Motivations for innovation in the built environment: new directions for research

Innovation in the built environment involves multiple actors with diverse motivations. Policy-makers find it difficult to promote changes that require cooperation from these numerous and dispersed actors and to align their sometimes divergent interests. Established research traditions on the economics and management of innovation pay only limited attention to stakeholder choices, engagement and motivation. This paper reviews the insights that emerge as research in these traditions comes into contact with work on innovation from sociological and political perspectives. It contributes by highlighting growing areas of research on user involvement in complex innovation, collective action, distributed innovation and transition management. To differing extents, these provide approaches to incorporate the motivations of different actors into theoretical understanding. These indicate new directions for research that promise to enrich understanding of innovation

An exploratory study into everyday problem solving in the design process of medical devices

We investigated accounts of how individuals in public and private organisations operating in the medical device industry use different forms of capital (social e.g. networks and cultural e.g. knowledge) to solve design based problems. We define capital as resources embedded in social networks, knowledge or economic wealth (Bourdieu, 1986). Data were collected from interviews and written diaries from individuals involved in the design process of medical devices using interpretative analysis. Inferences made from our analyses suggested that individuals working in organisations who successfully solve problems may do so by using both social and cultural capital and so may be more likely to engage in innovative activity than others. These exploratory findings suggest workers in large organisations may have the capability to use a greater level of in-house social and cultural capital, whereas those in smaller organisations may be more reliant on high levels of social capital in order to ‘tap into’ cultural capital beyond organisational boundaries

Training for innovation in Spain

The capacity for innovation of an organisation largely depends on its ability to acquire and develop new knowledge. Training is particularly important in this process, as it allows employees to constantly acquire new competences. This study provides a preliminary picture of the situation of training for innovation in Spain, and identifies the characteristics of companies offering training for innovation. Results show that 35.3% of Spanish companies undertake innovation processes and 22.3% offer training related to these innovation processes. For the 82% of these companies training helped the innovation process, so training is an important tool for innovative change

How control systems influence product innovation processes: examining the role of entrepreneurial orientation

This paper yields insights into the channels through which Management Accounting and Control Systems (MACS) exert an influence on product innovation by examining the extent to which different forms of control (i.e. value systems, diagnostic control systems, interactive control systems) are directly associated with the distinct phases of innovation processes. Using survey data collected from 118 medium and large Spanish companies, we find that: (1) value systems and interactive control systems have significant main effects on the creativity, coordination and knowledge integration, and filtering (sub-)phases of innovation processes; and (2) the significance and direction of these influences vary depending on the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) of firms. By highlighting the relevance of EO in shaping the influence of MACS on product innovation processes, this study calls for caution in generalising the expected effects of MACS on innovation

What Make the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Innovation Different Across European Countries?

This paper finds that the financial crisis has tremendously impacted innovation in most European countries with Greece and Lithuania being the most affected while Finland and Austria have the least negative effect on their innovation activities. Greece and Lithuania’s national innovation systems share many common characteristics which are in sharp contrast to those shared by Finland and Austria, including most notably culture, quality of the higher education system, science and technological capability, and structure of the economy. Those identified distinctions along the main dimensions of the national innovation systems between the most and least affected countries could to a large extent explain why the effect of the financial crisis is heterogeneous across European countries

Exploring Barriers and Opportunities in Adopting Crowdsourcing Based New Product Development in Manufacturing SMEs

Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the ‘Crowd’). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development (NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business