ACE Research Vignette 047: What is the hard evidence on innovation and business productivity

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international Entrepreneurship researchers. This vignette, written by Professor Beth Webster at Swinburne University of Technology, examines how innovation in small and medium size businesses affect their productivity.

Public space design of knowledge and innovation spaces: Learnings from Kelvin Grove Urban Village, Brisbane

The era of knowledge-based urban development has led to an unprecedented increase in mobility of people and the subsequent growth in new typologies of agglomerated enclaves of knowledge such as knowledge and innovation spaces. Within this context, a new role has been assigned to contemporary public spaces to attract and retain the mobile knowledge workforce by creating a sense of place. This paper investigates place making in the globalized knowledge economy, which develops a sense of permanence spatio-temporally to knowledge workers displaying a set of particular characteristics and simultaneously is process-dependent getting developed by the internal and external flows and contributing substantially in the development of the broader context it stands in relation with. The paper reviews the literature and highlights observations from Kelvin Grove Urban Village, located in Australia’s new world city Brisbane, to understand the application of urban design as a vehicle to create and sustain place making in knowledge and innovation spaces. This research seeks to analyze the modified permeable typology of public spaces that makes knowledge and innovation spaces more viable and adaptive as per the changing needs of the contemporary globalized knowledge society.

Design theory for innovation of classroom-based information systems

This research used design science research methods to develop, instantiate, implement, and measure the acceptance of a novel software artefact. The primary purpose of this software artefact was to enhance data collection, improve its quality and enable its capture in classroom environments without distracting from the teaching activity. The artefact set is an iOS app, with supporting web services and technologies designed in response to teacher and pastoral care needs. System analysis and design used Enterprise Architecture methods. The novel component of the iOS app implemented proximity detection to identify the student through their iPad and automatically link to that student's data. The use of this novel software artefact and web services was trialled in a school setting, measuring user acceptance and system utility. This integrated system was shown to improve the accuracy, consistency, completeness and timeliness of captured data and the utility of the input and reporting systems.

Open innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): External knowledge sourcing strategies and internal organizational facilitators

In this paper we explore how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engage in external knowledge sourcing, a form of inbound open innovation. We draw upon a sample of 1,411 SMEs and empirically conceptualize a typology of strategic types of external knowledge sourcing, namely minimal, supply-chain, technology-oriented, application-oriented, and full-scope sourcing. Each strategy reflects the nature of external interactions and is linked to a distinct mixture of four internal practices for managing innovation. Both full-scope and application-oriented sourcing offer performance benefits and are associated with a stronger focus on managing innovation. However, they differ in their managerial focus on strategic and operational aspects.

A model to assess the impact of innovation activity on project performance in consulting engineering firms

A holistic consideration of innovation and associated activities is still very new to consulting engineering firms. This research will have benefits for both industry and academia. The final outcome of this research is a prioritised decision making innovation model that can be used by consulting engineering firms to make informed decisions by investing in appropriate innovation activities that positively impact project performance. This helps by using an informed approach towards investing rather than 'hit-and-miss' trialling.

Business Innovation and Disruption in the Music Industry

Over the past fifteen years the music industry has experienced a disruptive process of digital transformation that has reshaped most aspects of the industry; in 2015 the contours of a “new music economy” have begun to emerge. The structure and mechanics of these evolutionary processes vary considerably between continents, and this book examines these processes within Europe, America and Asia. The contributors offer a range of theoretical perspectives, as well as empirical findings from the social sciences and business, as well as the media industries. They offer a holistic understanding of the forces shaping the new music economy, and shed some light on the impact of these forces on the ways in which music is created, aggregated and distributed, and on the economic and social consequences for industry producers and consumers.

Introduction to "Business innovation and disruption in the music industry"

Similar to most other creative industries, the evolution of the music industry is heavily shaped by media technologies. This was equally true in 1999, when the global recorded music industry had experienced two decades of continuous growth largely driven by the rapid transition from vinyl records to Compact Discs. The transition encouraged avid music listeners to purchase much of their music collections all over again in order to listen to their favourite music with ‘digital sound’. As a consequence of this successful product innovation, recorded music sales (unit measure) more than doubled between the early 1980s and the end of the 1990s. It was with this backdrop that the first peer-to-peer file sharing service was developed and released to the mainstream music market in 1999 by the college student Shawn Fanning. The service was named Napster and it marks the beginning of an era that is now a classic example of how an innovation is able to disrupt an entire industry and make large swathes of existing industry competences obsolete. File sharing services such as Napster, followed by a range of similar services in its path, reduced physical unit sales in the music industry to levels that had not been seen since the 1970s. The severe impact of the internet on physical sales shocked many music industry executives who spent much of the 2000s vigorously trying to reverse the decline and make the disruptive technologies go away. At the end, they learned that their efforts were to no avail and the impact on the music industry proved to be transformative, irreversible and, to many music industry professionals, also devastating. Thousands of people lost their livelihood, large and small music companies have folded or been forced into mergers or acquisitions. But as always during periods of disruption, the past 15 years have also been very innovative, spurring a plethora of new music business models. These new business models have mainly emerged outside the music industry and the innovators have been often been required to be both persuasive and persistent in order to get acceptance from the risk-averse and cash-poor music industry establishment. Apple was one such change agent that in 2003 was the first company to open up a functioning and legal market for online music. iTunes Music Store was the first online retail outlet that was able to offer the music catalogues from all the major music companies; it used an entirely novel pricing model, and it allowed consumers to de-bundle the music album and only buy the songs that they actually liked. Songs had previously been bundled by physical necessity as discs or cassettes, but with iTunes Music Store, the institutionalized album bundle slowly started to fall apart. The consequences had an immediate impact on music retailing and within just a few years, many brick and mortar record stores were forced out of business in markets across the world. The transformation also had disruptive consequences beyond music retailing and redefined music companies’ organizational structures, work processes and routines, as well as professional roles. iTunes Music Store in one sense was a disruptive innovation, but it was at the same time relatively incremental, since the major labels’ positions and power structures remained largely unscathed. The rights holders still controlled their intellectual properties and the structures that guided the royalties paid per song that was sold were predictable, transparent and in line with established music industry practices.

