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This introductory chapter offers a general definition of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), lays out the motivation for why they matter to businesses, and presents the organization of the book. It also tells the story of how the World Wide Web evolved from the original visionary idea in the 1940s of linking information together electronically. This story introduces the concepts of swarm creativity, innovation, collaboration, and communication.

This chapter provides both an introduction to the book and an overview of the following chapters. It introduces the type of innovation called soft innovation, primarily concerned with changes in products of an aesthetic or intellectual nature. It considers culture and the cultural industries, aesthetics, creativity and the creative industries.

This introductory chapter gives an outline of the book. It develops the theoretical framework by combining insights from classical trade theory, the market-based view of strategic management studies, theories on national innovation systems, and the literature on varieties of capitalism. Interestingly, all these strands of the competitiveness literature agree in their expectation that firms within the same economy will respond to increasing competitive pressure by exploiting the comparative advantages of national institutions as they specialize in the facilitated competitive strategies. The chapter then presents the analytical approach and illustrates why a comparison of pharmaceutical firms in Germany, Italy, and the UK is particularly helpful for understanding how firms cope with increasing competitiveness. Since an initial comparison casts doubt on the specialization theory of the competitiveness literature, the chapter introduces the research question addressed throughout the book: how can firms compete despite comparative institutional disadvantages? It concludes with an overview of the findings obtained on functional institutional equivalents and links them back to theoretical debates on regional networks, strategic management views, and entrepreneurial creativity.

The chapter frames the book by examining the relationship between community, economic creativity, and knowledge capitalism, focusing especially on why a new discourse of organization by community has emerged. It begins by explaining why capitalism and community are compatible, going on to examine how ‘community’ as a keyword of the knowledge economy is beginning to shape corporate practice. The chapter then offers a critical reading of contemporary interest in ‘communities of practice’, arguing that diverse types of situated practice generative of different types of learning and knowing should not be reduced to the language of community. Finally, the chapter explores the organizational implications of an economy valuing situated practice, forcing the recombinance of decentred effort and the cultivation of anticipatory knowledge.

This chapter examines the potentially best fitting cognitive and affective positive capacities for being included in the future. Specifically, cognitively-oriented creativity and wisdom, and the affective, emotionally-oriented positive strengths of subjective well-being, flow, and humor are selected. Each of these potential psychological capital (PsyCap) capacities is analyzed in terms of the criteria of valid measurement, development, and performance impact. Except for empirically demonstrating performance impact in the workplace, these are judged to generally meet the PsyCap inclusion criteria. The concluding section notes some needed future research for these cognitive and affective positive capacities to more fully meet the PsyCap criteria.

This chapter looks at the HRM (human resource management) and knowledge system dimensions of open innovation, highlighting the rising importance of externally-derived knowledge. It establishes a link between the internal-external orientation of HRM systems and the type of external knowledge accessed. Internally/externally-oriented HRM systems are associated with public/private external knowledge, respectively. The latter type of knowledge tends to be closer to the cutting edge, as it takes time to codify knowledge. Once again, this analysis points to difficulties Japanese companies face in participating in global knowledge networks. However, it also points to tradeoffs between support for individual creativity on the one hand, and team work and control on the other.

This chapter explores the challenge of unleashing individual creativity in large corporations by examining the environment and incentives of R&D researchers. Considerable tension is found in the relationship between the individual researcher and the firm, especially over special rewards given to successful research results and research expenses available to researchers. Deeper causes, however, flow from the fracturing of the sense of community brought on by corporate restructurings Finally, it is noted that researchers see risk avoidance by their superiors as the major obstacle to doing creative work, the result of the shift by Japanese firms from being aggressive challengers in the postwar period through the 1980s is to become defenders of existing assets.

The difference between “value of origin” and “origin of value”—is what philosophy as genealogy seeks to discern and in the process opens up an interval at a site of experience that is neither conceptual nor purely “aesthetic.” We may call this interval the space of the experience of art, which allows us to intuit both the force that gives rise to the experience and the event of its formation that illumines in its plasticity. But in recognizing this moment of valuation, genealogy goes even one step further. It arrives at the threshold of establishing how force sets in motion the kind of complex value structures and value assemblages that inform the collective life of humanity. In short, it seeks to ascertain the force that constitutes the political.

This chapter investigates an understanding of user-generated and collective creativities, which are related to how audio designers work with musicians. It presents accounts of two audio designers who create video game soundtracks and music scores for well-known computer games. This helps show how the many forms of creativity co-exist in their work, as well as its interplay between individual and social creativities.

This chapter argues that Schenker, despite his misgivings about positivist scholarship, appreciated its promise with respect to the study of the creative process. In his earliest essays, he had toyed with an array of speculative theories of artistic creativity indebted to Wagner, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and a host of Romantic writers. Sometime around 1895, however, he made a radical turn, disavowing all speculative approaches to the subject and lobbying his readers to assume a self-consciously realistic and empirical perspective by considering only those insights into the compositional act provided by the sketches and reminiscences of practicing composers. This new emphasis in Schenker's writings made clear his newly found sympathies with the positivist spirit famously exemplified in Gustav Nottebohm's studies of Beethoven's sketchbooks. However, this empiricist strain of thought was fleeting; within a decade, Schenker would disavow it and again embrace a purely metaphysical notion of the creative mind.

This chapter uses the rubric of ecological spiritualities to gather together proposals united by their appropriation of deification themes, where communion with creation becomes part of union with God. It argues that theological variety proliferates within a so-called “strategy of ecological spirituality”, but its approaches share a common practical rationale: each makes environmental issues matter for Christian experience by appealing to the ecological dimensions of fully Christian personhood. Underlying creation's integrity and faithful stewardship (the other two strategies), say theorists, there is a radical relation of personhood and environment. Environmental lament and redress begin from a primary spiritual communion of humanity and earth, assumed into personal experience with God. As they describe how grace can heal that communion, restoring ecological dimensions to personhood as humans become closer to God, approaches within this strategy draw on a background pattern of grace as deification. The strategy illuminates the way of the world into divine participation, as it describes the cosmic significance of personal communion. Used more and less intensively, the deification pattern shapes multiple theologies that deploy cosmology and anthropology to diagnose and practically address environmental issues.

This chapter investigates the articulation of Buddhism in terms of Romanticism and Transcendentalism by examining how Buddhism has come to be conceived as having a special link to art and creativity. D. T. Suzuki, a key figure in this conception, amalgamated German idealist and American Transcendentalist cosmological concepts with Buddhist ones and presented the Japanese poets, Zen monks, and samurai warriors as deeply and religiously attentive to nature in ways similar to the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists. His conception of spiritual freedom as a spontaneous, emancipatory consciousness that transcends rational intellect and social convention drew heavily on these figures. The idea caught on with other influential figures like Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita and has inspired a plethora of popular books, as well as programs in meditation and creativity in monasteries and universities.

This chapter focuses on Sergei Bulgakov's wisdom ecology. It argues that for the ethical strategy of ecological spirituality, Bulgakov demonstrates the possibility of making a theological place for creativity. Moreover, by making that place directly within his account of deifying grace, he helps contemporary ethicists work out the connection between their patterns of ecological personhood and their practical models of creativity.