Five ways libraries are using Instagram to share collections and draw public interest.

Alongside universities, libraries and librarians are now using social media platforms to connect with users in a range of exciting and innovating ways. The latest platform that libraries are experimenting with is Instagram, which allows users to take photos on their smart phones, apply exciting filters and add hashtags, and then share these images online with their followers. Amy Mollett and Anthony McDonnell investigate how libraries are making the most of this visually-engaging platform

Innovating for Learning: Designing for the Future of Education

Teaching has moved online as the world has moved online and learning is losing its sense of physical location with the availability of many different options from mobile to MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). The impact of online learning is not confined to distance learning; when a student attends a campus university they are now as likely to meet with their fellow learners virtually as face to face. The education sector has yet to fully adapt to what this means, and indeed there strong signs of a built in resilience from providers, employers and students themselves which may mean an apparent evolution is more likely than a revolution. At the same time, there are some quiet changes underway that mean we should be preparing to innovate for the revolution to come. Some of those changes are considered in work undertaken at The Open University that has been disseminated in a series of Innovating Pedagogy reports. These reports allow the academic authors to be more speculative than is usual practice and engage in considering the future, while remaining based on a view of what is happening in the sector. In particular they adopt a position focused on pedagogy that balances technology-based futurology that can dominate yet fail to resonate with those actually involved in the teaching process. The annual Innovating Pedagogy reports cover 10 topics each, with some deliberate overlap from year to year and development of themes that show innovations moving into teaching practice. This is illustrated by two cases, the impact of MOOCs and the application of learning design and analytics. The development of MOOCs demonstrates the value of reviewing pedagogy that aligns with technology. While the use of learning design and learning analytics demonstrates how improvements in the way we describe our learning processes and the way we understand learner behaviour is helping determine how choices in pedagogy impact on student satisfaction, progression and success

STRUCTURAL DIFFERENCES AMONG FIRMS: A POTE TIAL SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE INI THE APPLICATION OF 16YFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Information systems are seen as strategic business tools, frequently essential to a firm and central to its competitive strategy. Their importance is now acknowledged. But information technology -- equipment and services -- is available to all firms, and most applications can be duplicated; often the copying firm enjoys the advantages of newer and better technology, learns from the experience of the innovator, and offers comparable services at reduced costs. When can an information system convey sustainable competitive advantage? We believe that the benefits resulting from an innovative application of information technology can be defended if: o they are so closely tied to the strategy of the innovating firm that competitors do not wish to copy them o they exploit unique structural characteristics of the innovating firm -- aspects of vertical integration, degree of diversification, or unique skills and resources -- so that competitors do not benefit from copying them We introduce here a model of the firm, based on value chain analysis, that highlights differences among firms; the model then guides the search for defensible opportunities for competitive advantage that exploits these differences

Innovating Pedagogy 2015: Open University Innovation Report 4

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation

The effect of innovation activity on innovating quasi-rents: an empirical application

This paper investigates whether innovations generate quasi-rents and whether the size of those quasi-rents are affected by market conditions. Using a panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms during the period 1990-93 we answer affinnatevely to both questions. Product, process and both innovations generate quasi rents and such quasirents appears to be higher for process innovations. The size of innovation quasi-rents seems to be affected positively by demand growth, by product standarisation, and by low product market concentration. The three empirical results are in agreement with the theoretical predictions such as the Schmoockler' s theory of demandpool innovation, the price-elasticity of demand effects of Kamien and Schwartz and the replacement effect of Arrow. Process innovations are more affected by market conditions than the rest of innovations, at the tine of generating quasi-rents

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Innovation modes and productivity in the UK

This paper is motivated by the aim to develop appropriate indicators capturing modes of innovation by UK enterprises, examine how such innovation practices vary across regions and industries and explore the extent to which they have an impact on productivity. There is an emphasis on identifying and examining the relevance of non-technological innovation that builds on and extends previous research in this important area. Traditionally, measures of innovation have rested on single indicators such as patenting or R&D, supplemented, by product and process and process innovation outputs. More recently innovations in management, organisational and marketing areas are being brought into the picture and the relevant information collected by innovation surveys. Among indicators of innovation the distinctions between technological and non-technological innovations has often been loosely translated into either activities in manufacturing versus services, or into product and process innovations versus organisational and marketing innovations. While these simplifications of technological and non-technological innovation can be a practically useful, since data is readily available, they do not fully recognize that mixed modes of innovations are adopted by today’s firms; firms whose environments are characterised by increased competition, internationalisation and shorter product life cycles

A Constellation to Guide Us: An Interview with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe about the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shares her views about the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. She believes that that the Framework is one among many documents adopted by the Association of College and Research Libraries that academic librarians can and should use to promote information literacy. This interview was conducted in May 2016

Innovation dynamics and the role of infrastructure

This report shows how the role of the infrastructure – standards, measurement, accreditation, design and intellectual property – can be integrated into a quantitative model of the innovation system and used to help explain levels and changes in labour productivity and growth in turnover and employment. The summary focuses on the new results from the project, set out in more detail in Sections 5 and 6. The first two sections of the report provide contextual material on the UK innovation system, the nature and content of the infrastructure knowledge and the institutions that provide it. Mixed modes of innovation, the typology of innovation practices developed and applied here, is constituted of six mixed modes, derived from many variables taken from the UK Innovation Survey. These are: Investing in intangibles Technology with IP innovating Using codified knowledge Wider (managerial) innovating Market-led innovating External process modernising. The composition of the innovation modes, and the approach used to compute them, is set out in more detail in Section 4. Modes can be thought of as the underlying process of innovation, a bundle of activities undertaken jointly by firms, and whose working out generates well known indicators such as new product innovations, R&D spending and accessing external information, that are the partial indicators gathered from the innovation survey itself