Electronic market as a strategic lever of an innovation virtual system - an integrative approach to territorial innovations management

During the last years, electronic market has become established very quickly in all areas of the business world. Moreover, according to the most recent forecasts, it will grow exponentially during the years. ?Electronic market? phenomenon highlights the most significant effect of the Information and Communication Technologies development: space and time independence of the economic and social processes; every people, every social group, every Organization can communicate or can share information, knowledge, objectives, anywhere and anytime. In this new socioeconomic context, a re-thinking of local system economic growth models becomes necessary. In this paper we present Innovation Virtual System, as a new model for local systems development. Innovation System is conceived as a set of interacting Organizations, embedded in a dense web of social and economic relationships, skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge and at adapting their behavior according to knowledge about their external and internal settings. More specifically, we try to identify the effects of electronic market on these ?knowledge creating? Organizations, that is on their internal learning circuits and on their external relationships. Particularly we focus in the Internet based electronic market, highlighting the differences between Internet and the previous computing and communication environment, in order to give a clearer understanding of Internet as the strategic infrastructure of electronic market. After describing the impact of the Internet based electronic market on a single Organization, we present a framework of a local system collective learning process, and we describe some of the opportunities offered by the Internet based electronic market to this process.

Formal ontologies and strategic environmental assessment. A case study: the municipal land use plan of Genoa

n/

Styling the Future. A philosophical account of scenarios & design

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style (Mort, 1996) – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times (Whicher et al., 2015) see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed (Brown, 2008; Martin, 2009; Neumeier, 2009) as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes (1995, p.31), ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact (Flynn & Chatman, 2004; Cox, 2005). A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking (especially scenario planning (e.g. Schwartz, 1991; Li, 2014; Ramírez & Selin, 2014), but also some work from organisation and management studies (e.g. Tsoukas, 2005a, 2005b)), and an encounter with philosophy (particularly the work of Deleuze & Guattari (1984, 1987, 1994). We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living (both individuals and organisations)

Web 3.0 and Knowledge Management: Opportunities for Spatial Planning and Decision Making

The overabundance of information produced by new technologies, if on one side can be considered as a knowledge enrichment in planning process, on the other side it has not improved neither reality understanding nor possibilities of intervention. Old forms of citizens participation to planning process, generally based on assemblies, have been replaced by continuous discussions on social networks, blogs, etc.. The attempt to take into account the huge data flow produced everyday, it is not an easy task for planners. An ontologies based approach can represent an important support to such activities. "Comelicopedia" an European project between Italy and Austria, probably is one of the first experiences in applying ontologies to spatial planning process. All potentialities in planning and decision making fields will be analyzed and tools, such as "comelicopedia", can become usual in supporting a regulatory dialogue between decision makers and citizens

An Integral Approach to the Modeling of Information Support for Local Sustainable DevelopmentExperiences of a Serbian Enabling Leadership Experiment

Collaborative strategic decision making has to be widely informed, communicated and knowledge-based in order to innovate transformations toward local and global sustainability. It is unimaginable that this process could be effective without computer-aided information support, but the research indicates the utilization constraints within human capacities to recognize their usability and usefulness. These constraints seem to be even more challenging within the intensively transitional social contexts, such as Serbia. We argue that understanding the relationships between sustainability, governance, and planning in a specific social context has profound importance to gain usefulness of information support and to ensure its increasing utilization. Identifying the practical path of information support modeling requires an operational framework that encompasses innovative and socially valid initiatives. Therefore, an integral theory framework was chosen to comprehend all social influences on the information support of successful utilization. This article presents the integral framework of the information support's conceptual setting, which was used to build up community-based collaborative action research (CBCAR) as a transformative social learning process that enables information support utilization, and it was tested in six municipalities of Serbia. The implementation of pilot territorial information support (TIS) initiatives resulted in continuous and proactive local community efforts in information support development and usage

Regional science at the turn of the century: Reflections on its epistemological status

As a contribution to the current debate on the state-of-the art of regional science, this paper presents some reflections on the epistemological and methodological status of the discipline as we approach the turn of the century. First of all, and contrary to the widely held view that quantitative approach is seriously 'in crisis', it is argued that the discipline is going through a period of intensive, but constructive, theoretical development. To support this assertion, the authors suggest that it is important to abandon a hidden source of prejudice: the tendency to evaluate the present situation in terms of an outdated conception of the discipline. Modern quantitative geography and regional science is a vast and varied scientific field, which has radically evolved under the pressure of changing theoretical paradigms and technological advance. It has little to do with the old regional science of the 60s. The first part of the paper reviews this evolution: 1. from the original goal of applying to geography the tools of classical science, such as statistics, optimization and modelling (whose use was made possible in the 60s by the availability of the new "number crunching" computers) 2. to the present informatization (and hence quantification) of all branches of regional science, based on PCs and the Net, used as tools not just for computation, but for data handling, representation, visualization and communication). An attempt is made to fit all of these efforts, those with a long tradition (modelling, O.R., gaming simulation, statistics etc.), as well as the more recent approaches (expert systems, G.I.S., hypermedia, virtual reality, A.I.) into a single framework, stressing the specific aims of each and identifying existing - or potential - interconnections. In the second part of the paper we focus on the new frontiers of regional science and quantitative geography with particular reference to the processes of analysis and planning. It is suggested that: 1. the goal of analysis is shifting from simulation (the explicitation in terms of the "scientific method") of the mental processes involved in problem-solving, to the replication of the human ability to "formulate problems". This implies that creativity, and related aspects such as learning, and expertise, will come increasingly within the scope of research in regional science 2. progress in planning will be limited unless we will be able to go beyond the misleading counterposition between the formalised "rational" approach and the intuitive design approach. A fruitful way to cope with planning in a complex world is to integrate the two strategies and, in doing so, to tap into wider sources of knowledge. In other words, it is important to learn the 'art' of using the tools of geographical science.

Systemic design for territorial enhancement: An overview on design tools supporting socio-technical system innovation

The sustainable transition of the regional and urban systems in which we live represents a crucial challenge for our societies and requires a new integrated vision of the social, environmental, cultural, political and economic dimensions. Territorial systems can be considered as socio-technical systems, made up of a complex network of infrastructure and facilities and also of human interactions and activities. So far, the sustainable innovation of socio-technical systems has often been concerned with the introduction of sustainable technological solutions, but today it is clear how specific solutions must be framed from a systems perspective. The paper aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the design tools able to support this systemic transition, starting from the analysis of the macro-strategies developed by the transition studies, in particular the Multi-level Perspective model. Through a cross-analysis with the main design fields related to the systemic design domain, four types of tools are highlighted, which aim at (i) establishing learning processes;(ii) building multi-stakeholder networks; (iii) sharing foresight visions; (iv) enhancing green niche innovations. The comparison of the different tools enables pointing out the contribution of systemic design to territorial enhancement, stressing the contact points and potential synergies between different design approaches

Systemic design for territorial enhancement: An overview on design tools supporting socio-technical system innovation

The sustainable transition of the regional and urban systems in which we live represents a crucial challenge for our societies and requires a new integrated vision of the social, environmental, cultural, political and economic dimensions. Territorial systems can be considered as socio-technical systems, made up of a complex network of infrastructure and facilities and also of human interactions and activities. So far, the sustainable innovation of socio-technical systems has often been concerned with the introduction of sustainable technological solutions, but today it is clear how specific solutions must be framed from a systems perspective. The paper aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the design tools able to support this systemic transition, starting from the analysis of the macro- strategies developed by the transition studies, in particular the Multi-level Perspective model. Through a cross-analysis with the main design fields related to the systemic design domain, four types of tools are highlighted, which aim at (i) establishing learning processes;(ii) building multi-stakeholder networks; (iii) sharing foresight visions; (iv) enhancing green niche innovations. The comparison of the different tools enables pointing out the contribution of systemic design to territorial enhancement, stressing the contact points and potential synergies between different design approaches

Systemic design for territorial enhancement: An overview on design tools supporting socio-technical system innovation

The sustainable transition of the regional and urban systems in which we live represents a crucial challenge for our societies and requires a new integrated vision of the social, environmental, cultural, political and economic dimensions. Territorial systems can be considered as socio-technical systems, made up of a complex network of infrastructure and facilities and also of human interactions and activities. So far, the sustainable innovation of socio-technical systems has often been concerned with the introduction of sustainable technological solutions, but today it is clear how specific solutions must be framed from a systems perspective. The paper aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the design tools able to support this systemic transition, starting from the analysis of the macro-strategies developed by the transition studies, in particular the Multi-level Perspective model. Through a cross-analysis with the main design fields related to the systemic design domain, four types of tools are highlighted, which aim at (i) establishing learning processes;(ii) building multi-stakeholder networks; (iii) sharing foresight visions; (iv) enhancing green niche innovations. The comparison of the different tools enables pointing out the contribution of systemic design to territorial enhancement, stressing the contact points and potential synergies between different design approaches

Tracing postrepresentational visions of the city: representing the unrepresentable Skateworlds of Tyneside

In any visualisation of the city more is left unseen than made visible. Contemporary visualisations of the city are increasingly influenced by quantification, and thus anything which cannot be quantified is hidden. In contrast, we explore the use of ‘lo-fi’, doodled, participatory maps made by skateboarders in Tyneside, England, as a means to represent their cityscape. Drawing on established work an skateboarding and recent developments in cartography, we argue that skateboarders understand the city from a postrepresentational perspective. Such a framing presents a series of challenges to map their worlds which we explore through a processual account of our mapmaking practice. In this process we chart how skateboarders’ mappings became part of a more significant interplay of performance, identity, visualisation, and exhibition. The paper makes contributions to the emerging field of postrepresentational cartography and argues that its processual focus provides useful tools to understand how visions of the city are produced