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Nurse‐led research and innovation is key to improving health experiences and outcomes and reducing health inequalities. Clinical academic training programmes for nurses to develop research and innovation skills alongside continued development of their clinical practice are becoming increasingly established at national, regional and local levels. Though widely supported, geographical variation in the range and scope of opportunities available remains. It is imperative that clinical academic opportunities for nurses continue to grow to ensure equity of access and opportunity so that the potential of nurse‐led clinical academic research to improve quality of care, health experience and health outcomes can be realised. In this paper, we describe and report on clinical academic internship opportunities available to nurses to share internationally, a range of innovative programmes currently in operation across the UK. Examples of some of the tangible benefits for patients, professional development, clinical teams and NHS organisations resulting from these clinical academic internships are illustrated. Information from local evaluations of internship programmes was collated to report what has worked well alongside 'real‐world' set‐up and sustainability challenges faced in practice. Clinical academic internship schemes are often opportunistically developed, making use of hybrid models of delivery and funding responsive to local needs and available resources. Key enablers of successful clinical academic internship programmes for nurses were support from senior clinical leaders and established relationships with local universities and wider organisations committed to research capacity building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to propose a multidisciplinary approach for the analysis of demand and innovation. It combines insights from studies on technology diffusion, evolutionary economics and cognitive psychology to argue that consumption and demand are learning processes driven by trial-and-error, rather than by ex-ante maximisation. The paper presents a heuristic synthesis to incorporate learning processes in the determination of consumption preferences and capabilities. The case of banking service innovation in the UK is presented as an illustrative example of the outlined dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creative industries have long been seen as an innovative sector. More recent research posits that creative occupations are also a fundamental, but overlooked, driver of innovation. Theory also suggests cities are important for both creative industries and occupations, with urban environments helping firms innovate. Yet little empirical work has considered the links between creative industries, occupations, cities, and innovation at the firm level. This paper addresses this gap using a sample of over 9000 UK SMEs. Our results stress that creative industries firms are more likely to introduce original product innovations, but not those learnt from elsewhere. Creative occupations, however, appear a more robust general driver of innovation. We find no support for the hypothesis that urban creative industries firms are particularly innovative. However, creative occupations are used in cities to introduce product innovations learnt elsewhere. The results suggest that future work needs to seriously consider the importance of occupations in empirical studies of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s higher education (HE) in the UK has been continually developing to meet the needs of a changing economy. An economy now based largely on knowledge and its transfer, rather than manual skills and labour, has led to an emphasis by the government on increasing the number of adults with high level skills to contribute to economic success. The widening participation agenda is an example of the government drive to increase the numbers and range of people attending university. It is within this context that the term innovation has grown in currency. A growing student population requires learning and teaching methods to be developed, adapted and changed to address the diversity of needs within it. Innovation in learning and teaching therefore may become vital to the success of an institution. But what encourages staff to innovate? The majority of this paper will discuss the context for the focus on innovation in HE in terms of its contributing factors, such as changing economic needs and the government agenda to widen participation. Brief discussion at the end will be given to one faculty's initiative to encourage staff to innovate within their own practice. This initiative presents the potential benefits of creating opportunities for staff to present, exchange and discuss new ideas as a stimulus to taking the first step in innovating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]