The use of future-oriented knowledge in regional innovation processes: Research on knowledge generation, transfer and conversion

The importance of the regional level in research has risen in the last few decades and a vast literature in the fields of, for instance, evolutionary and institutional economics, network theories, innovations and learning systems, as well as sociology, has focused on regional level questions. Recently the policy makers and regional actors have also began to pay increasing attention to the knowledge economy and its needs, in general, and the connectivity and support structures of regional clusters in particular. Nowadays knowledge is generally considered as the most important source of competitive advantage, but even the most specialised forms of knowledge are becoming a short-lived resource for example due to the accelerating pace of technological change. This emphasizes the need of foresight activities in national, regional and organizational levels and the integration of foresight and innovation activities. In regional setting this development sets great challenges especially in those regions having no university and thus usually very limited resources for research activities. Also the research problem of this dissertation is related to the need to better incorporate the information produced by foresight process to facilitate and to be used in regional practice-based innovation processes. This dissertation is a constructive case study the case being Lahti region and a network facilitating innovation policy adopted in that region. Dissertation consists of a summary and five articles and during the research process a construct or a conceptual model for solving this real life problem has been developed. It is also being implemented as part of the network facilitating innovation policy in the Lahti region.

Managing the Front End of Innovation in a Networked Company Environment - Combining Strategy, Processes and Systems of Innovation

The objective of the thesis is to enhance the understanding about the management of the front end phases of the innovation process in a networked environment. The thesis approaches the front end of innovation from three perspectives, including the strategy, processes and systems of innovation. The purpose of the use of different perspectives in the thesis is that of providing an extensive systemic view of the front end, and uncovering the complex nature of innovation management. The context of the research is the networked operating environment of firms. The unit of analysis is the firm itself or its innovation processes, which means that this research approaches the innovation networks from the point of view of a firm. The strategy perspective of the thesis emphasises the importance of purposeful innovation management, the innovation strategy of firms. The role of innovation processes is critical in carrying out innovation strategies in practice, supporting the development of organizational routines for innovation, and driving the strategic renewal of companies. The primary focus of the thesis from systems perspective is on idea management systems, which are defined as a part of innovation management systems, and defined for this thesis as any working combination of methodology and tools (manual or IT-supported) that enhance the management of innovations within their early phases. The main contribution of the thesis are the managerial frameworks developed for managing the front end of innovation, which purposefully “wire” the front end of innovation into the strategy and business processes of a firm. The thesis contributes to modern innovation management by connecting the internal and external collaboration networks as foundational elements for successful management of the early phases of innovation processes in a dynamic environment. The innovation capability of a firm is largely defined by its ability to rely on and make use of internal and external collaboration already during the front end activities, which by definition include opportunity identification and analysis, idea generation, profileration and selection, and concept definition. More specifically, coordination of the interfaces between these activities, and between the internal and external innovation environments of a firm is emphasised. The role of information systems, in particular idea management systems, is to support and delineate the innovation-oriented behaviour and interaction of individuals and organizations during front end activities. The findings and frameworks developed in the thesis can be used by companies for purposeful promotion of their front end processes. The thesis provides a systemic strategy framework for managing the front end of innovation – not as a separate process, but as an elemental bundle ofactivities that is closely linked to the overall innovation process and strategy of a firm in a distributed environment. The theoretical contribution of the thesis relies on the advancement of the open innovation paradigm in the strategic context of a firm within its internal and external innovation environments. This thesis applies the constructive research approach and case study methodology to provide theoretically significant results, which are also practically beneficial.

The Innovation Process – Aiming towards Innovativeness in a Construction Company

The bachelor’s thesis concentrates on the innovativeness in the construction industry. The purpose of the thesis is to define the innovation as a concept reflected on a context of the construction industry. The second objective is to examine how the construction companies could foster and increase the innovativeness. The third objective was to find out tools, methods and phases of the front-end of the innovation process. The construction industry is often considered as a traditional and an old-fashioned manufacturing industry. The innovation or the innovativeness rarely linked to the construction industry. Productivity is a common problem in the construction industry. The construction industry needs to increase the productivity to compete in a globalized world. The productivity can be increased by the innovation. The thesis based on a literature review. The findings from the literature include a description of the innovation as a concept, the innovative culture and the innovation process as a context of the construction industry. The phases of the front-end of the innovation process were explained. Customers centered approach was taken into account in the innovation process. The required tools and methods for managing the front-end of the innovation process were illustrated. The thesis ensures the importance of the innovation facing challenges of the construction industry. Managing the front-end of the innovation is the most important aspect to stand out from the less innovative companies. To take a full advantage of the innovation companies cannot fear of changes. The innovation process requires a full support of the top management of the company. Taking into consideration a theoretical aspect of the thesis a further research is required to respond practical needs of the company. Tools and methods should be considered according the company’s needs and activities. Company’s existing state and culture should be examined before implementing the front-end of the innovation process to ensure the functionality.

