Advances and challenges in innovation studies

The article discusses recent advances and future challenges in innovation studies. First, it separately considers four main strands of research, studying innovation at the organisational, systemic, sectoral and macroeconomic levels. Then, considering the field as a whole, the article points to the existence of important neglected topics and methodological challenges for future research. In fact, several fundamental issues are still unexplored, such as the co-evolution between technological and institutional change; the role of demand; and the impacts of innovation on individual and collective welfare. There are also important methodological challenges, such as the need for more systematic interactions between the different levels of analysis; the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technological and institutional changes; and the search for a combination of contingent explanations based on case studies with general analytical results based on econometric and formal models.Innovation; Innovation management; innovation systems; innovation and growth

Advances and challenges in innovation studies

The article discusses recent advances and future challenges in innovation studies. First, it separately considers four main strands of research, studying innovation at the organisational, systemic, sectoral and macroeconomic levels. Then, considering the field as a whole, the article points to the existence of important neglected topics and methodological challenges for future research. In fact, several fundamental issues are still unexplored, such as the co-evolution between technological and institutional change; the role of demand; and the impacts of innovation on individual and collective welfare. There are also important methodological challenges, such as the need for more systematic interactions between the different levels of analysis; the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technological and institutional changes; and the search for a combination of contingent explanations based on case studies with general analytical results based on econometric and formal models

Advances and challenges in innovation studies

The article discusses recent advances and future challenges in innovation studies. First, it separately considers four main strands of research, studying innovation at the organisational, systemic, sectoral and macroeconomic levels. Then, considering the field as a whole, the article points to the existence of important neglected topics and methodological challenges for future research. In fact, several fundamental issues are still unexplored, such as the co-evolution between technological and institutional change; the role of demand; and the impacts of innovation on individual and collective welfare. There are also important methodological challenges, such as the need for more systematic interactions between the different levels of analysis; the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technological and institutional changes; and the search for a combination of contingent explanations based on case studies with general analytical results based on econometric and formal models

Categorizing a Field – The Use of the Nanotechnology Label across Communities

Labels are important to the emergence of organizational fields. The construction and use of labels enables communication and coordination across communities. This paper argues that new and existing communities’ uses of labels commence a categorization process central to the construction of meaning and definition of boundaries within organizational fields. Employing 25 ethnographic observations, 77 interviews and 12,774 articles from five different nanotechnology communities covering primarily the 21 year period from 1984 to 2005 I show the differentiated use of the nanotechnology label across communities. Scientists and entrepreneurs were not the creators and first adopters of the nanotechnology label, instead futurists, the government and venture capitalists played pivotal roles in promoting the nanotechnology label by supplying the field with resources and infusing the nanotechnology label with meaning. Theoretically this paper adds to our understanding of field emergence by reframing emergence as a categorization process

Hedging your bets: Explaining executives’ market labeling strategies in nanotechnology

Executives use market labels to position their firms within market categories. Yet, this activity has been given scarce attention in the extant literature that widely assumes that market labels are simple, prescribed classification brackets that accurately represent firms’ characteristics. By examining how and why executives use the nanotechnology label, we uncover three strategies: claiming, disassociating, and hedging. Comparing these strategies to firms’ technological capabilities we find that capabilities alone do not explain executives’ label use. Instead, the data show that these strategies are driven by executives’ aspiration to symbolically influence their firms’ market categorization. In particular, executives’ perception of the label’s ambiguity, their avoidance of perceived credibility gaps, and their assessment of the label’s signaling value shape their labeling strategies. In contrast to extant research, which suggests that executives should aim for coherence, we find that many executives hedge their affiliation with a nascent market label. Thus, our study shows that in ambiguous contexts, non-commitment to a market category may be a particularly prevalent strategy

Culture, innovation and entrepreneurship

Innovation and entrepreneurship lie at the heart of the modern economy. Yet, while scholars have long examined the economic drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship, less is known about the cultural forces that shape these dynamics. To the extent that the existing literature has considered how culture shapes innovation and entrepreneurship, it has been viewed as a constraining force which limited and hindered the creation of novelty. This is especially true for economic approaches to entrepreneurship and innovation. With this special issue, we highlight the central role of culture in entrepreneurial and innovative practice—what we refer to as cultural entrepreneurship—and advocate that scholars need to take a broader view of culture to emphasise the symbolic meaning systems that entrepreneurs use as tool kits to facilitate their pursuit of novelty. We discuss how the articles of this special issue employ such contemporary approaches to culture, contributing to the development of an exciting scholarly agenda. By drawing on a variety of empirical settings and methodologies, these articles generate novel and provocative insights about cultural entrepreneurship. Leveraging these contributions, we highlight possible future paths and research questions