This volume features excellent new research devoted to advancing our understanding of how networks foster creativity, innovation and the development of cutting-edge technologies. This is crucial reading for any researchers exploring strategic management tools and techniques, and specifically the intricacies of "network theory" within businesses.
Creativity can be viewed as the first stage of the overall innovation process, an important dimension of the entrepreneurship and new venture creation processes, and as such, it is considered to be a cornerstone of organizational competitiveness in this global, knowledge-based economy. Research on creativity has increasingly become multilevel, with most work conducted at the individual or team level of analysis. At the same time, there is a large body of research being conducted at the organizational level of analysis on innovation, and there has been a significant amount of entrepreneurship research at the individual level, with an increasing focus on organizational entrepreneurship. However, these three research streams have developed independently, and there has been very little knowledge transfer between the three areas. Because entrepreneurship is often said to be a process that is required to convert innovation into business ventures that will deliver benefits to stakeholders, it is typically driven by an individual or small group of individuals. Creativity research, innovation research, and entrepreneurship research have the potential to inform each other, enriching our knowledge of each area, particularly with regard to the cognitive processes and behaviors that are most effective. This Handbook includes contributions from the leading scholars in these three research areas, who integrate contemporary research findings on organizational creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship and provide fruitful new research directions."
This volume of Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy is devoted to research aimed at understanding the implications of Exploration and Exploitation activities in early-stage ventures and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs).
The aim of the Managing Networks of Creativity is to improve our understanding of creativity and the management of creativity, as discussed in the fields of management (including strategic management, organization science, organizational behaviour, and entrepreneurship), economics, sociology, regional studies, and political science. While research on creativity has made several important contributions to the theoretical literature, little attention has been paid to the development and testing of formal theoretical models, especially in those cases where creativity is the result not so much of individual behaviour than the outcome of collective efforts, connecting individuals in organizations, social networks, projects, geographic clusters, and so forth. The proposed volume includes studies, both conceptual and empirical, which, as a whole, "deconstruct" the concept of creativity and the management of creativity by identifying specific situations, contexts, firms, clusters, and districts in which creative processes evolve. The reader is provided with in-depth discussions of theoretical issues and a range of descriptive cases and survey data that the authors use to explore or test concepts and models. Overall, the volume aims to integrate current debates concerning the role of creativity (and innovation) in economic and social development.
This volume of Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy is devoted to research aimed at understanding success and failure factors of mergers and acquisitions in entrepreneurial firms. Contributions are multidisciplinary and cross-cultural, and tackle key issues from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives.
This book requires an interdisciplinary understanding of creativity, ideal for the formation of a digital public culture. Educating students, young professionals and future engineers is to develop their capacity for creativity. Can creativity be learned? With this question, the relations of technology and art appear in a new light. Especially the notion of "progress" takes on a new meaning and must be distinguished from innovation. The discussion of particular educational approaches, the exploration of digital technologies and the presentation of best practice examples conclude the book. University teachers show how the teaching of creativity reinforces the teaching of other subjects, especially foreign languages.
Computer science has drawn from and contributed to many disciplines and practices since it emerged as a field in the middle of the 20th century. Those interactions, in turn, have contributed to the evolution of information technology â€" new forms of computing and communications, and new applications â€" that continue to develop from the creative interactions between computer science and other fields. Beyond Productivity argues that, at the beginning of the 21st century, information technology (IT) is forming a powerful alliance with creative practices in the arts and design to establish the exciting new, domain of information technology and creative practicesâ€"ITCP. There are major benefits to be gained from encouraging, supporting, and strategically investing in this domain.
This book establishes constructivist, interpretivist, and linguistic approaches based on conventions about the nature of qualitative and text data, the author’s influence on text interpretation, and the validity checks used to justify text interpretations. Vast quantities of text and qualitative data in organizations often go unexplored. Text analytics outlined in this book allow readers to understand the process of converting unstructured text data into meaningful data for analysis in order to measure employee opinions, feedback, and reviews through sentiment analysis to support fact-based decision making. The methods involve using NVivo and RapidMiner software to perform lexical analysis, categorization, clustering, pattern recognition, tagging, annotation, memo creation, information extraction, association analysis, and visualization. The methodological approach in the book uses innovation theory as a sensitizing concept to lay the foundation for the analysis of research data, suggesting approaches for empirical exploration of organizational learning, knowledge management, and innovation practices amongst geographically dispersed individuals and team members. Based on data obtained from a private educational organization that has offices dispersed across Asia through focus group discussions and interviews on these topics, the author highlights the need for integrating organizational learning, knowledge management, and innovation to improve organizational performance, exploring perspectives on collective relationships and networks, organizational characteristics and structures, and tacit and overt values which influence such innovation initiatives. In the process, the author puts forward a new theory which is built on three themes: relationship and networks, knowledge sharing mechanisms, and the role of social cognitive schema that facilitate emergent learning, knowledge management, and innovation.
Swarm Creativity introduces a powerful new concept-Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs. Its aim is to make the concept of COINs as ubiquitous among business managers as any methodology to enhance quality and competitive advantage. The difference though is that COINs are nothing like other methodologies. A COIN is a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal--n innovation-by sharing ideas, information, and work. It is no exaggeration to state that COINs are the most productive engines of innovation ever. COINs have been around for hundreds of years. Many of us have already been a part of one without knowing it. What makes COINs so relevant today, though is that the concept has reached its tipping point-thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web. This book explores why COINS are so important to business success in the new century. It explains the traits that characterize COIN members and COIN behavior. It makes the case for why businesses ought to be rushing to uncover their COINs and nurture them, and provides tools for building organizations that are more creative, productive and efficient by applying principles of creative collaboration, knowledge sharing and social networking. Through real-life examples in several business sectors, the book shows how to leverage COINs to develop successful products in R & D, grow better customer relationships, establish better project management, and build higher-performing teams. In short, this book answers four key questions: Why are COINs better at innovation? What are the key elements of COINs? Who are the people that participate in COINs and how do they become members? And how does an organization transform itself into a Collaborative Innovation Network?
This cutting-edge Handbook takes stock of a diverse set of theoretical and methodological perspectives that address creativity, innovation, and the ways in which they intersect. Considering the development of the field, the Handbook examines current trends to chart a path forward for promising future research.
