Books on the topic 'SME Open Innovation'

This publication is comprised within a recent strand of studies devoted to scholastic culture, understood as an original and complex form of mediation between academic and popular culture. The history of scholastic disciplines is actually one of the most innovative and interesting sectors of the social history of education, and also links up with similar initiatives in other academic sectors, even at international level. These include studies on scholastic and educational publishing, the history of professional associations in the area of geography and cartography (both local and national), and on possible interactions between classical geographical studies and technological applications (digital history and geography). The study of geography teaching, in particular, is extremely useful and significant for analysing: the structure, functioning and changes in scholastic culture; the contribution it made at the time of foundation and consolidation of the Italian State and at other times of political and cultural discontinuity and, finally, the tormented relations of scholastic geography with numerous aspects of an ideological nature and related to the building of Italian identity. From a methodical and historical aspect, the approach of this book is distinctly interdisciplinary: it involves specialists from scientific communities that differ in their origins and current structure, but share the same argument of study and the wish for open exchange. The various contributions seek to highlight the close interrelations between past and present in geography, never severing the links between current and historic study, between the educational and operational concerns of today and those of yesterday. Rather, they underscore the importance and advantages of a historic perspective, which can supply useful keys for interpreting the moments of discontinuity and the (ideal and operational) tensions that have distinguished geographical culture, both scholastic and academic. Rassegna stampa: La Vita Scolastica Rivista n. 5 Dicembre 2013

Open Innovation Results challenges conventional thinking about exponential technologies, and probes the deeper factors necessary to obtain economic and social value from technology. It shows that generating technology alone is insufficient: the technology must also be broadly disseminated, and then absorbed and put to work before its full value is realized. The same is true with Open Innovation. It is not enough to do pilots or proofs-of-concept in your innovation unit. Your innovation results must be broadly shared throughout the organization, across the siloes, and the businesses themselves must invest in time, money, and people to absorb the new innovation and take it to market. Open Innovation Results also provides the latest research and practices involving open innovation, discussing both the achievements and failures of putting open innovation to work. The book looks at innovation practices (Lean Startup, incubators, accelerators) in a variety of industries (consumer products, IT, telephony, pharmaceuticals), and in a variety of countries (US, EU, China) around the world.

Innovation dilemmas come in myriad forms, arising from the human potential for discovery and invention. These innovations are attractive, and promise to be improvements. However, they are distilled from the endless unknown and are accompanied by considerable uncertainty, so their promise may be illusory. This chapter examines a range of innovation dilemmas, selected for their diversity; some are concrete and technological, others abstract and conceptual. We consider e-reading and its uncertain implications for young readers; military hardware and development of the Messerschmidt jet fighter plane; bipolar disorder and pregnancy; disruptive technology and the manager’s innovation dilemma; agricultural productivity and world hunger; military intelligence and foresight; and controlling an invasive biological pest that perhaps is neither invasive nor a pest. Finally, we discuss the habit of open-mindedness, which is both desirable but also sometimes an innovation dilemma.

There are many similarities in how firms pursuing an open innovation strategy can utilize crowds and communities as sources of external innovation. At the same time, the differences between these two network forms of collaboration have previously been blurred or overlooked. In this chapter, we integrate research on crowds and communities, identifying a third form—a crowd–community hybrid—that combines attributes of both. We compare examples of each of these three network forms, such as open source software communities, gated contests, crowdsourcing tournaments, user-generated content, and crowd science. We then summarize the intrinsic, extrinsic, and structural factors that enable individual and organizational participation in these collaborations. Finally, we contrast how these collaborative forms differ regarding their degree of innovativeness and relevance to firm goals. From this, we identify opportunities for future research on these topics.

According to conventional wisdom on crowdsourcing, the number of people defines the crowd and maximization of this number is often assumed to be the goal of any crowdsourcing exercise. However, some structural characteristics of the crowd might be more important than the sheer number of participants. These characteristics include (1) the growth rate and its attractiveness to members, (2) equality among members, (3) density within provisional boundaries, (4) goal orientation of the crowd, and (5) “seriality” of the interactions between members. Therefore, a typology is proposed that may allow managers to position their companies’ initiatives among four strategic types for driving innovation: crowd crystals, online communities, closed crowds, and open crowds. Incumbent companies may prefer closed and controlled access to the crowd, limiting the potential for gaining results and insights from fully open crowd-driven innovation initiatives. Thus, the effects on industries and organizations by open crowds are still to be explored.

