A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to give a lecture in Chile to postgraduate students about innovation management . The presentation was titled “Innovation management in complex settings: the evolution of the innovation process”, and here’s the keynote.
Tag Archive: Innovation
Paper Series
Since early notions of ‘Creative Cities’ in the mid 1980s (Landry, 2008), scholars from different areas [economists, urbanists and georgraphers], policy makers and urban planners have been proposing theories, strategies and normative guidelines, to transform urban settlements into creative places, this in order to achieve growth and progress within the knowledge economy. Among the several organisational structures for innovative transformations proposed by academics, the Creative Capital Model [CCM], introduced by Richard Florida in 2002, seems to be the latest framework for regional success in the global competitiveness rankings (Hansen et al. 2001).
Even though the CCM (Florida, 2002a) has been widely adopted by cities across US and EU for policy making and stategic development (Hoyman et al. 2009), both addressed to stimulate socioeconomic progress; its foundations [talent, diversity and technology], and the strategic perspective that is used to implement the model, have been challenged in terms of methodological appropriateness, and replicability and transferability of the subsequent normative framework designed to produce innovative transformations (Waitt et al. 2009), which currently represent the focus of a broad discussion among academics.
Even considering the impact of creativity, innovation and technology on socioeconomic progress and wealth in the context of the knowledge economy; several critiques to the CCM – [i] the assumptions on the linear progression of urban development, [ii] the high socioeconomic inequalities derived of the creative, but exclusionary, spaces, [iii] the assumption on the correlation between the amount of diversity and the attitude of tolerance; and [iv] the implicit favour to large metropolitan areas (Lewis et al. 2010) – have started to move the debate on creative cities to new dimensions. This in terms of the applicability of model to complex contexts and small cities, which, according to the framework proposed by Florida, does not present the basic requirements [talent, diversity and technology] for socioeconomic development based on creativity, innovation and technology.
Consequently, several topics related to ‘how to facilitate small cities to claim a portion of the creative economy’ have emerged as a central point of the most recent research on creative cities.
Everyday Innovation: How to enhance innovative working in employees and organisations
NESTA Report on Innovation in organisations
The imperative to promote innovative working remains strong in all sectors despite the current economic climate. However, although these aspirations exist, many working practices that promote innovation are not being readily adopted by organisations.
The following is an extract from the Executive Summary:
The imperative to promote innovative working remains strong in all sectors despite the current economic climate. However, although these aspirations exist, many working practices that promote innovation are not being readily adopted by organisations. When comparing sectors, this is particularly prevalent in public sector organisations. Here, some working practices may actually inhibit innovative working. Similarly, whilst the employee characteristics and behaviours that enhance innovative working (such as motivation for change, openness to ideas and original problem solving) can be clearly identified and measured, there is limited evidence that organisations are actively integrating the research evidence into corporate HR policy and practice.
Leadership capability, organisational culture, and organisational values are among the most important organisational factors and initiatives that enhance innovative working. Although there is a growing awareness of this, there is a persistent gap between what we know about these factors and how they are put into practice; how to enhance innovative working continues to be the most significant challenge for organisations. This report uses several practical examples to show how to promote everyday innovative working at the employee, group, leader and organisational levels.
The research reported here focuses upon the critical role employee characteristics and behaviours play in innovative working and reveals the key organisational factors that enable or inhibit innovation. Most importantly, we present the practical implications regarding how to best facilitate innovative working and promote innovation in organisations. The evidence base for this research was drawn from a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, key stakeholder interviews, case studies and a UK-wide survey facilitated by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) based on 850 responses from CMI member organisations.
Published
December 2009
Authors
Professor Fiona Patterson, Dr Maura Kerrin, Geraldine Gatto-Roissard and Phillipa Coan
Presentation of the Final Report
Sources
Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice
NESTA
I don´t know why academic videos always come in low quality (awful sound, blurry slides, etc)… Anyway, here’s a good talk by Eric Von Hippel on Lead User Innovation. Enjoy!!
To add a little more value to this post, here’s the link to download one of his latest working papers:
Baldwin, C. Y., & von Hippel, E. A. (2009). Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation. Working Paper, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Sloan School of Management.
Recently released, here’s a good article on How firms innovate. It’s part of the working paper series of UNU-Merit. Enjoy!
How firms innovate: R&D, non-R&D, and technology adoption
C. Huang, A. Arundel & H. Hollanders
Non-R&D innovation is a common economic phenomenon, though R&D has been the central focus of policy making and scholarly research in the field of innovation. An analysis of the third European Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3) results for 15 countries finds that almost half of innovative European firms did not perform R&D in-house. Firms with weak in-house innovative capabilities and which source information from suppliers and competitors tend to innovate through non-R&D activities. In contrast, firms that engage in product innovation, find clients, universities and research institutions an important information source for innovation, or apply for patents or use other appropriation methods are more likely to perform R&D. However, non-R&D performers do not form a consistent block, with several notable differences between firms that use three different methods of innovating without performing R&D. Many of these determinants also influence the share of total innovation expenditures that are spent on non-R&D innovation activities. Furthermore, an analysis of the determinants of the share of each firm’s total innovation expenditures for non-R&D activities shows that the factors that influence how innovation expenditures are distributed is generally consistent across sectors and European countries.
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
ISSN 1871-9872
Pablo Munoz
Sustainable Innovation 