Environmental issues as threats and opportunities for technological innovation

In this article we deal with how large chemical corporations perceive and handle threats and opportunities deriving from environmental problems. We suggest that coalitions or networks are a useful way to analyse the dynamics of the links between separate aspects of the business. A differentation is made between production, innovation and strategy networks. Networks transcend firm boundaries and an analytical distinction is made between networks that remain inside and those external to the corporation. We concentrate on strategy formulation and implementation and on the role of intra-organizational structures. In a pilot study, we interviewed key persons in five chemical companies in the USA and in The Netherland. Conclusions are that firms increasingly adjust their strategies, that this leads to organizational changes; and that environmental, safety and health (ESH) units play some role in this strategy reformulation by becoming part of networks inside the corporation. Some suggestions for further research are given.     

LeNS China:A Chinese learning network on sustainability for the development and diffusion of teaching materials and tools on design for sustainability

It is a shared opinion that sustainable development requires a system discontinuity, meaning that radical changes in the way we produce and consume are needed. Within this framework there is an emerging understanding that an important contribution to this change can be directly linked to decisions taken in the design phase of products, services and systems. Design schools have therefore to be able to provide design students with a broad knowledge and effective Design for Sustainability tools, in order to enable a new generation of designers in playing an active role in re-orienting our consumption and production patterns. This paper presents the intermediate results of the LeNS China, the Learning Network on Sustainability of Chinese design Higher Education Institutions aiming at curricula development on Design for Sustainability. The project is a regeneration of the LeNS Asian-European multi-polar network project financed by the European Commission. LeNS China is taking in consideration the local needs, interests and opportunities could represent a significant enabling platform capable to sensitise, support and empower a new generation of Chinese design educators, designers and entrepreneurs to reach design practice throughout an open collaborative learning approach. The paper will firstly introduce the LeNS project and its ethos, and then the LeNS China network will be described in terms of the state of the art of design for sustainability and its education in China, the scope and the objective, the results achieved so far and the next steps.     

Cognitive style, learning and innovation

Cognitive style is widely recognized as an important determinant of individual behaviour. “This paper considers its rehance to organizational learning and the innovation process. The central argument is that cognitive style is fundamental determinant of individual and organizational behaviour which manifests itself in individual workplace actions and in organizational systems, processes and routines. “The paper presents a number of propositions which raise some implicationsfor research into cognitive styles and its impact upon innovation and organizational learning. It is argued that in order to optimize individual performance: (a) a number of human resource interventions are required which facilitate a versatility of style at both the individual and the organizational levels; (6) managers and human resource practitioners have a crucial role to play and that a precondition for action is an understanding of the basis of style and its practical implications.     

Conceptual niche management of grassroots innovation for sustainability: The case of body disposal practices in the UK

The grassroots has recently been identified as an alternative site for the development of innovations that may contribute to shifts towards more sustainable systems of consumption and production. While the characteristics of these innovations have been elaborated, it remains unclear how these alternative ideas and practices can be purposively supported to populate incumbent systems. This is especially so in light of the difficulty the grassroots face in connecting forcefully with the mainstream.This article will address this issue by outlining an adaptation of conceptual niche management - an approach that focuses on the embedding of guiding principles used to fulfill basic societal needs - that is sensitive to grassroots innovation. The framework will be applied to the current UK body disposal system to illustrate how such transformative sustainability ideas may be capitalised on.     

Infrastructures, incentives, and institutions: Fostering distributed knowledge bases for the learning society

While much attention has been devoted to information and communication technologies, a more fundamental change at the start of the new millennium is the increasing importance of innovation for economic prosperity and the emergence of a learning society. The analysis in this paper shows that innovation should be understood as a broad social and economic activity: it should transcend any specific technology, even if revolutionary, and should be tied to attitudes and behaviors oriented towards the exploitation of change by adding value.We build on the idea of inclusive learning, which entails a process of shared prosperity across the globe following local specific conditions, and argue that it is crucial to understand the features of knowledge-induced growth in rich countries, as well as the challenges and opportunities for late-industrialized and less-developed countries. To achieve these objectives, we emphasize the relative importance of infrastructures and incentives, but considering the increasingly important role of institutions towards the development of social capital. This is because learning societies will increasingly rely on “distributed knowledge bases” as a systematically coherent set of knowledge maintained across an economically and/or socially integrated set of agents and institutions.This broad concept has motivated the work behind the present paper, which builds on material presented at the 5th International Conference on Technology Policy and Innovation (ICTPI), which was held in Delft, The Netherlands, in June of 2001. Under the broad designation of “critical infrastructures,” the Conference brought together a range of experts to discuss technology, policy and management in a context much influenced by the dynamics of the process of knowledge accumulation, which drives learning societies. Thus, this special issue includes a set of extended contributions to the Delft conference, and the aim of this introductory paper is to set the stage for these contributions, with an original contribution on possible views on the role critical infrastructures play to foster innovation in the learning society.     

