Low-skill industrial work

DINÂMIA'CET, Janeiro de 2010.This paper reflects on the development prospects of ‘simple’ industrial labour in advanced societies. The term ‘simple labour’ denotes tasks of low complexity that make no great demands on employees and require only limited qualifications to perform. One can also speak of ‘lowskill industrial work’. For quite some time, mainstream research has been of the opinion that the permanent trend of upgrading of skills makes this type of work increasingly irrelevant for the development of gainful employment in advanced societies. Consequently, low-skill industrial labour has been seen to become a more and more negligible factor in the course of globalisation because the production processes needing it are increasingly being relocated to developing countries.FC

Various Approaches to Measuring Business Innovation: Their Relevance for Capturing Social Innovation

This paper reviews various approaches to measuring business innovation from the angle of capturing social innovations and offers several methodological and policy conclusions. First, the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) indicators in principle could be useful in settings where the dominant mode of innovation is based on R&D activities. In practice, however, both R&D and non-R&D-based modes of innovation are fairly important. IUS, therefore, only provides a partial picture. Social innovations can certainly rely on R&D-based technological innovations. Their essence, however, tends to be organisational, managerial and behavioural changes. The IUS indicators do not capture these types of changes. Second, an assessment of the 81 indicators used to compile the Global Innovation Index reveals that it would neither be a fruitful effort to rely on those indicators to capture social innovations. Third, given the diversity among innovation systems, a poor performance signalled by a composite indicator does not automatically identify the area(s) necessitating the most urgent policy actions. Only tailored, thorough comparative analyses can do so. Fourth, analysts and policy-makers need to be aware of the differences between measuring (i) social innovation activities (efforts) themselves, (ii) the framework conditions (pre-requisites, available inputs, skills, norms, values, behavioural patterns, etc.) of being socially innovative, and (iii) the economic, societal or environmental impacts of social innovations