Introduction to "International Perspectives on Business Innovation and Disruption in the Creative Industries Film, Video and Photography"

The creative industries are particularly fecund empirical fields for investigating the processes of business innovation and disruption. The creative industries are some of the fastest growing sectors in many economies (European Commission, 2001; OECD, 2006; United States Census Bureau, 2010) and thus are worthy of study in their own right. Additionally, the study of the creative industries affords insights into how we understand the current economic transformation towards knowledge- based economies more broadly. The transformation toward knowledge- based economies has been foreshadowed by the transformation of creative industries such as publishing, film, video, photography, music and so on...

Introduction to "Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing"

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries (see preface for extensive discussion of creative industries) respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The papers included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry...

Repositioning the innovation rationale for public service media

The values that gave rise to the ethos of public service broadcasting (PSB) almost a century ago, and which have provided the rationale for PSBs around the world across that time, are under question. This article argues that the process of reinvention of PSBs is enhanced through repositioning the innovation rationale for public service media (PSM). It is organized around a differentiation which is part of the standard repertoire of innovation studies – that between product, process and organizational innovation – as they are being practised by the two Australian PSBs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The article then considers the general problematics of innovation for PSBs through an analysis of the operations of the public value test in the context of European PSM, and its, to this stage, non-application in Australia. The innovation rationale is argued to be a distinctive via media between complementary and comprehensive roles for PSM, which in turn suggests an international, policy-relevant research agenda focusing on international circumstances in which the public broadcaster is not market dominant.

Design and a deep customer insight approach to innovation

This paper proposes and explores the Deep Customer Insight Innovation Framework in order to develop an understanding as to how design can be integrated within existing innovation processes. The Deep Customer Insight Innovation Framework synthesises the work of Beckman and Barry (2007) as a theoretical foundation, with the framework explored within a case study of Australian Airport Corporation seeking to drive airport innovations in operations and retail performance. The integration of a deep customer insight approach develops customer-centric and highly integrated solutions as a function of concentrated problem exploration and design-led idea generation. Businesses’ facing complex innovation challenges or seeking to making sense of future opportunities will be able to integrate design into existing innovation processes, anchoring the new approach between existing market research and business development activities. This paper contributes a framework and novel understanding as to how design methods are integrated into existing innovation processes for operationalization within industry.

Agile innovation: Innovating with enterprise systems

The contemporary organisations are presented with an eclectic collection of technologies that has dramatically shifted the process of innovation. This thesis investigates the nature and the process of attaining innovation through the modern IT portfolio. A qualitative study of nine organizations was conducted. The results identified that the modern IT portfolio innovates through a new innovation process called 'agile innovation,' which differs from the existing innovation types.

Birth and expansion of innovation ecosystems: A case study of copper production

Despite the growing attention innovation ecosystems have received from scholars and practitioners, rather little is known about the crucial birth and expansion phases that these ecosystems experience. Through a single case in the complex product system (CoPS) environment, this paper investigates the development of an innovation ecosystem between 1980 and 2007. The findings demonstrate that the ecosystem’s birth phase includes sub-phases, namely, invention and start-up, where the ecosystem is reconfigured to find the appropriate form and the proper actors to satisfy the first customer’s requirements. Moreover, the duration of the expansion phase is found to be remarkably long, suggesting that within the CoPS setting, expansion may also include two or more sub-phases.

Place making facilitators of knowledge and innovation spaces: Insights from European best practices

Knowledge economy seeks its nourishment from diversity and dissemination of ideas and creativity of its talent base. This has led to the acknowledgement of place making as a major strategy to attract and retain the knowledge base into the emerging knowledge and innovation spaces. The study seeks to explore the adoption of place making in this context. Literature and practice provide information to understand the evolution of various spatial typologies and the specialised role of place making in such locations. This helps in determining the key facilitators of place making. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach and develops an integrated conceptual framework considering dimensions and facilitators of place making. Through the lens of the framework, best practices across Europe—i.e., Cambridge Science Park (UK), 22@Barcelona (Spain), Arabianranta (Finland), Strijp-S (Netherlands), and Digital Hub (Ireland)—are scrutinised to highlight various approaches to place making. The findings provide insights and a discussion into the interplay of form, function, image and underlying processes in globally emerging spatial typologies of contemporary knowledge and innovation spaces.