学习型社会中大学开放内涵探微

应对学习型社会建设和教育全球化的世界潮流,实现大学的开放,成为我国高等教育改革发展研究和实践领域的主题之一。正确理解大学开放的时代内涵,对于发挥大学在建设学习型社会过程中的作用具有重要的现实意义。文章从大学开放的内涵和大学开放的基本选择两个方面,对学习型社会中的大学开放问题进行了探讨。     

Envisioning sustainability: Recent progress in the use of participatory backcasting approaches for sustainability research

This paper describes recent progress in the utilization of participatory scenario-based backcasting approaches to sustainability research that blend quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to explore alternative climate change futures, as undertaken in a range of academic, government, and private sector projects in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada. These projects reveal that buy-in to policy proposals may be enhanced by participation, but there is a risk of participants being overwhelmed by the complexity of the choices they are being asked to make. Furthermore, tools are grounded in a process, which must itself be the explicit focus of attention in designing successful backcasting projects and combining participatory backcasting techniques with more interactive processes that can enhance our ability to explore highly complex and uncertain, value-laden issues. These approaches can be used to drive action and support decision-making, but for a truly consultative and consensus-oriented process to occur, it is important that a broad sample of the community be engaged in the discussion that are equipped with technical knowledge or understanding of the goals of the process in order to participate in an equitable and effective fashion.     

Collective learning,innovation and growth in a boundedly rational,evolutionary world

We formulate a simple multiagent evolutionary scheme as a model of collective learning, i.e. a situation in which firms experiment, interact, and learn from each other. This scheme is then applied to a stylized endogenous growth economy in which firms have to determine how much to invest in R&D, where innovations are the stochastic product of their R&D activity, spillovers occur, but technological advantages are only relative and temporary and innovations actually diffuse, both at the intra and interfirm levels. The model demonstrates both the existence of a unique long-run growth attractor (in the linear case) and distinct growth phases on the road to that attractor. We also compare the long-run growth patterns for a linear and a logistic innovation function, and produce some evidence for a bifurcation in the latter case.     

Moocs视野下工学结合会计实践创新模式

随着中国2013MOOCs元年的开启,MOOCs对中国的高等教育正在产生划时代的影响,在此背景下,依托MOOCs教学平台,研究工学结合会计实践教学创新模式,构建MOOCs视野下新型会计实践路径。     

Enhancing innovation through learning: the roles of market orientation and interorganisational knowledge stores

Drawing on the organisational learning theory, this study regards market orientation as a market-based learning and seeks to advance insight into how market orientation and interorganisational knowledge stores together affect different types of innovation. Our findings from a sample of 246 manufacturing firms provide supporting evidence for the positive effect of market orientation on both explorative and exploitative innovation. The effect of market orientation on innovation gets amplified when firms possess large amount of interorganisational knowledge, demonstrating the synergistic effect produced by different types of learning which is less known. This study, therefore, sheds light on the under-researched area of literature surrounding the interaction between different learning activities and the roles of knowledge from different sources on firm innovation.     

Risks and opportunities for the progress of digitalization in Mexico

ABSTRACT

The aim of this research is to identify Mexico’s current conditions for the incorporation of the changes derived from the processes of increasing digitization into its productive sector, called Industry 4.0. To achieve this goal, this work uses the results obtained from a survey questionnaire answered by qualified technological and productive informants with the purpose of identifying the perspectives of firms initiating this transformation. The selection of information units was based on a theoretical sample (not statistically representative), a methodological feature that forced us to analyze carefully the data collected. The results reached show that, from the perspective of the actors involved, the innovative structure in Mexico presents serious limitations in terms of technical and organizational capabilities of the firms to incorporate digital technologies in their production processes. This paper proposes a first exploratory analysis on the visions of Mexican firms and intermediary organizations that deals with the increasing technical and organizational challenges of the new digital technologies. This article provides analytical and empirical inputs for the analysis of the opportunities that Mexican firms have to incorporate these new technical trends. Finally, the work highlights critical institutional and governance aspects for the debate of national industrial and innovative policy agendas.     

