Sustained Innovation
Innovation is a key source of competitive advantage and public value through new strategies, products, services and organisational processes.
The UK has outstanding exemplars of innovative private and public sector organisations and is investing significantly in its science and skills base for the future. However, the demands are both intensifying and diversifying. In certain circumstances, even organisations with an exceptional commitment to innovation have,to work faster and smarter merely to retain and enhance their position.
Sustained Innovation Projects:
John Bessant - Accelerating Diffusion of Innovation
Innovation is about creating new possibilities for the enterprise, for example through product/service offerings or process change. But there is significant scope for productivity improvement through the early adoption of process innovations with particular reference to the insights question which diffusion theory can offer to help policy agents (national/regional government, business and sector associations, supply chain 'owners' etc) accelerate the process.
John Bessant - Developing New Routines for Managing Discontinuous Innovation
There is now a relatively stable picture of what constitutes 'good practice' in managing innovation, which is increasingly used as a reference model against which to audit and develop performance. This prescription works well for the 'steady state' conditions where the innovation challenge involves; doing what we do, but 'better' but it is less effective under discontinuous non-equilibrium conditions.
John Bessant - Innovating Routines in a Creative Industry: The US and UK Electronic Games Industry
The Electronic Games Industry (EGI) is a maturing creative sector that has grown rapidly from a largely non-monetised 'bedroom' activity in the early 1990s to a global industry with a turnover of approximately 33bn in 2002.
Julian Birkinshaw - Innovation and Development in Foreign-Owned Companies
This study focuses on the level of attention that foreign-owned subsidiary companies get from their corporate headquarters, and their ability to successfully chart their own strategic direction. Attention can be a blessing and a curse for the subsidiary, so this study examines the approaches that subsidiaries can use to achieve the right form of attention, and to use it to improve their operating performance.
Julian Birkinshaw - Management Innovation
Researchers have traditionally paid relatively scant attention to the dynamics of management innovation, that is, to the processes through which organizational principles and practices evolve and, perhaps, advance over time.
Mark Easterby- Smith - Organisational Learning and Dynamic Capabilities
Dynamic capabilities refer to the ability of an organisation to adapt and innovate continually in the face of business and environmental change. For many years it has been of interest to researchers from strategy and economics because of the assumed link to organisational performance and competitiveness.
Rick Delbridge - Processes of Knowing in the Design and Construction of Bespoke Products
This project is looking at the design and build of one-off superyachts (25 meters and above). These processes involve various actors (customers, designers, shipyards, technical experts and brokers) in the negotiation and clarification of expectations, design and build possibilities. This makes it an interesting area to explore issues around knowledge management and exchange relations.
Gerry Johnson and George Yip - Successful Strategic Transformers
This project will seek to explain how some companies are able to achieve strategic transformation without trauma and the accompanying loss of value to shareholders and the economy.
Rachel Griffith - Technology Sourcing
Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms are increasingly relocating research activities to 'centres of excellence' in order to source new technologies. Research will consider how important this motivation has been in the observed shift of technological activity out of the UK and into the US.
Rick Delbridge - The Organizing and Innovation Characteristics of UK Biotech Clusters
This project is using mixed methods to explore the characteristics of biotech clusters in the UK and to better understand the policy requirements and economic development implications of such aggregations.
Julian Birkinshaw - Corporate Venturing
This research examines the attributes and performance of corporate venture units in the UK and the US. Using detailed data on 95 corporate venture units (questionnaire and interviews) collected at two points in time, the research sheds light on how corporate venture units can best be managed and how their roles fit the broader strategic goals of their parent companies.
Julian Birkinshaw - Discontinuous Innovation
Many industries today face a fast pace of technological and market change where the shifts are not just 'more of the same'. They are characterized by periods of discontinuous change in which the companies that emerge as the new winners often have very different competencies, networks, and backgrounds to the previous incumbents.
John Bessant - Measuring and Enabling Innovative Capability
This project explores the problem of implementing what is already known about 'good practice' in managing innovation. It is developing an integrated and robust toolkit to help support building this capability and will field test and develop it in a number of cases.
This project examines strategic learning as a route to capability development that can contribute to competitiveness through distinctiveness in market contribution. It examines specifically the way individual managers' learning intentions and actions in conjunction with the organizational learning systems (HRD and KM) produce distinctive capabilities that enable organizations to be competitive.
