Permanent Innovation

Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value. Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, as a matter of strategy, method, and habit. It happens in organizations that embrace innovation as a core value, practice innovation as a core methodology, and produce innovation as a consistent output. The notion of permanent innovation may at first be startling, and it may even seem to be a contradiction. The concept of permanence implies stability and the absence of change, while the concept of innovation implies constancy of change and novelty. Combining these two, however, yields an important synthesis: the practice of innovation not as an occasional occurrence, but as a repeating process of value creation and organizational adaptation. In these times of accelerating change and increasing competition, Permanent Innovation is an absolute necessity. This book is about how to achieve it.

Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value. Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, as a matter of strategy, method, and habit. It happens in organizations that embrace innovation as a core value, practice innovation as a core methodology, and produce innovation as a consistent output. The notion of permanent innovation may at first be startling, and it may even seem to be a contradiction. The concept of permanence implies stability and the absence of change, while the concept of innovation implies constancy of change and novelty. Combining these two, however, yields an important synthesis: the practice of innovation not as an occasional occurrence, but as a repeating process of value creation and organizational adaptation. In these times of accelerating change and increasing competition, Permanent Innovation is an absolute necessity. This book is about how to achieve it.

The major purpose of this book is to clarify the importance of non-technological factors in innovation to cope with contemporary complex societal issues while critically reconsidering the relations between science, technology, innovation (STI), and society. For a few decades now, innovation—mainly derived from technological advancement—has been considered a driving force of economic and societal development and prosperity. With that in mind, the following questions are dealt with in this book: What are the non-technological sources of innovation? What can the progress of STI bring to humankind? What roles will society be expected to play in the new model of innovation? The authors argue that the majority of so-called technological innovations are actually socio-technical innovations, requiring huge resources for financing activities, adapting regulations, designing adequate policy frames, and shaping new uses and new users while having the appropriate interaction with society. This book gathers multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches in innovation that go beyond technology and take into account the inter-relations with social and human phenomena. Illustrated by carefully chosen examples and based on broad and well-informed analyses, it is highly recommended to readers who seek an in-depth and up-to-date integrated overview of innovation in its non-technological dimensions.

For firms and other organizations, innovation has become a means of anticipating and managing major changes in their external context and overcoming societal challenges such as sustainable development. As a result, they must innovate repeatedly and continuously. This book explores the multiple facets of innovation project management, defined as the set of activities implemented to bring into being and successfully complete one or several innovation projects. It combines research experience, in cooperation with practitioners, and a theoretical, transversal and global overview inspired from different research streams. The author develops methodologies and frameworks that might be put into practice, provides a case study of research conducted with an air systems manufacturing firm, and outlines avenues for further reflection on innovation project management practice improvement.

Although co-design has been practised in new service and product development for some years, it has only recently begun to appear in the burgeoning field of social innovation. It appears to be well-attuned to this new context, offering as it does an open-ended relational process to generate novel solutions to problems whose very definition seems to escape more conventional approaches. However, even less research attention has been paid to co-design than to social innovation. This book explores the potential of co-design as a social innovation process. It reviews the diverse theoretical and disciplinary foundations on which co-design is based. It proposes a framework for understanding co-design as a cohesive practice across the extremely broad scope of its potential applications. It explores appropriate approaches to governance and evaluation of co-design initiatives and outlines the key issues and limitations on its use. Although it is intended to provide a robust theoretical basis for researching co-design initiatives, it will also be of interest to anyone who is contemplating putting co-design into practice.

This paper documents the determinants of real oil price in the global market based on SVAR model embedding transitory and permanent shocks on oil demand and supply as well as speculative disturbances. We find evidence of significant differences in the propagation mechanisms of transitory versus permanent shocks, pointing to the importance of disentangling their distinct effects. Permanent supply disruptions turn out to be a bigger factor in historical oil price movements during the most recent decades, while speculative shocks became less influential.

In the current times of more frequent crises and ever shortening innovation cycles, the management of change has become a crucial task of survival. While it is not a new topic in business research, the developments of the last decade have posed many new challenges for the change management of firms and organizations and have thus also raised many new questions for academic research in business administration, which the present book turns to deepen. Its particular focus is on disruptive change including its driving forces as well as effective and sustainable management. This publication constitutes a collection of articles that discuss change and innovation processes across different sectors of the economy (industry, banking, and retail), the role of leadership and corporate governance for the effectiveness and sustainability of organizational change.

This book asks what kind of impacts innovations and technology have on subjective well-being and happiness. It presents the state of the art both in terms of results and theoretical questioning on these topics. It proposes a new concept: innovation that leads to greater happiness, and highlights new research in this area. In so doing, it addresses a less researched area in the field of well-being research. The authors state that notwithstanding the indisputable positive contributions of innovation and technology, there are also drawbacks, which need equal attention in research. This book is of interest to students and researchers of quality of life and well-being, as well as innovation research.