International Journal of Innovation Management

Many of today's high growth and high value-added businesses are concentrated in the knowledge- and innovation-based industries of information technology, telecommunications, biotechnology, media, software and entertainment. Though the governments of Hong Kong, Singapore & Taiwan (Asian NIEs) have invested heavily in promoting these sectors, they have largely failed to produce internationally competitive firms. We argue that government-led initiatives that were appropriate for economies in the investment-driven stage of industrialisation need to be reformed. As some economic sectors approach the technology frontier, diverse financing arrangements are needed to direct capital to high technology start-ups. To complement existing government-related technology initiatives, a more varied financial infrastructure must be developed.

Many researchers and practitioners contend that organisations should respond to changing market need and create competitive advantage through innovation and creativity. Each year, organisations expend significant resources developing new products and processes and yet research shows that more than half of these initiatives fail. Successful organisations are not innovative by accident; they deliberately manage their innovation process. In order to effectively manage the innovation process, organisations must utilise proven approaches to "lever" innovation within the organisation.

This paper proposes an approach to managing systems innovation that centres on the process of organisational innovation and good management practice. This approach aims to provide a more integrated approach to systems innovation that will make it more systemic and improve its likelihood of success. This paper's main objective is to present a Systems Innovation Self-Assessment (SISA) tool. This tool is derived from the Systems Innovation Management approach, together with the findings of a series of case studies undertaken of the Irish manufacturing industry. This tool allows organisations to assess their progress towards developing an environment supportive of systems innovation. A number of observations obtained from these case studies are also presented.

For some time now, successive generations of more sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been adopted by organisations to enhance or replace more traditional methods of accessing, recording and communicating information used in problem-solving activities. Professionals in most industries have had some experience of the impact of ICT innovation and might be expected to resist innovations which they perceive to have the potential to disrupt crucial processes. This appears particularly likely to occur where there is a substantial tacit knowledge component. In this paper, we report the perceptions of key groups of healthcare professionals of the barriers to adoption of videoconferencing into knowledge-intensive processes mediating high-level problem-solving. While there was some shared perception of the critical problems, the interpretations of the underlying issues differed. The findings give some insight into the conceptualisation issues surrounding innovation management within complex systems which are emerging in the adoption of ICTs. The nature of their impact on pre-existing core communication routines involving high level expertise and tacit knowledge is considered.

In an exploratory survey to R&D managers in different sectors of European Process Industry, the importance and present use of a formal work process for process development has been studied. A new conceptual three-phase model for the "process development process", including the identification of production needs, process development and transfer of results to production, was also tested. The results show that only 44% of the companies in the study presently use a formal work process for process development, but the need for such a process is considered to be high. Good support was given for the new conceptual model as a starting point for further development of a company-specific "process development process".

The vital importance of innovation in today's competitive climate has been widely canvassed. But while the need for more innovation is intensively proclaimed, the response for some time now has been widely regarded as falling well short of what is required. In other words, there is and has long been a perceived "innovation problem" in the UK and of course in many other countries. There is a large literature exploring the barriers to innovation and this has identified a whole array of factors ranging from the macro-level (such as a tendency towards short-termism) to the micro-level (including personality traits and team characteristics). This article reports the results from a new extensive study which addresses the "problem" by attending to the perceptions, assumptions, interpretations and cognitions of managers — i.e. those actors who determine organisational priorities and who make crucial resource allocation decisions. These managerial ways of seeing have vital consequences for organisational innovation. This article reports on the marked variety of managerial interpretations of innovation; it presents new ways of classifying these and it describes the practical implications of these insights.