Sustaining Innovation

Continued creativity in innovation relies on collaboration between distinct groups who must overcome frequently competing agendas. With contributions from academics, business leaders, and policymakers this volume explores differing collaborative combinations.

In many ways, the process of innovation is a constant social dance, where the best dancers thrive by adapting new steps with multiple partners. The systematic and continuous generation of value in any innovation system relies on collaboration between different groups, who must overcome multiple, often competing agendas and needs to work together fruitfully over the long term. Featuring contributions from leading researchers, business leaders, and policymakers representing North America, Europe, India, Africa, and Australasia, this volume investigates different combinations of collaborative arrangements among innovation actors, many of which are changing conventional expectations of institutional relationships.

Collectively, the authors demonstrate that no particular combination has emerged as the most dominant, or even resilient, model of innovation. Several authors expand on our understanding of the triple helix model, with both academics and practitioners looking to the quadruple helix (encompassing business, academic, government, and civil society) as the new standard. Other authors address aspects of open innovation, co-creation, and user-centered designall testaments to the rapidly shifting landscape. At the same time, many businesses, academics, and governments, not to mention non-profit organizations, foundations, and society at large, are active in conversations about how to pursue a more sustainable model of innovation. The pursuit of this holy grail of innovation is both facilitated and complicated by an ever-accelerating technological environment in which social networking and mobile tools are emerging as new dance arenas.

Building on an emerging concept (quadruple helix) through existing Expertise (European CLIQ project) and profile of the editors as 'industrial academics' Investigating of sustainable innovation from a variety of viewpoints, including sustainability as long-term competitiveness, as well as notions related to responsibility in the guise of sustainable development Editors from leading business-centered universities with a global network from which to design a compelling table of contents Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras