Knowledge intensive service activities (KISAs) in Korea's innovation system

노트 : This is submitted to the Korea Development Institute as the Final Report of “Analysis on Knowledge-Intensive Service Activities in Korea’s Innovation System”, in fulfillment of the Contract between KDI and STEPI. This Research is Fully Sponsored by Strategic Research Partnership of Korea Development Institute

Integrated Functional Sanitation Value Chain

The value chain (VC) system is a key way to address important sanitation technological and institutional gaps in production and service delivery and could constitute a natural platform for development actions and also serve as a market systems approach to improve access to safely-managed sanitation. It has been suggested that sanitation could boost local and national economies and global interconnections with a growing recognition that the private sector can play a bigger role in delivering the Sustainable Development Goal for sanitation, and help businesses understand value-added and product opportunities. This book proposes a pathway towards re-thinking the sanitation value chain (SVC) and suggests that it should cover all processes, activities and products of enterprises/actors in the sanitation supply chain that provide value-added services within each stage. Following the Regenerative Sanitation Principles, this book presents a new perspective to the SVC known as the 'integrated functional sanitation value chain' (IFSVC) to address operational functions within sanitation systems in combination with sanitation enterprises, operators and external actors that support the growth of the sanitation economy. The underlying premise of this book is that the IFSVC represents a new perspective that would have major social, environmental and economic implications for local, national, regional and global sanitation service delivery. It is hoped that researchers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, government officials and funders will find this book valuable, and be inspired and enabled to carry sanitation work forward in their own spheres of operation. The book gives several examples of encouraging developments, particularly in technical and business model innovation. It is our hope that this book will provide the stimulus for new learning and its application, particularly through cross-disciplinary and cross-sector partnerships that bring together all the skills and capabilities needed to deliver a fully effective IFSVC

Openness of Innovation in Services and Software - Essays on Service Innovations, Open Source, and Hybrid Licensing Models

Open Innovation—and Open Source as its particular manifestation in the software industry—have recently been touted as cornerstones of competitiveness for firms in the new service economy and of value added by public institutions involved in the gathering, processing and publishing of information. Although the basic concepts are by no means new, a considerable surge in research literature has occurred over the past decade around the keywords of open source, open innovation, value co-creation and both innovation in general and service innovation in particular. Putting breakthrough inventions aside, I consider what exactly open innovation means: What qualifies as an innovation and how is it different from the plain old product or service development? Is open inherently better than closed, and what exactly is the difference between the two? What middle ground is there, if any? Services growing in importance, is open innovation in (software) services different from (open) innovation in software products? Besides, is there any real difference between software services and software products? Particularly, what is the role of customers in that extended open community around the firm? What is the value that they see vs. the value that the firm sees? In the four research publications in Part II of this dissertation, I am addressing these questions in more detail in various contexts: both from a purely software development and software business perspective and from a more general service development and innovation perspective. The four publications have more specific research questions and detailed implications, in addition to contributing to the general themes outlined above. They elaborate on the following topics: Different perspectives to value co-creation in services and the customer/supplier value construct; Roles of customers in service innovation activities in standardised services with transactional intent; The effect of adoption of open-source tools within a commercial for-profit organisation on the organisational structure itself; and Hybrid open-closed software licensing model as a platform for reverting from commoditised product business to higher-value customer relationships. Beyond the theoretical and practical contributions of the publications in Part II, Part I of this dissertation offers a robust definition of innovation in general as well as a more defendable view of the nature of services vs. goods. In addition it clarifies what the term product means in relation to both services and goods as well as in the software industry—a topic that often causes confusion among academics and practitioners

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Expertise as business : long-term development and future prospects of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS)