This chapter introduces the principle of sensory substitution and presents the main systems which currently exist, starting with the pioneering work of Paul Bach-y-Rita. Some research in this domain pursues the ideal of restoring an exact imitation of normal perceptual systems, but whenever there is a technical mediation, variations become possible and so there will always be possible novelties or augmentations. We highlight that these devices also open up the possibility of experimental studies of active perception within a minimalist framework, which lead to the conclusion that rather than “sensory substitution” one should more properly speak of “perceptual supplementation”. When we make prosthetic devices to assist persons with sensory disabilities, this creates possibilities of new forms of sensorimotor dynamics which open up new perceptual domains and augment the subjects’ capabilities. This raises new questions about the conditions of individual appropriation and social adoption of these innovations.

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal is an initiative of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University. It annually recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. This book unveils the Public Mapping Project, which developed DistrictBuilder, an open-source software redistricting application designed to give the public transparent, accessible, and easy-to-use online mapping tools. As the book shows, the goal is for all citizens to have access to the same information that legislators use when drawing congressional maps—and use that data to create maps of their own.

With the rise of China’s information and communications technology (ICT) sector, a number of Chinese high-tech firms are approaching transnational stages and shifting the center of gravity in global ICT markets. In the meantime, China’s digital economy has raised the debate with regard to the nature and direction of its developmental model. This book investigates Huawei Technologies—China’s most competitive high-tech company—as a microcosm of the rise of China’s corporate power and its evolving digital economy. Yun Wen first traces Huawei’s history against the backdrop of China’s ICT development and its outward expansion in global markets. Focusing on Huawei’s research and development strategies, she then delineates Huawei’s path to its cutting-edge technology and innovation leadership. Huawei’s distinct experience in the design of its ownership structure and labor practices is also examined in the book. By examining how Huawei’s growth intertwined with the trajectory of China’s ICT development and how it responded to various forces of corporate China’s globalization, this book sheds light on distinguishing features of the “Huawei model” and the geopolitical economic implications of China’s corporate globalization. It argues that the core of China’s pathbreaking model lies in local alternatives and indigenous agencies that have the ability to insist on a self-reliant, open-minded, and innovation-oriented developmental strategy.

On the eve of the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meetings in Seattle, software programmers, Matt Arnison and Manse Jacobi posted the first message to the newly created, open-publishing indymedia.org website, which concluded with what later became a classic indymedia prompt: “Add a comment on this article.” In the days to come, thousands of journalists, activists, organizers, and concerned citizens responded to the call, and the new Independent Media Center (IMC), as well as the city of Seattle, were “swamped by the tide of activist media makers.” With hundreds of volunteers on the ground and millions of visitors turning to the new participatory news portal, a truly open, democratic newsroom was established, and the indymedia movement was born. This chapter provides an account of the organizing and vision that went into establishing the Seattle Independent Media Center in two short months before the WTO meetings. It also focuses on the work that went into establishing the first IMC, the innovations and possibilities that emerged during the Seattle experiment, and finally, some of the problems that surfaced in this new model of movement-based communications.

The conventional account of a European Union (EU) “democratic deficit” misses part of the story. This book argues that member-state regulatory processes operating under EU mandates may actually have become more democratically accountable, not less. EU law creates entry points for stakeholder participation in the operation of national regulatory authorities; these avenues for public participation were formerly either not open or not institutionalized to this degree. In these cases, we see not a democratic deficit but a democratic surplus generated by EU law in the member states. Moreover, the decentralized EU regulatory structure may promote experimentation, innovation, and policy exchange between the member states. The book discusses a series of case studies demonstrating how EU law influenced telecommunications regulation in France, Greece, and the United Kingdom. It assesses the operation of accountability processes by drawing on data from more than 1,000 public consultations and some 8,000 consultation responses. The analysis is supplemented by interviews with agency officials as well as industry and consumer group representatives in Paris, Athens, Brussels, and London. The study finds increased participation by actors other than the traditional powerful firms as well as significant transparency gains compared to the previous regime. Nonetheless, the three countries did not respond to EU pressures in an identical fashion. The book compares how the same EU mandates were translated into divergent institutional practices as a result of the different administrative traditions, bureaucratic culture, and public law history of these countries. It also documents roadblocks and difficulties along the way.

