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The innovative strength of the world's two largest economies, the United States and Japan, are based on two different forms of industrial and social organization. For the United States, venture companies play a key role in technical and economic progress, while in Japan they have only a minor role. This book argues that without vibrant new high technology companies, Japanese industry will decline inexorably. At the same time, if the favourable yet delicate environment in America is undermined, America will face collapse of its innovative and economic strength. Japan has done much to improve its environment for high technology ventures. It has some promising new high technology companies and gradually increasing numbers of entrepreneurial scientists and managers. But they continue to swim against the current. One reason is that large, established companies dominate high technology fields and pursue an autarkic innovation strategy-relying on research in-house or in affiliated companies. Another reason is that these same large companies still have preferential access to university discoveries, largely because of government policies. Thus, high technology ventures are deprived of niches in which to grow, skilled personnel, and their natural customer base. In the field of university-industry relations, steps can still be taken to improve the environment for high technology ventures-steps that would also increase the quality of university science. The American–Japanese innovation dichotomy represents a broader dichotomy between so-called liberal and coordinated market economies. The lessons from these two countries' experiences are applicable to many industrialized countries, and to developing countries shaping their innovation systems.

Business model innovation is an important source of competitive advantage and corporate renewal. An increasing number of companies have to innovate their business models, not just because of competitive forces but also because of the ongoing change from product-based to service-based business models. Yet, business model innovation is also a massive organizational change process that challenges existing processes, structures and modes of control. The specific angle, and the novel feature of this book, is to thoroughly examine the organizational dimension of business model innovation. Drawing on organizational theory and empirical observation, the contributors specifically highlight organizational design aspects of business model innovation, focusing on how reward systems, power distributions, routines and standard operating procedures, the allocation of authority, and other aspects of organizational structure and control should be designed to support the business model the firm chooses. Also discussed are how existing organizational structures, capabilities, beliefs, cultures and so on influence the firm’s ability to flexibly change to new business models.

Green growth promises to transform climate change mitigation from a problem to an economic sure thing. By making investment in energy efficiency and low-emissions energy the foundation of a new industrial revolution, green growth promises to relieve the intractable conflict between high-carbon losers and low-carbon winners. This book addresses the challenges and opportunities for green growth. Advocates for green growth have yet to show how investments in emissions reduction translate into improvements in economic productivity. As the first half of this book illustrates, most green growth successes so far face limits to their ability to generate sustained economic improvement. We propose that real green growth must focus on how a low-carbon energy systems transformation will create growth in the broader economy. Previous transformations, in coal, oil, or electricity, drove growth primarily via the new kinds of production they made possible in the economy writ large. Whether low-carbon energy may do the same remains unclear. The second half addresses how we might discover these transformative gains. We introduce the idea of a “green spiral”, in which early policy action creates supportive constituencies with an economic stake in further progress towards a low-emissions energy system. Country case studies illustrate the potential for this feedback loop to operate in different national contexts. With this action occurring despite little progress on a global climate deal, we conclude that an international climate change treaty may be the product, not the start, of effective national action on emissions reduction.

Advances in technology are critical for the transformation of a nation from a relatively low-wage to a relatively high-wage economy. Leading national economies are invariably global leaders in technology. In the last three decades, China has changed from one of the most impoverished countries on the planet to becoming the world largest economy with hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of poverty. Yet the question of China’s progress toward global technological leadership remains an open and hotly debated subject. Each chapter of this book focuses one high-tech industry exploring questions concerning technological trajectories and innovative capacities, historical evolution of the structures of industrial organization, international technology transfer, the role of the state, product-market conditions, the dynamic interaction of supply and demand, global competition, national policies, and regional industrial eco-systems. Taken together, these chapters provide the most complete picture to date of China’s technological development, with insights into the dynamics of innovative enterprise, and the roles of the state and globalization in supporting the development process.

This book provides the first in-depth analysis of how four innovative Chinese electronics enterprises — the Stone Group, the Legend Computer Group, the Founder Group, and the China Great Wall Computer Group — transformed the Chinese computer industry over the past decade. It explains how indigenous Chinese business enterprises that developed during the era of economic reform gained the high-technology capabilities and modern marketing know-how to compete domestically and internationally with powerful foreign multinationals. Through case studies based on first-hand access to company records and personnel, this book reveals how, building on technological capabilities accumulated during the central planning era, the institutional transformations of the economic reform era unleashed a unique pattern of organizational learning and innovative enterprise. This book also draws out the implications of the developmental experience of the Chinese computer electronics sector for understanding the institutional and organisational foundations for a successful transition from a centrally planned economy toward a market-oriented one.

This book examines the origins and emergence of technology-based industrial clusters — regional concentrations of related firms and organizations — in order to understand the forces that promoted economic development. Many places attempt to emulate the world's most famous industrial cluster Silicon Valley, with its rich institutional landscape of engaged and leveraged research universities, high-flying local venture capitalists, world class supporting business and legal consultants, and rich collaborative networks. While mature clusters may look similar, what really matters is the process by which clusters come into existence. But there is little understanding of such processes, and little guidance provided on the role of policies in promoting cluster emergence. The book attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by focusing on the early origins of high-technology cluster in Europe, the United States, and China, and the ensuing policy implications. The book is organized around three main themes: Creation Myths Revisited, Considering the Development Cluster Context, and Crafting Cluster and Economic Development Policy. The empirical analyses suggest that clusters that grow rapidly as compared to the less successful ones are distinguished by vigorous entrepreneurial activity and the active building of institutions aided by the forces of agglomeration economies.

Ours is the most dynamic era in human history. The benefits of four centuries of technological and organizational change are at last reaching a previously excluded global majority. This transformation will create large-scale opportunities in richer countries like the United States just as it has in poorer countries now in the ascent. This book argues that it is time to overcome the outdated narratives of fear that dominate public discourse and to grasp the powerful momentum of progress. Acknowledging the gravity of today's greatest global challenges—like climate change, water scarcity, and rapid urbanization—the book emphasizes that the choices we make today will determine the extent and reach of the coming prosperity. To make the most of this epochal transition, it states, the key is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs introduce new products and services, expand the range of global knowledge networks, and, most importantly, challenge established business interests, maintaining the vitality of mature capitalist economies and enhancing the viability of emerging ones. The book frames narratives of inspiring entrepreneurs within the sweep of human history. The book's deft analysis of economic trends is enlivened by stories of entrepreneurs making an outsize difference in their communities and the world—people like Karim Khoja, who led the creation of the first mobile phone company in Afghanistan; Leila Janah, who is bringing digital-age opportunity to talented people trapped in refugee camps; and Victoria Hale, whose non-profit pharmaceutical company turned an orphan drug into a cure for black fever.

Examples of the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing go back to at least 1714, when the UK used crowdsourcing to solve the Longitude Problem, obtaining a solution that would enable the UK to become the dominant maritime force of its time. Today, Wikipedia uses crowds to provide entries for the world’s largest and free encyclopedia. Partly fueled by the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing, interest in researching the phenomenon has been remarkable. For example, the Best Paper Awards in 2012 for a record-setting three journals—the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Academy of Management Perspectives—were about crowdsourcing. In spite of the interest in crowdsourcing—or perhaps because of it—research on the phenomenon has been conducted in different research silos within the fields of management (from strategy to finance to operations to information systems), biology, communications, computer science, economics, political science, among others. In these silos, crowdsourcing takes names such as broadcast search, innovation tournaments, crowdfunding, community innovation, distributed innovation, collective intelligence, open source, crowdpower, and even open innovation. The book aims to assemble papers from as many of these silos as possible since the ultimate potential of crowdsourcing research is likely to be attained only by bridging them. The papers provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing from different fields based on a more encompassing definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both the private and public sectors.

Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. Innovations provide new and purportedly better opportunities, but—because of their newness—they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances, and many other discoveries and inventions. To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. Furthermore, the paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome optimization—“more is better, so most is best”—pervades decision-making in all domains, but this is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, online learning, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, and more.

When successful and well-managed firms fail, we call this disruption. In the almost two decades since Clay Christensen’s famous treatise mapping this phenomenon, such failure has continued, with companies such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Blockbuster, Nokia, and RIM all falling hard from positions of seemingly unassailable dominance. In each case, they either did not or could not respond to disruptive events that allowed new entrants to capture their markets. At the same time, however, other major firms have had sustained success, shielded from what could have been dominance-ending disruptive events. This book takes the experience of both the fallen and the resilient and identifies Disruption’s Shield, the principles and actions that can ensure great firms’ continued success. The headline theory of disruption is now known to all, but that has not alleviated the risks faced by major firms nor the litany of failures. This is because a good defense has to guard against all disruptive events. Up until now, only one set of disruptive forces – those coming from the demand-side – have been fully understood and driven into manager’s mindsets. But this single-minded focus has led many firms to neglect equally important supply-side forces. This type of disruption can occur when firms, focussing on developing new products based on current technologies quickly, find themselves inflexible and unresponsive when their greatest competitive threats come not from seemingly niche entrants but from technologies that re-write organizational rulebooks. Only by understanding both types of disruptive risk can business leaders understand, evaluate and deploy the full range of options to avoid disruption and continue to thrive. The Disruption Dilemma is the first book that puts all of these elements together. It identifies the system of choices that have allowed great firms to balance competitiveness and resilience.

Why are some individuals more entrepreneurial than others? What types of institutional environments are more conducive to entrepreneurship? Does entrepreneurship contribute to the growth of a country? Answering these questions is particularly important at a time when governments all over the world are looking to entrepreneurship as a way to increase employment and the competitiveness of their countries. The chapters in this volume cover topics such as entrepreneurial motivation, gender and migration, entrepreneurial financing, urban entrepreneurship, growth-oriented entrepreneurship, economic growth, and regional entrepreneurship policies. Each chapter is based on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The GEM project collects detailed and comparable data on representative population samples in more than 60 countries. No other existing book provides such a coherent global view of entrepreneurship and its implications. Other studies use a hodge-podge of data from different sources to study entrepreneurship. The data used to support the different parts of a given argument are not always consistent with one another or easily compared. The scientific validity of such empirical findings is limited as the various pieces of evidence do not belong to the same puzzle. Therefore, the coherence of a universal approach is lost and important aspects of the entrepreneurial process may be overlooked or undervalued. This volume, on the other hand, tests all theoretical arguments against the same empirical data, all the pieces fit into the same puzzle and a coherent and unitary picture of entrepreneurial activity, from its causes and motivations to its macroeconomic impact and implications, emerges.

The book describes what it means to say the world is complex and explores what that means for managers, policy makers and individuals. The first part of the book is about the theory and ideas and science of complexity. This is explained in a way that is thorough but not mathematical. It compares differing approaches, and also provides a historical perspective, showing how such thinking has been around since the beginning of civilisation. It emphasises the difference between a complexity worldview and the dominant mechanical worldview that underpins much of current management practice. It defines the complexity worldview as recognising the world is interconnected, shaped by history and the particularities of context. The comparison of the differing approaches to modelling complexity is unique in its depth and accessibility. The second part of the book uses this lens of complexity to explore issues in the fields of management, strategy, economics and international development. It also explores how to facilitate others to recognise the implications of adopting a complex rather than a mechanical worldview and suggests methods of research to explore systemic, path-dependent emergent aspects of situations.

With the growing influence of discursive perspectives and of research on organizational discourse, business discourse, and narrative perspectives on organizing, organizational scholars are focusing increasing attention on the constitutive role of language and communication in organizational processes. This view conceptualizes language and communication as bringing organization into being, and is therefore inherently sympathetic to a process perspective. However, our understanding of the role of language in organizational processes and organizational action is still limited, partly due to the tendency in discourse analysis to focus on language alone, without explicit linkages to organizational practices, activities, and actions. Moreover, analyses elucidating the agency and power of discourses in specific organizational contexts have been scarce. Thus, there is a paucity of knowledge of the ways in which language and communication operate in organizational activity. This fourth volume focuses on language and communication at work, and examine language and communication as an inherent part of ongoing organizational processes. The chapters explore the question of language and communication as constitutive of work; analyze how language and communication work in the context of organizing and managing; and examine the role of language and communication as part of strategic and institutional work in and around organizational phenomena. More generally, the chapters concentrate on one or several aspects of organizing by showing how communication, discourse, and narrativity are constitutive of what is taking place. These analyses focus on micro-level instances of communication or discourse, or more macro-level processes of organizing or change.

Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague (1857–1934) achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs—from pioneering work in self-governing motors to developing the first full-scale operational electric railway system—all while commercializing his inventions and promoting them (and himself as their inventor) to financial backers and the public. This book tells his story, setting it against the backdrop of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of technology. In a burst of innovation during these years, Sprague and his contemporaries—Thomas Edison, Nicolas Tesla, Elmer Sperry, George Westinghouse, and others—transformed the technologies of electricity and reshaped modern life. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague started the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company; designed and built an electric railroad system for Richmond, Virginia; sold his company to Edison and went into the field of electric elevators; almost accidentally discovered a multiple-control system that could equip electric train systems for mass transit; started a third company to commercialize this; then sold this company to Edison and retired (temporarily). Throughout his career, the author tells us, Sprague framed technology as invention, cast himself as hero, and staged his technologies as dramas. He toiled against the odds, scraped together resources to found companies, bet those companies on technical feats—and pulled it off, multiple times. The idea of the “heroic inventor” is not, of course, the only way to frame the history of technology.

This is a book about the formation, development, and success or failure of new high technology companies, focusing on those that grew under the auspices of entrepreneurs from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston at the end of World War Two. Trained in high-technology in MIT's labs and academic departments or in the local industrial marvel that became known as the “Route 128 phenomenon”, these entrepreneurs took their technical and innate skills with them to found their own new companies. The book is based on extensive empirical research on these firms conducted over a period of twenty-five years and much previously written work on the subject, and is the culmination of such earlier work and synthesized findings. It centers on people, technology, money, and markets, and its main goal is to provide insights that may eventually contribute to fulfilling other entrepreneurs' dreams and other communities' hopes. The book chapters comprise three connected sections — treating birth, transition and growth, and success or failure.

This book traces the emergence and growth of the Israeli hi-tech sector to provide a new understanding of industry evolution. In the case of Israel, the chapters here reveal how the hi-tech sector built an entrepreneurial culture with a capacity to disseminate intergenerational knowledge of how to found new ventures, as well as an intricate network of support for new firms. Following the evolution of this industry from embryonic to mature, the chapters develop a genealogical approach that relies on looking at the sector in the way that one might consider a family tree. The principles of this genealogical analysis enable them to draw attention to the dynamics of industry evolution, while relating the effects of the parent companies' initial conditions to their respective corporate genealogies and imprinting potential. The text suggests that genealogical evolution is a key mechanism for understanding the rate and extent of founding new organizations, comparable to factors such as opportunity structures, capabilities, and geographic clusters.

This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science-based technologies. It is not an object, but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these technologies from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms, and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firms — DS Genentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden — and their activities and ‘knowledge-seeking’ behaviour in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. This book was awarded the Schumpeter Society book prize in 1996. This paperback edition includes a new introduction in which the author reflects upon the most recent developments in biotechnology. The book will interest those who wish to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the ‘knowledge society’, for example, management and organisation researchers, economists, policy advisors, and managers and strategists responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.

This book challenges the perspective that organizational expertise exists to be recognized and utilized, and offers an alternative lens that views expertise, and experts, as emergent and constituted in communication among organizing actors. Scholars of diverse backgrounds explore how recent changes in the structure of organizational life have altered the nature of expertise, and discuss opportunities to advance the study of expertise. The work of experts is commonly characterized by exclusivity or an esoteric nature, making it both seemingly difficult to acquire and understand. Trens towards specialized work and employees’ increased reliance on communication technologies to complete tasks further complicate the evaluation of workers’ knowledge and abilities. Examining the intersection of communication and expertise within and across different contexts of organizing offers new insights into the discursive, material, and structural influences that contribute to an understanding of expertise. This presents theoretical frameworks for the study of expertise, providing reviews of how the study of expertise has evolved, applying perspectives on expertise to different domains of organizational practice, and presenting new directions for the study of the intersection of expertise, communication, and organizing.

Explaining the Future addresses the questions “will this new technology solve the problem that its inventors claim it will,” “will it succeed for any application at all,” “can we narrow down the options before we spend a lot of money on development,” and “how do we persuade colleagues, investors, clients, or readers of our technical reasoning?” Whether the person answering these questions is a researcher, a consultant, a venture capitalist, or a CTO, they will need to be able to answer them clearly and systematically. Most learn these skills only through years of experience. However, by making them explicit, this book makes the learning process more efficient and speeds its readers toward higher-level careers. First, it will provide the tools to think through matching new (and old) technologies, materials, and processes with applications: it covers the questions to ask, the resources needed to answer them, and who deserves trust. Then, it discusses analyzing the information that has been gathered in a systematic way and dealing with uncertainty. Next, there are chapters on communication, including tailoring documents to a specific audience, making a persuasive and structured technical argument, and writing an explanation that is credible and easy to follow. Finally, the book includes a case study: a real worked example that goes from an idea through the twists and turns of the research and analysis process to a final report.