Cultural legitimacy and framing struggles in innovation journeys: A cultural-performative perspective and a case study of Dutch nuclear energy (1945-1986)

This article contributes to the field of innovation studies by addressing the role of cultural legitimacy in technical innovation journeys. The article develops a new perspective that connects insights from discourse theory, interpretive approaches to culture, cultural sociology and social movement theory. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches (which tend to conceptualize culture in a top-down deterministic manner), our cultural-performative perspective emphasizes agency, collective sensemaking and framing struggles. Cultural change is a contested process, in which various groups perform on public stages to influence the attitudes and opinions of relevant audiences who provide financial resources, protection or support relevant for innovation journeys. We demonstrate the usefulness of this perspective with a longitudinal case study of nuclear energy in the Netherlands (1945-1986), which encompasses both the creation of legitimacy in the 1950s and 1960s, and its contestation by an anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, which halted the innovation journey.     

Learning teaching in the sustainability classroom

This article analyzes the experience of a particular sustainability learning classroom model, examining the classroom composition, structure, positioning, and atmosphere components in an experimental course on the topic of sustainable buildings. The course, called Angles on Green Building, offered as the second in a suite by the Learning City sustainability in higher education collaborative, experimented with content, which concerned the emerging practice and policy of green building, and with form, exploring the most appropriate pedagogical methods for the advancement of sustainability learning and action. The course took as its practical focus the green building industry in Vancouver, Canada, with an initial case study of the new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), a green building and research facility planned for completion in 2009. This article uses evidence drawn from the instructors, students and visiting professionals in the course, together a diverse and interdisciplinary group from four different higher education institutions in Vancouver. Our findings contain lessons about the careful attention needed for instructors to design, run and implement courses in sustainability topics that enable students from widely different backgrounds and levels of self-directedness to engage with, take responsibility for, and transform their behaviours in favour of sustainability.     

Model for evaluating the environmental sustainability of energy projects

This article focuses on the problem of assessing the environmental sustainability of energy projects. For this purpose an original model, which is based on various indicators that measure the environmental sustainability of energy projects, has been developed. This model, so called index of environmental sustainability of energy projects (IESEP), can be used in scenario comparison, while measuring the effectiveness of the proposed alternatives. Finally, an example of how to use this model is provided by analyzing alternatives to ameliorate the environmental sustainability of a hydroelectric project. In doing so, it is possible to show the usefulness of this model when used as a decision making tool for energy planners.     

Backcasting for sustainability: Introduction to the special issue

In this introductory paper we introduce the special issue on “Backcasting for Sustainability”. We present briefly a historical background, and position backcasting in the wider context of future studies, in which it can be related to “normative forecasting” and normative scenarios. We reflect on the diversity and variety of backcasting studies and experiments, as presented in the ten papers for this special issue. After summarizing the papers we formulate a future research agenda.     

循环经济:泰达发展的不竭动力

泰达作为我国综合型生态工业园区的代表，通过机制和技术的创新，逐渐构建起较为明晰的区域物质流、能量流和信息流，促进了区域资源能源的高效利用、产品的耦合共生、产品经济向功能经济的转变，形成了结构较完整的循环经济发展模式，是我国推进循环经济工作中的典范，为建立资源循环型社会起到了示范作用。     

Society as a learning system: Discovery,invention, and innovation cycles revisited

The very simple heuristic suggestion that society as a whole and its numerous subsets operate like learning systems, basically governed by Volterra-Lotka equations, has been extremely valuable in organizing a most variegated collection of statistical sets of time series, ranging from the structure of energy markets to the efficiency of machinery and the expansion of empires. In this paper an attempt is made to treat invention and entrepreneurship, generally perceived as the most “free” of human activities but actually subject to iron rules. Invention and innovation during the last 250 years appear in precisely structured waves that lend themselves to robust prediction. The present wave will reach its maximum momentum around 1990. Furthermore, the introduction, maximum market penetrations, and prices of new primary energies show a very strong link to these innovation waves. This stresses once more that economic features may be the expression of deeper “physical” phenomena related to the basic working of society and thus become predictable up to a point through a very abstract and noneconomic analysis.This work has been done in the frame of IIASA's Energy Systems Program and can be considered as an outgrowth of and complement to the research on the evolution of energy systems described in IIASA Research Reports 79-12, 79-13, and 77-22. There it was found that a new primary energy coming into the market must be observed for 10 or 20 years if one is to extract the basic features necessary to predict its long-term market behavior. Specifically, it was concluded that the dates at which new primary energies come into play cannot be predicted. In this paper innovations are considered not one by one but as an abstract set, whose behavior is analyzed. In this frame possible birth dates for new energy sources can be identified, thus enhancing the quality of very long-term forecasting in the energy field. Also, prices appear predictable, at least in their gross features.