Staging Collaborative Design And Innovation

This stimulating book proposes the concept of staging as a tool for planning and facilitating design and innovation activities. Drawing on a predominantly Scandinavian tradition of participatory design research and sociotechnical perspectives from actor–network theory, it discusses how staging can enable co-design, sustainable transitions and social and radical innovation.

This book explains and exemplifies how SMEs can embrace the Smart Production approach and technologies in order to gain a beneficiary outcome. The book describes the Smart Production vision for SMEs, as well as the method to get there. The concept behind the book is based on the long-term experience of the authors in researching and tackling problems of SMEs in the manufacturing sector. The book provides applied methods and obtained solutions in different branches and different sizes of SMEs, encompassing a broad survey of our markets and societies. The perspective is systemic/holistic and integrated including human, organizational, technological, and digital perspectives.

This timely book takes an insightful look at rethinking innovation and how lessons can be learnt from what is a major turning point in our contemporary societies: the urgent need to reduce the use or consumption of certain substances and technologies due to the dangers they pose to our environments and current way of life. Using theoretical reflection and empirical work in a broad range of sectors including agriculture, food, health, religion, energy, packaging, markets and digital technology, eminent scholars utilise new perspectives to enrich our understanding of innovation processes and how these can be transformed.

The book provides a snapshot of a hot topic – the systemic nature of innovation and its relevance to design – with a trifold perspective: the academic level – the literature on innovation studies and design is often neglected and a clear connection between the two topics taken for granted; the research level – collaborative models are currently considered great opportunities for transforming consumption, production and distribution of goods, but a clear scholarly discourse is still forming; the political level – the European Commission and the OECD are devoting much effort to understanding and measuring the impact of design in innovation processes and firms and a clear contribution would greatly support this path. Thus the book provides an informed, historical and nuanced perspective to the relationship between design and innovation to contribute to all three levels and to propose a point of view that goes beyond aesthetics and meanings.

Digital-Age Innovation in Higher Education recounts the creation, development, and growth of an innovation unit within a major university. This single case study follows the development of the EdLab at the Gottesman Libraries of Teachers College, Columbia University, which was charged with developing new services and products at a time when digital technologies were markedly beginning to impact the sector. The major steps taken – recruiting staff in key skill areas, developing projects, collaborating across organizational lines, securing resources, delivering new services, and more – are covered in detail, illustrating the opportunities and challenges presented by innovation mandates in long-established organizations with stable operations and traditional academic values and practices.

While innovation has long been a major topic of research and scholarly interest for the private sector, it is still an emerging theme in the field of public management. While ‘results-oriented’ public management may be here to stay, scholars and practitioners are now shifting their attention to the process of management and to how the public sector can create ‘value’. One of the urgent needs addressed by this book is a better specification of the institutional and political requirements for sustaining a robust vision of public innovation, through the key dimensions of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and design. This book brings together empirical studies drawn from Europe, the USA and the antipodes to show how these dimensions are important features of public sector innovation in many Western democracies with different conditions and traditions. This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.

Maximising reader insights into the theory, models, methods and fundamental reasoning of design, this book addresses design activities in industrial settings, as well as the actors involved. This approach offers readers a new understanding of design activities and related functions, properties and dispositions. Presenting a ‘design mindset’ that seeks to empower students, researchers, and practitioners alike, it features a strong focus on how designers create new concepts to be developed into products, and how they generate new business and satisfy human needs. Employing a multi-faceted perspective, the book supplies the reader with a comprehensive worldview of design in the form of a proposed model that will empower their activities as student, researcher or practitioner. We draw the reader into the core role of design conceptualisation for society, for the development of industry, for users and buyers of products, and for citizens in relation to public systems. The book also features original contributions related to exploration, conceptualisation and product synthesis. Exploring both the power and limitations of formal design process models, methods, and tools viewed in the light of human ingenuity and cognition, the book develops a unique design mindset that adds human understanding to the list of methods and tools essential to design. This insight is distilled into useful mindset heuristics included throughout the book.

The Social Design Reader explores the ways in which design can be a catalyst for social change. Bringing together key texts of the last fifty years, editor Elizabeth Resnick traces the emergence of the notion of socially responsible design. This volume represents the authentic voices of the thinkers, writers and designers who are helping to build a 'canon' of informed literature which documents the development of the discipline. The Social Design Reader is divided into three parts. Section 1: Making a Stand includes an introduction to the term 'social design' and features papers which explore its historical underpinnings. Section 2: Creating the Future documents the emergence of social design as a concept, as a nascent field of study, and subsequently as a rapidly developing professional discipline, and Section 3: A Sea Change is made up of papers acknowledging social design as a firmly established practice. Contextualising section introductions are provided to aid readers in understanding the original source material, while summary boxes clearly articulate how each text fits with the larger milieu of social design theory, methods, and practice.