Until now, there has been relatively little empirical evidence on the role of social relations in innovation and innovation policies. Lack of innovation is not necessarily caused by lack of technology or unwillingness to innovate, but often, because of a lack of supportive social capital between the actors. This book analyzes this urgent problem, and proposes models and measures for better regulation.
Innovation - the process of obtaining, understanding, applying, transforming, managing and transferring knowledge - is a result of human collaboration, but it has become an increasingly complex process, with a growing number of interacting parties involved. Lack of innovation is not necessarily caused by lack of technology or lack of will to innovate, but often by social and cultural forces that jeopardize the cognitive processes and prevent potential innovation. This book focuses on the rule of social capital in the process of innovation: the social networks and the norms; values and attitudes (such as trust) of the actors; social capital as both bonding and bridging links between actors; and social capital as a feature at all spatial levels, from the single inventor to the transnational corporation. Contributors from a wide variety of countries and disciplines explore the cultural framework of innovation through empirics, case studies and examination of conceptual and methodological dilemmas.
This book examines innovation as social change in South Asia. From an anthropological micro-perspective, innovation is moulded by social systems of value and hierarchy, while simultaneously having the potential to transform them. Peterson examines the printing press’s changing technology and its intersections with communal and language ideologies in India. Tenhunen explores mobile telephony, gender, and kinship in West Bengal. Uddin looks at microcredit and its relationship with social capital in Bangladesh. Jeffrey surveys imbalanced sex ratios and the future of marriage payments in north-western India. Ashrafun and Säävälä investigate alternative dispute resolution as a social innovation which affects the life options of battered young wives in Sylhet, Bangladesh. These case studies give insights into how the deeply engrained cultural models and values affect the forms that an innovative process can take. In the case of some South Asian societies, starkly hierarchical and holistic structures mean that innovations can have unpredictable sociocultural repercussions. The book argues that successful innovation requires taking into account how social hierarchies may steer their impact. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.
This volume presents a collection of different views and perspectives, featuring both theoretical and empirical contributions, to provide deep insight into the role of innovation and of non-technological innovation (NTI) in contemporary business. It illustrates how NTI encourages organizational development as well as competitive advantage. Chapters display a variety of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, including case studies, best practices, surveys, novel approaches to interpretations, concepts and theories. Together they contribute to a significant extension of the existing knowledge on non-technological innovations and their role in organizations. This volume highlights the effects of marketing and organizational innovation strategies on companies’ innovation and overall performance, while demonstrating that the effects of NTI may vary depending on the phase of the innovation process, and how it differs within small, medium and large enterprises from manufacturing and service industries. It explores the bidirectional relationship between technological innovation (TI) and NTI, and considers the competences needed to implement NTI. The book is written for scholars and academic professionals from a wide variety of disciplines addressing issues of organizational change and innovation, new management techniques and strategies, and the sustainable growth of organizations. It may also be an interesting source of knowledge for graduate and postgraduate students in management.
Putting forward a comprehensive view of knowledge with a specific perspective on place and space, this book provides a new perspective on the globalisation of knowledge. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the principal agenda of this volume is to open up a perspective ’beyond knowledge’ - i.e. beyond the interpretation of knowledge as scientific-technical knowledge. Author Martina Fuchs introduces further kinds of knowledge and interpretation which influence managements’ perception of globalisation and therefore the knowledge which is going global. She refers to knowledge in the sense of experiences, competencies in the production and labour process, as well as mutually shared mental constructs which are embedded in a context of understanding and interpretation. Exploring beyond the meaning of worldwide knowledge as general open access knowledge, this book also discusses barriers to knowledge, problems of transfer, and the influence of governance and control.
This report examines cross-border collaboration on innovation, building on case studies of cross-border areas that include the following countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom and Ireland.
The object of this study is to clarify the meanings and uses of social innovation in contemporary societies. The author makes use of the forms of analysis provided by theories of social change and the multi-disciplinary, long-term approach that is associated with Big History, with its focus on evidence and insights from different scientific and ...
South Korea has attained spectacular economic success in recent decades. It has reached the status of a Newly Advanced Economy, with challenges increasingly mirroring those faced by other advanced economies. These include the necessary upgrading of the labor force, the frictions of switching to a national system of innovation adapted to leadership in R&D, market-based economic policies that reflect the government’s difficulties in foreseeing future technological developments, and the consequences of social change for the innovation system and policy-making. In the forthcoming book the parallel challenges for innovation and technology for the Republic of Korea and other advanced economies will be analyzed more thoroughly with an international perspective in mind. This comparison and international benchmarking will allow policy makers and scholars to better appreciate how much the country has already moved into the circle of globally leading economies and what can be done to consolidate and strengthen its position.
The social dynamics of innovation networks captures the important role of trust, social capital, institutions and norms and values in the creation of knowledge in innovation networks. In doing so, this book connects to a long-standing debate on the socio-spatial context of innovation in economic geography, which is usually referred to as the Territorial Models of Innovation (TIMs) literature. This present volume breaks with the TIM literature in several important ways. In the first place, this book emphasizes the role of individual agency because individuals and their networks are increasingly recognized as the principal agents of knowledge creation. Secondly, this volume looks at space as a continuous field of opportunity rather than as bounded territory with a set of endowments, such as knowledge base and social capital. Although individually these elements are not new to the TIM literature, it has thus far failed to grasp their critical implication for studying the social dynamics of innovation networks. The approach to the socio-spatial context of innovation in this volume is summarized as Knowledge Economy 2.0. It emphasizes that human creativity is now the main source of economic value and that human creativity and knowledge creation is not an organized process within organizations, but happens bottom up in formal and informal professional and social networks of individuals that cut across multiple organizations.