The third chapter brings the mixed media of the BAM and the 21st century together as Crawford shows that black art, after the Black Arts Movement, continues to create an alternative way of approaching art as process, not as object. The first part of this chapter shapes this process-oriented counter-literacy around the Black Arts Movement textual productions of the black book as the open book. She explores the openness of word and image texts and argues that they produce the lack of closure of black post-blackness. Through the text paintings of Glenn Ligon and the word and image books of Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, John Keene, Christopher Stackhouse, and others, this chapter unveils the unbound nature of mixed media as one of the most innovative legacies of the Black Arts Movement.

This book defends a new interpretation of Hegel’s idealism as oriented by a philosophical and logical concept of life, focusing on Hegel’s Science of Logic. Beginning with the influence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Karen Ng argues that Hegel’s key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which Hegel views as “Kant’s great service to philosophy.” Ng charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant and argues that its key innovation is the claim that the purposiveness of nature enables the operation of the power of judgment. Situating Hegel among contemporaries such as Fichte and Schelling, she further argues that this innovation is key for understanding Hegel’s philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in which the theory of self-consciousness plays a central role. In her new interpretation of Hegel’s Logic, Ng argues that the Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel’s critique of judgment, where he defends the view that life opens up the possibility of intelligibility as such. She argues that Hegel’s theory of judgment is modeled on reflective, teleological judgments, in which something’s species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Ng demonstrates that absolute method is best interpreted as the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing a new way for understanding Hegel’s philosophical system.

American higher education is at a crossroads. Technological innovations and disruptive market forces are buffeting colleges and universities at the very time their financial structure grows increasingly fragile. Disinvestment by states has driven up tuition prices at public colleges, and student debt has reached a startling record-high of one trillion dollars. Cost-minded students and their families--and the public at large--are questioning the worth of a college education, even as study after study shows how important it is to economic and social mobility. And as elite institutions trim financial aid and change other business practices in search of more sustainable business models, racial and economic stratification in American higher education is only growing. In American Higher Education in Crisis?: What Everyone Needs to Know, Goldie Blumenstyk, who has been reporting on higher education trends for 25 years, guides readers through the forces and trends that have brought the education system to this point, and highlights some of the ways they will reshape America's colleges in the years to come. Blumenstyk hones in on debates over the value of post-secondary education, problems of affordability, and concerns about the growing economic divide. Fewer and fewer people can afford the constantly increasing tuition price of college, Blumenstyk shows, and yet college graduates in the United States now earn on average twice as much as those with only a high-school education. She also discusses faculty tenure and growing administrative bureaucracies on campuses; considers new demands for accountability such as those reflected in the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard; and questions how the money chase in big-time college athletics, revelations about colleges falsifying rankings data, and corporate-style presidential salaries have soured public perception. Higher education is facing a serious set of challenges, but solutions have also begun to emerge. Blumenstyk highlights how institutions are responding to the rise of alternative-educational opportunities and the new academic and business models that are appearing, and considers how the Obama administration and public organizations are working to address questions of affordability, diversity, and academic integrity. She addresses some of the advances in technology colleges are employing to attract and retain students; outlines emerging competency-based programs that are reshaping conceptions of a college degree, and offers readers a look at promising innovations that could alter the higher education landscape in the near future. An extremely timely and focused look at this embattled and evolving arena, this primer emphasizes how open-ended the conversation about higher education's future remains, and illuminates how big the stakes are for students, colleges, and the nation.

