Considering adoption: Towards a consumption-oriented approach to innovation

What are the forces that shape the adoption of innovations? This question has been sidelined in a largely production-centric literature on the economic geography of innovation. Inspired by Weber’s dual concern with procurement and distribution activities in the location of industry, this paper examines the new nature of distances products must overcome en route to the market, and the resources that are necessary to do this successfully. Building on findings in sociology, this paper suggest a consumption-centric perspective and future research on innovation in the knowledge-based economy, which foregrounds the significance of actors that are able to validate new products.innovation adoption and diffusion; consumption; sociology of scientific knowledge; Alfred Weber; knowledge economy

The rationale of e-health evaluation: The case of NHS Direct

An important area of research is that of the evaluation of e-health services. A holistic e-health evaluation framework should address the aspects that are hampering healthcare services from embracing the full potential of information and communication technologies towards successful e-health initiatives. Towards building a holistic evaluation framework for e-health services, this paper is intended to examine the rationale of e-health evaluation, as the paper argues that this aspect should be addressed first in the development of such a framework. NHS Direct which is one of the largest e-health services in the world has been chosen to discuss and validate a set of evaluation rationales and their applicability in practice

Tweeting biomedicine: an analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

Data collected by social media platforms have recently been introduced as a new source for indicators to help measure the impact of scholarly research in ways that are complementary to traditional citation-based indicators. Data generated from social media activities related to scholarly content can be used to reflect broad types of impact. This paper aims to provide systematic evidence regarding how often Twitter is used to diffuse journal articles in the biomedical and life sciences. The analysis is based on a set of 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science (WoS) and published between 2010 and 2012. The number of tweets containing links to these documents was analyzed to evaluate the degree to which certain journals, disciplines, and specialties were represented on Twitter. It is shown that, with less than 10% of PubMed articles mentioned on Twitter, its uptake is low in general. The relationship between tweets and WoS citations was examined for each document at the level of journals and specialties. The results show that tweeting behavior varies between journals and specialties and correlations between tweets and citations are low, implying that impact metrics based on tweets are different from those based on citations. A framework utilizing the coverage of articles and the correlation between Twitter mentions and citations is proposed to facilitate the evaluation of novel social-media based metrics and to shed light on the question in how far the number of tweets is a valid metric to measure research impact.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

Reinforcing attitudes in a gatewatching news era: individual-level antecedents to sharing fact-checks on social media

Despite the prevalence of fact-checking, little is known about who posts fact-checks online. Based upon a content analysis of Facebook and Twitter digital trace data and a linked online survey (N = 783), this study reveals that sharing fact-checks in political conversations on social media is linked to age, ideology, and political behaviors. Moreover, an individual’s need for orientation (NFO) is an even stronger predictor of sharing a fact-check than ideological intensity or relevance, alone, and also influences the type of fact-check format (with or without a rating scale) that is shared. Finally, participants generally shared fact-checks to reinforce their existing attitudes. Consequently, concerns over the effects of fact-checking should move beyond a limited-effects approach (e.g., changing attitudes) to also include reinforcing accurate beliefs.Accepted manuscrip

Policy-driven EU Research Networks: Impact on the Greek S&T System

This paper focuses on the impact of EU-funded collaborative research networks at a national level using a combined method approach, social network analysis and in-depth case study work. First, it examines the participation intensity and role of the Greek organizations in the research network established through the Information Society Technologies priority of the European Community’s 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes. Furthermore, it attempts to assess the impact of the IST research network on the diffusion and deployment of innovation in Greece. Some interesting results with significant policy implications arise: a) Greece exhibits high participation intensity in the EU-funded IST network, b) there are Greek organizations that have assumed an influential role in the network through time, in addition, they are also critical to the connectivity of the more peripheral Greek actors to the IST network, c) the value of the network, lies for the most part in indirect or ‘behavioural’ effects than in immediate project outputs measured in terms of commercialized products or services, d) however, while the knowledge obtained through the network assists organizations to gain better understanding of the market and identify future deployment opportunities this is not always possible due to the lack of sufficient infrastructure and national policies to support market introduction.