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are expert companies that provide services to other companies and organisations. IT services, R&D services, technical consultancy, legal, financial and management consultancy, and marketing communications are typical KIBS industries. KIBS have aroused broad interest, several studies having indicated that they are active innovators, as well as facilitators and carriers of innovations of other companies. A futures perspective is essential from the viewpoint of innovation, and the study in hand intends to link this perspective to KIBS research. The study applies the so-called foresight approach, which, instead of predicting, focuses on creating views of alternative futures. In this study, the significance of historical analysis as a basis for foresight is stressed: the study starts with an examination of the long-term development of KIBS. The study has mapped the future of KIBS both generally and particularly from the innovation perspective. The general examination consists of analysis of driving forces, strong prospective trends and weak signals. Driving forces refer to those phenomena at the level of the entire economy that constitute the framework for the future of KIBS. Strong prospective trends and weak signals outline the internal development of KIBS: the main lines of development and unexpected outturns. In the analysis of innovation activities, promising new innovation opportunities, the generality of innovation activities, and new spheres of skills were explored. Both literature and empirical material were used as information sources; the empirical material was collected in the Finnish KIBS sector through face-to-face interviews. The main trends in the KIBS sector according to this study can be summarised as follows: The long-established growth trend of KIBS can be expected to continue. A central reason for growing service demand is the versatile and up-to-date expertise of KIBS, which derives from abundant client contact. Clients' purchasing know-how is, however, decisive for the success of the service. Besides the quantitative growth, the role of KIBS can be anticipated to strengthen as their services link ever more tightly to clients' strategies. The service content is also changing in KIBS: client-specific know-how becomes stressed and the service content broadens to include packages and comprehensive solutions. The way of providing services is more and more often consultative. This induces KIBS from other sectors to penetrate the field of management consultancy. Convergence among KIBS – as well as between KIBS and neighbouring sectors – is progressing in many other ways, too; the development of ICTs is an important factor accelerating this development. Along with the emergence of big multisectoral KIBS, increasing concentration in the sector can be found. The significance of internationalisation is growing and the forms of international activities are diversifying. As regards KIBS' innovation activities, an important finding was that promising fields for innovation also exist in the non-technological KIBS, which earlier have only been studied to a small extent. In the area of skills, KIBS face a challenge to reconcile very different, partly opposite, requirements, e.g. combining expertise and entrepreneurship.reviewe

Service innovation implementation in international hotel groups: a critical realist study

Services have a dominant role in the world economy, with an increasing number of organisations adopting business models that incorporate product and service provision, in an effort to offer holistic customer experiences. Service innovation, as an avenue for growth, is becoming a major strategic focus in organisations worldwide. Service innovation research however, does not reflect the high level of interest in innovation shown by practitioners. There is a long tradition of product-related research that describes the conditions underlying service development in relation to products. However, evidence in the literature suggests that services are different from products and their features uniquely shape the innovation process. A significant research gap exists in the ways innovation projects are implemented in services. Existing studies fail to provide complete models of implementation that go beyond prescriptive step-by-step process manuals and to cover a variety of service industries that are as heterogeneous as products and services. This study attempts to fill these gaps by focussing on the implementation process in the under-studied service context of hotels, an industry that provides unique insights into the way interpersonal interactions shape implementation. Findings in this study derive from qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with managers and employees involved in two service innovation projects rolled out to European countries in 2011. Guided by a critical realist philosophy that perceives the world as mind-independent but accessible only through our subjective interpretations, the role of the researcher in this study was to approach innovation implementation by searching for valid explanations behind the participants’ experience. The study has found that the implementation process is an iterative process of planning, training, launch, review and routinisation, and follow-up periods. These are repeated as the implementation cascades through large organisations from the regional level to local organisational units. Secondary adoption and adaptation processes permeate implementation, whereby choices made at higher levels are evaluated at lower ones in a continuous cycle of decision-making. A variety of factors relating to the individuals involved, the firm where the innovation is implemented, the innovation concept, and the execution of the process have been linked to the realisation of the projects. Among these factors, knowledge, organisation of informal activities and the innovation-market fit have been shown to have the most significant positive influence on implementation. The events in the process have been explained by a combination of four mechanisms as diverse as sensemaking, organisational learning, organisational politics and emotional reactions to the implementation process. Thus, this research sheds new light on the theory and practice of service innovation implementation and paves the way for further research into the field

Broadband Korea

노트 : This report was prepared by Tim Kelly, Vanessa Gray and Michael Minges. It is based on research carried out from 23 to 30 May 2002 as well as articles and reports noted in the document. The assistance of the Ministry of Information and Communication, particularly Sang-Hak Lee, was indispensable and highly appreciated. The assistance of colleagues within ITU is also noted particularly Nathalie Delmas, who formatted the report and created the cover. Both Jin-Kyu Jeong and Chinyong Chong provided detailed comments. The report would not have been possible without the cooperation of the many Korean organizations who offered their time to the reportís authors. The report is one of a series examining the Internet in developing nations. Additional information is available on ITUís Internet Case Study web page at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/. (The rest omitted