Innovation Through Cooperation

Many people have great ideas. Without the necessary skills and means most never get to realize them. If they could cooperate with competent firms and entrepreneurs together both could achieve much and this is increasingly happening. Mechanisms are being established making a division of labour between inventors and implementers a reality. This is changing the nature of innovation from an internal R&D, or purely entrepreneurial attempt, to a more cooperative innovation. An Idea Economy emerges, where anyone has the possibility to profit from their ideas, and everyone will benefit from more and better innovation. This book presents us the emergence and structure of the Idea Economy by extending the seminal concepts of Entrepreneurial Society and Open Innovation. Part I describes the big picture on how innovation is evolving, where we are today, and what an Idea Economy will look like. Part II points the way forward, discussing in detail on how cooperation in the innovation process works, and why this is only recently becoming possible. ​

Volume 12 of this annual series focuses on achieving improving innovation in organizations through collaboration. The chapters present a variety of methods and settings that explore ways that collaboration can be utilized to enable and enhance innovation.

Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration, takes an unusually international perspective of sustainable innovation with contributions from Australia, Europe, and North America. Prominent policy makers, scientific researchers and practitioners in this field provide various inputs and analyses relating to the development of sustainable innovations. It is expected that policy makers, organizations, individual researchers, students and even communities can further develop and implement concepts and practices by drawing on the variety of projects and theoretical foundations presented in this volume.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume is concerned with the evolution and achievements of cooperation in research and innovation between Africa and Europe, and points to the need for more diversified funding and finance mechanisms, and for novel models of collaboration to attract new actors and innovative ideas. It reflects on the political, economic, diplomatic and scientific rationale for cooperation, while also examining practical developments, illustrated with examples, in the fields of food security, health, and climate change. The need to mobilise scientific knowledge and to ensure equality and fairness in the cooperation are recurrent themes. Africa-Europe Cooperation in Research and Innovation is essential reading for policy makers and researchers in international relations and science diplomacy.

Research cooperation in a nation is a fundamental key to national competitiveness in technology that supports growth in a national economy. To fully understand why some nations are more successful in innovation than others, one must examine the structure and process of knowledge creation and use — the Science & Technology policy of a nation.National innovation requires progress both in Science & Technology, and also in economy. Research cooperation for innovation is necessary, since science, technology, and production are performed in different sectors of a nation. Universities conduct research science, and science discovers nature. Governments support most of the research in universities, and therefore are the principal sponsors of science. Industry develops most technology and commercializes technology into economically useful products/services. The structure and process of knowledge in a nation thus requires (1) creation of knowledge in science, (2) translation of science into technology, and (3) design of technology into commercialization of utility. At a national level, innovation is thus a complicated concept — proposing a need to identify the proper ways that government-university-industry can cooperate to advance knowledge and economically benefit from innovation. Special programs in Science & Technology policy that have proven beneficial in fostering research cooperation for national competitiveness will be covered in this book.Cooperative Innovation: Science & Technology Policy helps readers understand a practical science & technology policy for a nation. Its contents are particularly useful for government administrators of research, industrial research directors, university research directors, and students of science & technology policy.

This book addresses the role of cooperation, networks and institutions in the context of regional innovation systems. It emphasises the importance of these factors in the emergence of local innovation systems, using detailed examples of clusters which have reached different stages of maturity. The authors address the topic from an empirical, theoretical and political perspective, and highlight the local mechanisms which are involved in the development of innovation systems. They offer a comprehensive overview of different approaches in the field and present numerous case studies which stress the influence of networks and local institutions. Significantly, they also introduce several new approaches to regional innovation systems, including contributions which explicitly discuss the design and potential of policy measures to promote regional development. The policy recommendations are based on sound theorising which, in turn, is based on extensive empirical research. This book is a valuable addition to a complex and growing literature which offers new perspectives and insights on cooperation, networks and institutions, and their role in the development of local systems of innovation. The combination of empirical, theoretical and policy-oriented approaches will ensure this book is essential reading for academics and policymakers in the fields of regional economics, innovation research and economic geography.

When writing this book I aim to accomplish several goals. First, I would like to show that building a cooperative environment for a diverse workforce is a crucial antecedent to any attempts at building innovativeness. Diversity expresses itself in various forms. It may be the fact that men and women may have different creative sensitivities (Chapter 11), or that the employees differ in their views on the importance of various components of the business model (Chapter 3), or that different employee groups or different companies employ different strategies with respect to innovation management (Chapter 7). Being aware of these sources of diversity may be of practical importance for thoughtful managers. Second, the heuristic methods described in Chapters 4, 10, and 11 are well suited for managerial practice, since they are the tools ready to be implemented in everyday work, when the need arises to stimulate employees’ innovativeness. Several hundred original examples provided in these chapters are meant to serve either as direct triggers of creativity (Appendix to Chapter 11) or potentially useful cases to enrich one’s thinking about their problems to be solved (examples of the TRIZ method in Appendix to Chapter 4 and examples of the SCAMPER method in Appendix to Chapter 10). Third, modeling innovation dynamics using game theory (Chapter 7) and quantifying within-organization diversity with methods that are borrowed from community ecology, open novel opportunities for researchers in the area of management (Chapter 3). The existence of team roles creates a natural organizational setting through which plurality of employee views on the main business model of the organization are expressed. Since each team role has a unique view on the importance of particular components of the business model, an informal but very dynamic diversity of business models co-existing in the organization arises. I adopt quantitative concepts and methods from ecology to show how the diversity of team-role views can be assessed. Furthermore, the same method can be used to capture the diversity of views on business models among individual employees, especially at managerial and executive level. In a turbulent business environment an organization’s flexibility may be improved by internal diversity of the ways its business model is implemented. Finally, several topics may be used in the educational context, with very low barriers to entry for the student users. Reciprocity as a mechanism promoting cooperation and building trust (Chapters 2 and 3) is, in my view, a fundamental concept when teaching about organizational behavior. Game theory is useful in strategic management. The heuristic methods mentioned above are key to implementing a very effective approach in creative thinking and innovation management courses.

Areas addressed include: motivations and mechanisms for technological collaboration, the fields in which it is likely to occur, and the consequences of collaboration for the parties involved and the economy as a whole.