This chapter explores some of the innovative approaches to the doctrines of sin and reconciliation found in the Christian theology of the nineteenth century. These accounts tended to emerge in Western Christianity, and specifically in Protestant Germany. The chapter opens with a concise rehearsal of a broadly traditional account of sin and reconciliation in the Christian tradition, and an outline of the principal streams of criticism this traditional account encountered in the Enlightenment period. It then considers in turn the constructive interaction with these core doctrinal themes of a series of significant writers: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, and Wilhelm Herrmann. It concludes by reflecting upon the key insights which this trajectory of creative thinking has contributed to the enterprise of Christian theology.

From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture. The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.

Latin America and the Caribbean, unlike other regions, is still quite young demographically: people over age 60 make up around 11% of the total population. However, the region is expected to experience the fastest rate of population aging in the world over the coming decades. This projected growth of the elderly population raises challenges related to pensions, health, and long-term care. At the same time, it opens up numerous business opportunities in different sectorshousing, tourism, care, and transportation, for examplethat could generate millions of new jobs. These opportunities are termed the “silver economy,” which has the potential to be one of the drivers of post-pandemic economic recovery. Importantly, women play key roles in many areas of this market, as noted in the first report published by the IDB on this subject (Okumura et al., 2020). This report maps the actors whose products or services are intended for older people and examines silver economy trends in the region by sector: health, long-term care, finance, housing, transportation, job market, education, entertainment, and digitization. The mapping identified 245 actors whose products or services are intended for older people, and it yielded three main findings. The first is that the majority of the actors (40%) operate in the health and care sectors. The prevalence of these sectors could be due to the fact that they are made up of many small players, and it could also suggest a still limited role of older people in active consumption, investment, and the job market in the region. The second finding is that 90% of the silver economy actors identified by the study operate exclusively in their countries of origin, and that Mexico has the most actors (47), followed by the Southern Cone countriesBrazil, Chile, and Argentinawhich have the regions highest rates of population aging. The third finding is that private investment dominates the silver economy ecosystem, as nearly 3 out of every 4 actors offering services to the elderly population are for-profit enterprises. The sectors and markets of the silver economy differ in size and degree of maturity. For example, the long-term care sector, which includes residential care settings, is the oldest and has the largest number of actors, while sectors like digital, home automation, and cohousing are still emerging. Across all sectors, however, there are innovative initiatives that hold great potential for growth. This report examines the main development trends of the silver economy in the region and presents examples of initiatives that are already underway. The health sector has a wealth of initiatives designed to make managing chronic diseases easier and to prevent and reduce the impact of functional limitations through practices that encourage active aging. In the area of long term careone of the most powerful drivers of job creationinitiatives to train human resources and offer home care services are flourishing. The financial sector is beginning to meet a wide range of demands from older people by offering unique services such as remittances or property management, in addition to more traditional pensions, savings, and investment services. The housing sector is adapting rapidly to the changes resulting from population aging. This shift can be seen, for example, in developments in the area of cohousing or collaborative housing, and in the rise of smart homes, which are emerging as potential solutions. In the area of transportation, specific solutions are being developed to meet the unique mobility needs of older people, whose economic and social participation is on the rise. The job market offers older people opportunities to continue contributing to society, either by sharing their experience or by earning income. The education sector is developing solutions that promote active aging and the ongoing participation of older people in the regions economic and social life. Entertainment services for older people are expanding, with the emergence of multiple online services. Lastly, digitization is a cross-cutting and fundamental challenge for the silver economy, and various initiatives in the region that directly address this issue were identified. Additionally, in several sectors we identified actors with a clear focus on gender, and these primarily provide support to women. Of a total of 245 actors identified by the mapping exercise, we take a closer look at 11 different stories of the development of the silver economy in the region. The featured organizations are RAFAM Internacional (Argentina), TeleDx (Chile), Bonanza Asistencia (Costa Rica), NudaProp (Uruguay), Contraticos (Costa Rica), Maturi (Brazil), Someone Somewhere (Mexico), CONAPE (Dominican Republic), Fundación Saldarriaga Concha (Colombia), Plan Ibirapitá (Uruguay), and Canitas (Mexico). These organizations were chosen based on criteria such as how innovative their business models are, the current size and growth potential of their initiatives, and their impact on society. This study is a first step towards mapping the silver economy in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the hope is to broaden the scope of this mapping exercise through future research and through the creation of a community of actors to promote the regional integration of initiatives in this field.