Suchergebnisse

Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French literature from the 1950s to the present investigates how 20th- and 21st-century French authors play with literary form as a means of engaging with contemporary history and politics. Authors like Georges Perec, Monique Wittig, and Jacques Jouet often treat the practice of writing like a game with fixed rules, imposing constraints on when, where, or how they write. They play with literary form by eliminating letters and pronouns; by using only certain genders, or by writing in specific times and spaces. While such alterations of the French language may appear strange or even trivial, by experimenting with new language systems, these authors probe into how political subjects—both individual and collective—are formed in language. The meticulous way in which they approach form challenges unspoken assumptions about which cultural practices are granted political authority and by whom. This investigation is grounded in specific historical circumstances: the student worker-strike of May '68 and the Algerian War, the rise of and competition between early feminist collectives, and the failure of communism and the rise of the right-wing extremism in 21st-century France. Analysis of pronominal subjects in Perec and Wittig shows how they interrogate power struggles during May '68; both authors imagine shared textual production as the bedrock of new political communities. Moving into the 21st century, Jouet stages various "bad" communists, in order to pay tribute to dying communist communities and to unpack the ongoing legacy of communism's collapse. In the end, formal play offers an antidote to 20th- and 21st-century crises of community by creating virtual communities through the text itself.

AbstractThe discussion on innovation networks of patents or papers has attracted many economic geographers; however, the Industrial Technology Innovation Strategy Alliance (ITISA) has been ignored, although it is also an important innovation form of firms, and the formation mechanism of alliance innovation networks is unclear. This study is based on the data of Shanghai high‐tech ITISAs between 2010 and 2015, and employs the methods of social networks and negative binomial regression to analyse the actor structure, spatial structure, and proximity mechanism of innovation networks of Shanghai high‐tech ITISAs. Results highlight the following: (a) Firms comprise the largest number of actors in alliance innovation networks, and universities, research institutions, and industry associations also play some roles. (b) The local and rooted characteristics of the innovation networks of ITISAs are obvious. The spatial distribution of innovation partners is mainly in Shanghai, and a few innovation actors are located in neighbouring cities, such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration. (c) Proximity significantly promotes the formation of innovation networks in an ITISA and contributes to the improvement of innovation ability, and organizational proximity plays a greater role than geographical proximity or cognitive proximity.

Formal and informal institutions matter in the context of the innovation performance of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). The purpose of the research was to investigate whether the interplay between formal and informal institutions has a positive, negative or neutral impact on the innovation performance of CEECs, and if formal or informal institutions alone also have a positive, negative or neutral influence on the innovation performance of CEECs. The research is based on informal institutions of CEECs such as trust, traditions, customs, creativity or cooperation, and formal institutions of CEECs such as law, formal rules, or science, technology and innovation policy (STIP). The research methodology focuses on secondary statistical data from 18,808 surveys from the European Social Survey Round 9 (2018) edition 2.0 for informal institutions and from 1090 innovation policies of European Commission and OECD STIP Compass and 414,073 notices of awarded tenders of the European Union Tenders Electronic Daily for formal institutions. Innovation performance was measured by the Summary Innovation Index (SII) of the European Innovation Scoreboard 2019. The findings show that informal institutions such as trust in others, trust in the legal system, the importance of following traditions and customs or cooperation among citizens of CEECs, as well as interplay between informal institutions such as trust in the legal system and formal institutions such as obedience to rules among citizens of CEECs have a negative impact on the innovation performance of the national economies of CEECs. Meanwhile, the variety of policy theme areas and creativity among citizens of CEECs have a positive impact on the innovation performance of the national economies of CEECs.

Objetivo: La innovacion abierta (IA) ha demostrado ser crucial para aumentar la innovacion y el desempeno economico de las empresas. Sin embargo todavia existe una comprension limitada de los factores que impulsan realizar esta IA. El principal objetivo de este articulo es arrojar luz en esta direccion al analizar simultaneamente los determinantes internos y externos que llevan a las empresas a realizar practicas formales e informales de IA. Diseño: Las hipotesis son contratadas con muestras de dos regiones europeas, Navarra (Espana), calificada como region seguidora en innovacion, y Noord Brabant (Paises Bajos), lider innovador. La muestra seleccionada incluye empresas manufactureras y de servicios que completaron la Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2008. Resultados: Los resultados indican que, para los determinantes internos, los motivos relacionados con la busqueda de innovaciones en producto y la intensidad interna de I + D son fuertes impulsores para todas las practicas de IA, mientras que la importancia de los motivos relacionados con la obtencion de innovaciones en proceso y medioambientales dependen del contexto regional. En cuanto a los factores externos, la politica publica influye en la adopcion de IA tanto formal como informal, pero estos resultados varian entre las regiones dependiendo del origen de los fondos. Originalidad/valor El estudio presenta importantes implicaciones para la literatura en IA. En primer lugar, mientras la mayoria de la literatura analiza un unico tipo de practicas de IA, este estudio distingue practicas formales e informales de IA y estudia sus determinantes internos y externos simultaneamente. Segundo, las hipotesis son contrastadas en dos regiones europeas diferentes. Esto permite observar si los resultados obtenidos son robustos independientemente de la localizacion de las empresas o si varian dependiendo del contexto de ambas regiones. ; The purpose of this paper is to analyse a firm's internal and external drivers of formal and informal open innovation (OI) practices. To enrich the analysis and to obtain more robust results, the authors checked the study's hypotheses using samples from two European regions, Navarre (Spain), classified an innovator follower, and Noord-Brabant (Netherlands), an innovator leader. Design/methodology/approach: The sample selected includes manufacturing and service firms that completed the Community Innovation Survey for the year 2008 in both regions. The final sample had 1,288 observations from Navarre and 623 observations from Noord-Brabant. The authors consider two OI dimensions, breadth of information sources for informal OI practices and breadth of cooperation agreement for formal OI practices. Finally, the estimates were performed by means of a negative binomial regression. Findings: Results indicate that for the internal drivers, product-related motives to innovate and in-house R&D intensity are strong drivers for both formal and informal OI engagement in general, while the influence of process- and environmental-related motives are context dependence. Originality/value: This study distinguishes between formal (i.e. cooperation activities) and informal (i.e. external sources of information used for new ideas) inbound OI practices, while most of the literature has focussed on one single type of OI practice. The use of two samples coming from two different European regions allows observe whether the adoption motives of the OI practices are robust independently from the firms' location or if they vary across regions owing to context dependence. ; The authors thank the funding for this research from Spain Economy and Competitiveness Ministry (ECO2013-48496-C4-2-R and ECO2013-46954-C3-1 projects) and Programme INTERREG IV C (EURIS project).

This study explores an alternative healthcare innovation project in its making using ethnographic research methods. The project is a confined space — a living lab — that cannot fully be described or explained in the same way we normally understand set-ups for healthcare innovation. By creating its own space, in the intersection between formal and informal structures, it draws our attention to a new way of organizing healthcare innovation. Taking an ethnographic research approach, it is suggested how a concept of a bubble can be used to describe the nature of the living lab as a partial and flexible object that constitutes multiple future possibilities. The concept of the bubble challenges the notion of the living lab as a cheese bell, which is the term used by the field participants, inspired by Clayton Christensen. Bringing in theoretical points from Bruno Latour regarding laboratories, this study explores the materiality of the laboratory and its political nature. The study contributes to the debate on innovation in healthcare and especially fuses to the discussion of how to organize healthcare innovation. It argues that we need to pay attention to new kinds ofliving labs — like the one introduced in this study.