Mark Easterby- Smith and Simon Collinson - International Knowledge Transfer and Dynamic Capabilities
This research project includes a cluster of distinct projects.
1. Dynamic capabilities of Western MNCs competing in China. This study covered 11 European companies and fieldwork has run from 2004 to 2006.
2. Examination of the relationship between knowledge management and dynamic capabilities in European companies.
3. A study of the learning trade-offs between foreign multinationals and local partners operating in China, in particular, looking at a question of who learns what from whom, and the implications for long-term competitiveness.
Rick Delbridge - Collaborative Networks and Discontinuous Innovation
The purpose of this research is to explore and further explain 'diversity' in inter-firm networks. Diversity refers to the variety of information and resources associated with having a network in which the information and resources a firm gets from its partners are unique and non-redundant. The primary interest is to uncover the characteristics of organizational capability. The research will also seek to examine how diversity of contacts may lead to radical (discontinuous) innovations.
Rachel Griffith - Public Policy and Innovation
The Porter Report focused on a lack of institutions for collaboration as a weakness of the UK. In 2004 two government commissioned reviews (Lambert Review and Innovation Review) reported and announced several policy reforms.
Michelle Lowe - Retail Innovation: The planning regulation-retail format links
This project addresses the role of retail planning policy in shaping innovation in retail firms and in the wider retail development arena.
To address the interrelationships between retail planning and retail innovation, the research takes a format-centred approach.
Zella King - Capturing value from research networks in emerging technologies
Plastic electronics is a disruptive approach to developing and producing low-cost, low-power electronic devices that will have a global impact on a broad range of industry sectors. The United Kingdom is at the forefront of developments in novel materials and applications for a plastic electronics market projected to be worth $300 billion by 2030.
Jaideep Prabhu - Off-shoring and Outsourcing Innovation? The new challenge for multinational
Recent evidence suggests that multinational companies are now off-shoring their innovation activities, much as they off-shored their manufacturing activities in the two decades before. Moreover, firms are increasingly locating their innovation activities in emerging economies such as China and India, rather than in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Simultaneously, innovation is increasingly ‘open’, with firms outsourcing innovation to local firms in triad or emerging markets.
The fellowship supports two broad streams of research. The first research stream contributes to a better understanding of how companies and universities can create value by bringing out new technologies to the market. This research programme consists of studies that focus on commercialisation in the biotechnology sector and in the university context.
This Fellowship investigates the challenges to “dependable innovation” in the context of the network organisation and modular technology production. Today it is no longer sufficient for technologies to be innovative, they also have to be dependable (ie reliable, available, safe and secure).
This fellowship examines how tailored software systems support new service sector practices. Provider-client communication during service tailoring is important in many service sector industries. In healthcare for instance, physicians and nurses gather information from patients in order to communicate diagnosis and treatment options.
This AIM Innovation Fellowship includes two research projects addressing innovation in creative business. The first investigates 'Innovating Practices in Digital Advertising' in the UK and the USA. Digital technologies and media are increasingly important in the advertising industry in terms of both product innovations and in the co-ordination of workflow.
Simon Collinson - The International Innovation Capabilities of UK Firm
This project examines joint-ventures and alliances between British and Chinese firms in mainland China to understand what each side is gaining from such partnerships, particularly in terms of developing new capabilities for innovation. As these firms collaborate to serve the growing China market, or export products and services abroad, there is an exchange of innovation-related knowledge and capabilities.
Michael Jacobides - Sustained Innovation along the Value Chain – UK vs US
How do profits migrate from one part of the value chain to the next? Who stands to lose or win in the process of value chain evolution and profit migration? This project focuses on the patterns of innovation and the patterns of appropriating returns from innovation in different parts of the value chain.
Bruce Tether - Sustained Innovation in Services and Services Sustaining Innovation
The UK economy is dominated by services, and business services in particular are growing in employment and value added. Yet understanding of innovation has essentially been derived from studying manufacturing, and relatively little is known about how services innovate, and contribute to ‘systems of innovation’.
Rick Delbridge - Managing people in a high growth innovative SME
This research on a high performing SME operating in the service sector builds on work examining the evidence on the adoption of ‘high-performance work systems’ (HPWS) in manufacturing and HRM practices more generally in industrial settings. The research has involved an intensive in-depth case study developed in conjunction with the SME’s owner-managers.
To find out more about Our Research Please click here or For further information relating to the Innovation Projects, please contact aim@wbs.ac.uk
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