Creative And Innovative Network Management

Networking methods and the needs for competence demand flexibility and adaptability of the education systems. This text argues that every country's authority should promote networking throughout the education process in order to create a suitable environment for life-long learning.

Organizations are complex social systems that are not easy to understand, yet they must be managed if a company is to succeed. This book explains networks and how managers and organizations can navigate them to produce successful strategic innovation outcomes. Although managers are increasingly aware of the importance of social relations for the inner-workings of the organization, they often lack insights and tools to analyze, influence or even create these networks. This book draws on insights from social network theory; insights sharpened by research in a number of different empirical settings including production, engineering, financial services, consulting, food processing, and R&D/hi-tech organizations and alternates between offering critical real business examples and more rigorous analysis. This concise book is vital reading for students of business and management as well as managers and executives.

Many organizations in both the private and public sector are confronted with stiff challenges as they face rapid changes in the business environment. Understanding the causes of these changes is essential if organizations are to fashion suitable management responses. In a highly competitive and globalized scenario, business creativity provides the spark that fosters the development and implementation of innovation and organizational change. Increased understanding of the concepts of business creativity and strategic innovation management provides valuable insights into how organizations can change to meet new challenges. The book aims to: explain the nature of the acceleration in discontinuous change that is affecting the Western business environment emphasise the importance of taking a strategic approach to management responses to encourage creative and innovative skills indicate how a detailed strategic plan can be developed to support organizations intent on profitable survival in the twenty-first century. This textbook will be the perfect accompaniment to postgraduate courses on innovation management and creativity management. The wide-ranging approach means that the book will also be useful supplementary reading on a range of courses from management of technology to strategic management.

Report on the First European Conference on Creativity and Innovation, `Network in Action', organized by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research TNO Delft, The Netherlands, December 13-16, 1987

This volume features excellent new research devoted to advancing our understanding of how networks foster creativity, innovation and the development of cutting-edge technologies. This is crucial reading for any researchers exploring strategic management tools and techniques, and specifically the intricacies of "network theory" within businesses.

The aim of the Managing Networks of Creativity is to improve our understanding of creativity and the management of creativity, as discussed in the fields of management (including strategic management, organization science, organizational behaviour, and entrepreneurship), economics, sociology, regional studies, and political science. While research on creativity has made several important contributions to the theoretical literature, little attention has been paid to the development and testing of formal theoretical models, especially in those cases where creativity is the result not so much of individual behaviour than the outcome of collective efforts, connecting individuals in organizations, social networks, projects, geographic clusters, and so forth. The proposed volume includes studies, both conceptual and empirical, which, as a whole, "deconstruct" the concept of creativity and the management of creativity by identifying specific situations, contexts, firms, clusters, and districts in which creative processes evolve. The reader is provided with in-depth discussions of theoretical issues and a range of descriptive cases and survey data that the authors use to explore or test concepts and models. Overall, the volume aims to integrate current debates concerning the role of creativity (and innovation) in economic and social development.

This unique book reveals how Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) can be used to achieve resilience to change and external shocks. COINs, which consist of 'cyberteams' of motivated individuals, are self-organizing emergent social systems for coping with external change. The book describes how COINs enable resilience in healthcare, e.g. through teams of patients, family members, doctors and researchers to support patients with chronic diseases, or by reducing infant mortality by forming groups of mothers, social workers, doctors, and policymakers. It also examines COINs within large corporations and how they build resilience by forming, spontaneously and without intervention on the part of the management, to creatively respond to new risks and external threats. The expert contributions also discuss how COINs can benefit startups, offering new self-organizing forms of leadership in which all stakeholders collaborate to develop new products.

Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond illustrates the ways in which creativity spurs innovation – not only in the realms of business and management, where the innovation is regularly acknowledged and discussed, but throughout the social sciences. With contributions from experts in fields as far-flung as policy, history, economics, law, psychology, and education, in addition to business and management, this volume explores the manifold avenues for creativity and innovation within and across a multitude of disciplines.