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This paper discusses a university-wide pilot designed to encourage academics to creatively explore learner-centred applications for digital audio. Participation in the pilot was diverse in terms of technical competence, confidence and contextual requirements and there was little prior experience of working with digital audio. Many innovative approaches were taken to using audio in a blended context including student-generated vox pops, audio feedback models, audio conversations and task-setting. A podcast was central to the pilot itself, providing a common space for the 25 participants, who were also supported by materials in several other formats. An analysis of podcast interviews involving pilot participants provided the data informing this case study. This paper concludes that audio has the potential to promote academic creativity in engaging students through media intervention. However, institutional scalability is dependent upon the availability of suitable timely support mechanisms that can address the lack of technical confidence evident in many staff. If that is in place, audio can be widely adopted by anyone seeking to add a new layer of presence and connectivity through the use of voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I also share results from a pilot study, which offer insights regarding R&D companies' preferred slack time model, the creative work employees perform during slack time, and the perceived success of slack time programs. Keywords: Slack time; Discretionary time; Creativity; Innovation; Innovation portfolio management EN Slack time Discretionary time Creativity Innovation Innovation portfolio management 34 45 12 11/04/22 20221101 NES 221101 Organizations have to deal with surges of activity, adjust to changes in the external environment, and proactively experiment with the development of innovative products, services, processes, or business models. Regardless of how a company categorizes its innovation initiatives, an innovation portfolio is likely to have different degrees of innovativeness and complexity, which can be used as input to determine if the way the company organizes slack time fits well with its innovation portfolio. [Extracted from the article]

Industrial R&D has undergone major changes since 1958, when IRI's journal, Research-Technology Management (RTM) was first published. These changes include industry's growing investment in R&D, the composition of its human resources, and techniques for effective management, organization, and leadership of the R&D enterprise. The current trend toward globalization of markets, manufacturing and R&D is leading to rapid growth in collaborative efforts to conduct R&D with other firms, universities and government labs. Future changes, enabled by new information technologies, will be even more dramatic--and rapid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through creative imitation, this article aims to make the case for a more inclusive view on innovation related to gender. In entrepreneurship theory, innovation is usually associated with creativity as something extraordinary, followed by generalisations of how innovation is brought about, which are based upon dichotomies that lead to exclusion of those who are expected to innovate. Innovation policy tends to associate innovation with industrial, large-scale product development, to the neglect of other types of innovations. Therefore, policy and research both tend to disregard certain innovations that are pursued by certain actors in certain areas. In particular, women entrepreneurs are neglected, as are innovations within women-dominated industries. This marginalisation is, arguably, related to how innovation is conceptualised, which this article will scrutinise by means of gender theory and narrative theory. The article highlights the example of a businesswoman who has pursued innovation in the area of wedding arrangements, which represents one of the categories that have been marginalised in research and policy on innovation. The woman's story of one of her innovations is analysed based upon data collected at dialogue seminars. This illustrates how innovation--when regarded as a mediation between creativity and imitation--appears to be both extraordinary and everyday, as well as tied to the context in which it appears. This serves to bridge dichotomies and end up with an inclusive approach in terms of who is expected to innovate, where, and what. In so doing, this article challenges common assumptions regarding innovation and offers an original interpretation of how innovation is associated to imitation and gendered relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the regional distribution and economic effect of the "creative class" on the basis of a unique data set that covers more than 500 regions in 7 European countries. The creative class is unevenly geographically distributed across Europe; the analyses show that a regional climate of tolerance and openness has a strong and positive effect on a region's share of these people. Regional job opportunities also have a large effect on the size of a region's population of the creative class. The findings reveal some evidence of a positive relationship among creative class occupation, employment growth, and entrepreneurship at the regional level in a number of European countries. On the basis of the analysis, however, it is not clear whether human capital, measured by creative occupation, outperforms indicators that are based on formal education, or if formal education has the stronger effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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