International Journal of Innovation Management

Engineers play a crucial role in the growing complexity of the innovation process and in an economy's national system of innovation. This paper focuses on the role of engineers as managers. It is based on the understanding that the rising technical complexily of the activities of most enterprises and the central role of technology to economic performance has made it increasingly important to bring engineers into all levels of management activities. We use longitudinal data on three recent cohorts of Canadian engineering graduates to document the extent and nature of the flows into engineering and non-engineering management positions, and to compare various outcomes (earnings levels, job satisfaction, skill use and overall evaluation of the educational programme) associated with these different career paths using both static and dynamic perspectives. We are thus able to assess the general attractiveness of the management ladder for engineering graduates and identify some implications of the outcomes for the accumulation of technology.

In this essay, we analyse the diffusion of the Internet and online retailing within the standard framework of diffusion to heterogeneous consumers. We show that many conditions favour the diffusion of Internet retailing in the short run, but not in the long run. We argue that the standard framework needs to account for the "nested" diffusion process. That is, the diffusion of online retailing depends on the diffusion of many other goods, whose underlying diffusion process is also changing. An understanding of these interrelated processes leads to a richer understanding of the prospects for the long-term diffusion of online retailing.

This paper presents a model for managing product development projects in which new strategic platforms that are of paramount importance to a company are developed. The model incorporales a superweight manager who manages a "live or die" strategic programme across different projects. From this study, an additional model emerges besides the four generic types of product development, project organisations and leadership presented by Clark and Wheelwright (1993a). The analysis was conducted by screening data into five categories, namely, strategic control of the project, resource allocation, organisational structure, targets and leadership. The data were collected through interviews and validated by triangulation and internal seminars.

This paper aims to test whether the same technological characteristics specific to the European ICT industry emerged over time in terms of large firms' profiles of specialisation. Against the background of an ongoing European integration process, the analysis takes into account the role played by country-specific factors. The increasing overlap between the ICT technological specialisation profiles of European multi-nationals seems to be the major finding of this paper. European technology policy might be identified as one of the factors explaining this pattern without, however, disregarding the broad impact of European integration, which has increased the extent of market-based and technology-based interaction between firms.

Organisational creativity remains an ill-defined concept. Studies have failed to arrive at a convincing general theory of creativity and, more recently, attention has turned to the possibilities of middle-range theories in which creativity is treated as a context-specific phenomenon. A new approach for exploring the nature of creativity of organisations is reported with preliminary empirical results. The method draws on signalling theory applied to a database of companies generated from citations and executive nominations. Companies such as 3M, IBM, Sony, Disney and Proctor & Gamble were found to yield strong and frequent signals over extended time periods. Strong signals have also been detected from younger firms such as Microsoft, Virgin and Nike. The approach offers the possibility of industry-specific benchmarking for corporate creativity, and for testing the relationship between an organisation's creativity, innovativeness and other change-related features.