The book comprises a series of contributions and case studies fused together around the concept and dynamics of innovation – product, process, systems, marketing, organisation, roles, relations, norms, values and policy. The underlying theme is innovation as necessarily transformative, where the transformation is in the economic system for a better world. That better world is one that is inclusive, efficient and meets the global challenges. To that end the tools of innovation, measurement (effects vis-à-vis outcomes) and the enabling financial mechanisms are examined, evaluated and change is explored.

The book comprises a series of contributions and case studies fused together around the concept and dynamics of innovation - product, process, systems, marketing, organisation, roles, relations, norms, values and policy. The underlying theme is innovation as necessarily transformative where the transformation is in the economic system for a better world. That better world is one that is inclusive, efficient and meets the global challenges. To that end the tools of innovation, measurement (effects vis-à-vis outcomes) and the enabling financial mechanisms are examined, evaluated and change is explored.

After decades of innovation, satellites now play a discrete but pivotal role in the efficient functioning of modern societies and their economic development. This publication provides the findings from a OECD Space Forum project on the state of innovation in the space sector.

The history of life is a nearly four billion year old story of transformative change. This change ranges from dramatic macroscopic innovations such as the evolution of wings or eyes, to a myriad of molecular changes that form the basis of macroscopic innovations. We are familiar with many examples of innovations (qualitatively new phenotypes that provide a critical benefit) but have no systematic understanding of the principles that allow organisms to innovate. This book proposes several such principles as the basis of a theory of innovation, integrating recent knowledge about complex molecular phenotypes with more traditional Darwinian thinking. Central to the book are genotype networks: vast sets of connected genotypes that exist in metabolism and regulatory circuitry, as well as in protein and RNA molecules. The theory can successfully unify innovations that occur at different levels of organization. It captures known features of biological innovation, including the fact that many innovations occur multiple times independently, and that they combine existing parts of a system to new purposes. It also argues that environmental change is important to create biological systems that are both complex and robust, and shows how such robustness can facilitate innovation. Beyond that, the theory can reconcile neutralism and selectionism, as well as explain the role of phenotypic plasticity, gene duplication, recombination, and cryptic variation in innovation. Finally, its principles can be applied to technological innovation, and thus open to human engineering endeavours the powerful principles that have allowed life's spectacular success.

A small number of countries, regions, cities, and localities are powerful gatekeepers and generate the bulk of creative and innovative ideas, while the majority is largely excluded. This book looks at neglected, but emerging innovation centres analysed from various spatial and organizational perspectives; ranging from entire countries and regions to individual firms and small neighbourhoods. Bringing together leading scholars from various disciplines, it examines a variety of economic sectors including biotechnology, agrotourism, and the food retail industry. The authors employ various, often contradictory, concepts, ranging from local buzz and the global pipeline, through an analysis of collective learning processes to geographical embeddedness, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The purpose of the book is twofold: investigating changes occurring in the regions and cities under transformation and attempting to find common and unique mechanisms behind these changes. Consequently, the authors shed light on the scale and scope of the innovativeness of selected economic and social processes.

This dissertation contributes on assessing how knowledge spaces change over time and on which are the factors driving their development. Technologies in innovation literature are regarded as a collection of combined components. These components are represented in the network form through knowledge spaces. Technologies follow an evolutionary process but the role of technological spaces and their evolution are still aspects not sufficiently developed in literature. The thesis focuses in Chapter 2 on the categorisation of innovation activities. Once the main features of different types of innovations responsible for changes in technological paradigms and therefore in technological spaces have been analysed, the dissertation provides newly crafted indicators to assess their evolution in Chapter 3. The reshaping and evolution of technological spaces is also influenced by some drivers, the focus is on two possible drivers that could influence the evolution of technological spaces. The first external regional driver analysed is cluster policies and the second internal regional driver is the ability of organizations in knowledge recombination activities. In Chapter 4 we measured both short term impacts and long term ones of cluster policies on the evolution of knowledge spaces. The results show that the program contributed both to increase the importance of specific technological fields in winning regions. Chapter 5 recognises the factors that influence the propensity of organizations to combine knowledge differently from others. We found that the orientation towards applied or basic research and the embeddedness in the regional innovation network matter for the way in which technologies are combined. Different empirical methods have been used to produce results spacing from Difference in Difference to Quantitative Text Analysis to Social Network Analysis. Moreover, as main data sources both patents and publications have been used.

The growth of evolutionary thinking has had a profound impact on economic theory and related fields such as strategy and technological innovation. An important paradigm that underlies the evolutionary theory of innovation is neo-Darwinian evolution. According to this paradigm, evolution is gradualist and based on the mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention. Since the 1970s, theoretical advancements in evolutionary biology have recognised the central role of punctuated equilibrium, speciation, and exaptation. However, despite their significant influence in evolutionary biology, these advancements have been reflected only partially in evolutionary approaches to economics, strategy, and innovation. The aim of this book is to review these advancements and explore their implications, with a particular emphasis on the role of serendipity and unprestateability in innovation and novelty creation.