Inter organizational learning within and by innovation networks

The thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning between organizations in innovation networks that develop new products, services or processes. Inter organizational learning is studied especially at the level of the network. The role of the network can be seen as twofold: either the network is a context for inter organizational learning, if the learner is something else than the network (organization, group, individual), or the network itself is the learner. Innovations are regarded as a primary source of competitiveness and renewal in organizations. Networking has become increasingly common particularly because of the possibility to extend the resource base of the organization through partnerships and to concentrate on core competencies. Especially in innovation activities, networks provide the possibility to answer the complex needs of the customers faster and to share the costs and risks of the development work. Networked innovation activities are often organized in practice as distributed virtual teams, either within one organization or as cross organizational co operation. The role of technology is considered in the research mainly as an enabling tool for collaboration and learning. Learning has been recognized as one important collaborative process in networks or as a motivation for networking. It is even more important in the innovation context as an enabler of renewal, since the essence of the innovation process is creating new knowledge, processes, products and services. The thesis aims at providing enhanced understanding about the inter organizational learning phenomenon in and by innovation networks, especially concentrating on the network level. The perspectives used in the research are the theoretical viewpoints and concepts, challenges, and solutions for learning. The methods used in the study are literature reviews and empirical research carried out with semi structured interviews analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The empirical research concentrates on two different areas, firstly on the theoretical approaches to learning that are relevant to innovation networks, secondly on learning in virtual innovation teams. As a result, the research identifies insights and implications for learning in innovation networks from several viewpoints on organizational learning. Using multiple perspectives allows drawing a many sided picture of the learning phenomenon that is valuable because of the versatility and complexity of situations and challenges of learning in the context of innovation and networks. The research results also show some of the challenges of learning and possible solutions for supporting especially network level learning.

Applying collective intelligence to idea evaluation at the front end of innovation

The study focuses on the front end of innovation process. Due to changes in innovation policies and paradigms customers, users and shopfloor employees are becoming increasingly important sources of knowledge. New methods are needed for processing information and ideas coming from multiple sources more effectively. The aim of this study is to develop an idea evaluation tool suitable for the front end of innovation process and capable of utilizing collective intelligence. The study is carried out as a case study research using constructive research approach. The chosen approach suits well for the purposes of the study. The constructive approach focuses on designing new constructs and testing them in real life applications. In this study a tool for evaluating ideas emerging from the course of everyday work is developed and tested in a case organization. Development of the tool is based on current scientific literature on knowledge creation, innovation management and collective intelligence and it is tested in LUT Lahti School of Innovation. Results are encouraging. The idea evaluation tool manages to improve performance at the front end of innovation process and it is accepted in use in the case organization. This study provides insights on what kind of a tool is required for facilitating collective intelligence at the front end of innovation process.

Building the map of innovation for membrane materials (Ceramic membranes)

This work proposes a method of visualizing the trend of research in the field of ceramic membranes from 1999 to 2006. The presented approach involves identifying problems encountered during research in the field of ceramic membranes. Patents from US patent database and articles from Science Direct(& by ELSEVIER was analyzed for this work. The identification of problems was achieved with software Knowledgist which focuses on the semantic nature of a sentence to generate series of subject action object structures. The identified problems are classified into major research issues. This classification was used for the visualization of the intensity of research. The image produced gives the relation between the number of patents, with time and the major research issues. The identification of the most cited papers which strongly influence the research of the previously identified major issues in the given field was also carried out. The relations between these papers are presented using the metaphor of social network. The final result of this work are two figures, a diagram showing the change in the studied problems a specified period of time and a figure showing the relations between the major papers and groups of the problems

Governmental Measures to Enhance the Finnish Innovation System to Respond to the Challenge of Mitigating Climate Change

Climate innovations, that cover both technological applications and process and service innovations, play a key role in climate change mitigation. The purpose of this study was to examine how the Finnish innovation system could be enhanced with governmental measures so that the diffusion of climate innovations could be speeded up. During the study, it became evident that the governmental measures need to support the whole innovation chain, which comprises of research, development, demonstration and deployment. Only this can lead to the successful birth and diffusion of low carbon innovations. The study found that the strengths of the Finnish innovation system are research and development, and the current national innovation policies strongly support these activities. However, these have been emphasised at the expense of the demonstration and deployment. Consequently, the biggest bottlenecks in the Finnish innovation landscape are the lack of pilot and demonstration projects and slow commercialisation, thus the high price of the innovation. To meet with the challenge, the government should firstly promote strict greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. This would boost up the innovation activities, which would also lower the prices of the innovations. To speed up the commercialisation process, measures that stimulate the domestic market, such as feed-in-tariffs and public procurements, are needed. Special attention should also be paid to the measures that could shift the traditional closed innovation chain towards open innovation. This means that the product development should involve experts from several fields such as the user and marketing experts to speed up the commercialisation. In addition, efficient innovation co-operation between both private and public sector is essential. Finally, as the domestic resources are not adequate for producing all the innovations needed, the domestic innovation activities should be focused on a few sectors, and at the same time promote efficient import policies.

Influence of Institutional Environment on Companies’ Innovation Activity

At the time of moving towards knowledge-based economy, countries pay much attention to innovations by making them a central issue in countries’ innovation policy development. Innovations are influenced much by the institutional environment, in which they are created. That is why exploration of National Innovation Systems, as an important part of such an environment, became central in works of different researchers all over the world.

The Digital Book as a Disruptive Innovation

Whether digital book will become the dominant design of books and be a widely accepted format for reading is a question that is currently asked by every e-publisher, publishing industry worker and many book consumers. This study is the first to holistically approach Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory for an instrument of measuring the phenomenon of the digital book. The disruptiveness of an innovation could be measured by it’s disruptive potential and the disruption process it passes. The empirical part of the thesis is designed so to investigate the digital book‘s features as an innovation for disruptive potential and then the current digital book market, monitoring it for disruption processes. Proving that the digital book is a disruptive innovation may allow understanding it’s prospects and even help in making a pattern of the innovation’s market infiltration in the future. The framework created for answering the research question could also be used in a similar way to analyze other E-publishing products (e.g. e-newspapers, emagazines).

Innovatiivisuus ja yhteistoiminnallinen oppiminen liike-elämässä ja opetuksessa

Innovativity and cooperative learning in business life and teaching The study comprises four articles and a summary, which analyse the concepts of innovation and innovativity and the cooperative learning connected to the innovation processes of companies. Th e study comments on what is innovativity. Another point of inspection is how the cooperative learning theory constructed on the basis of educational science lends it self to inspecting business innovations. At the end, we ponder upon how the concepts of innovativity can be used to inspect teachers’ activities. The studied business innovations were chosen on after considering expert statements. The key personnel in the innovation process were interviewed. The concept of innovation is inspected especially with the aid of concept analysis. The pedagogical innovativity study based on the view of education specialists in quantitative and the data was collected with a questionnaire created on the basis of previous research and literature. Different research methods were used in the studies, thus mixed methods were used for the whole of the doctoral thesis. The starting point for the whole, grounded theory, has to be understood here as a research strategy as well as a research method and data analysis method. The results show that innovativity is creativity that demands versatile learning and has positive eff ects on the process or event in practice. The results also show that in successful innovation businesses cooperative learning is something that has been found instead of searched. Cooperative learning can be seen as characteristic for innovation businesses. The five stage division of cooperative learning creates a useful method of analysing learning in innovation businesses. Innovativity connected to cooperative learning seems to make the creation of innovations possible. In addition to this, the results also show that a teacher’s innovativity is connected to reforms and an attitude that embraces them. Versatile learning in the individual and community is a prerequisite for innovativity. It is important that the teacher has a continuous will to renew teaching methods and combine work and teaching methods. The basic requirements are pedagogical vocational profi ciency and resourcefulness in everyday work.