Search

The provision of sustainable housing should factor energy efficiency, the use of sustainable building methods and materials and address the current associated barriers. This consideration triggered an ongoing study in UK which has so far conducted a bibliometric analysis of 275 papers using the VOSviewer software. More papers have been published in the last 5 years compared to the previous 15, and the UK is less engaged in successful collaborations in comparison to other economically developed nations. The lesser use of innovation in the UK has been identified. Also, the uses of sustainable methods and materials in residential housing are not fully exploited for achieving energy efficiency. A future research direction emerging is the potential to study the combined impact of using innovative materials and methods to achieve greater energy efficiency in UK housing provision. Through technological innovations and the need to move from fossil fuels (for example, through the use of heat pumps) a new approach can move the UK closer to achieving net-zero in housing provision and operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central part of the innovation process concerns the way firms go about organizing search for new ideas that have commercial potential. New models of innovation have suggested that many innovative firms have changed the way they search for new ideas, adopting open search strategies that involve the use of a wide range of external actors and sources to help them achieve and sustain innovation. Using a large-scale sample of industrial firms, this paper links search strategy to innovative performance, finding that searching widely and deeply is curvilinearly (taking an inverted U-shape) related to performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The role of environmental regulations in inducing innovation and improving performance has been studied in the literature. However, there have been no studies in the UK using statistical data. This paper aims to study the links among regulations, innovation and performance in the UK using sector level data. Design/methodology/approach – The paper used structural equation modelling to study the links among the three variables simultaneously. Findings – The analysis indicates that environmental regulations in the UK are significant in improving economic performance of the industrial sectors. They also find that, in the short run, environmental regulations negatively influence innovation, and innovation negatively influences economic performance in these sectors. Practical implications – The results have implications both for policy makers and firms in the UK industrial sector. For policy makers, environmental regulations have generally improved economic performance. For firms, the study shows that sufficient planning in meeting government’s environment standards can help improve their economic performance. Originality/value – This is the first study in the UK to explore simultaneously the links among the three variables: environmental regulations, innovation, and performance, using secondary sector level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a survey data of UK firms that engaged in downsizing, this paper explores the link between downsizing and innovation determinants. We suggest that the relationship between downsizing and innovation determinants is contingent upon the speed of implementing the downsizing and the severity of downsizing. Overall, the results confirm our general proposition and shed new light on the relationship between downsizing and innovation enhancers, and barriers to innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the U.K. has a common political system, there are distinct regional differences. These differences are reflected in the outcomes of U.K. Government attempts to devise and implement innovation strategy within all parts of the U.K. Northern Ireland's (NI) regional differences are increased by the province's peripheral location in relation to the rest of the U.K. The aim of this paper is to explore the outcomes of innovation strategy and implementation on an U.K. regional basis. Moreover, the paper seeks to examine the effects of location by comparing the NI results with the other U.K. regions. This paper's focus is on NI; however, the level of analysis is the U.K. This is extremely important as it provides comparative data in order to test whether or not NI does differ from other regions in terms of its level of innovation activity. Data from the Community Innovation Survey shows that NI has a significantly lower level of product innovation, together with the lowest level of novel product innovation and the lowest market share attributed to novel innovations compared to the rest of the U.K. In addition, NI has the fourth lowest level of process innovation (and the lowest level of novel process innovation) in the U.K. Overall, NI can be considered something of an outlier region with regard to product innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Científica General José María Córdova is the property of Escuela Militar de Cadetes General Jose Maria Cordova and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The potential for universities to contribute positively to business innovation has received much attention in recent years. While the determinants of university-business cooperation have been examined extensively, less attention has been given to the mediating influence of proximity in this relationship. The analysis in this paper builds on the UK business innovation survey (2002-2005) by incorporating measures of the university research environment for each of the 16,500 businesses surveyed. These measures allow us to look beyond business-level characteristics as determinants of the geography of university cooperation and account for the character of the local university environment. Measures include the distance from each business to its nearest university, the quality of local university research and the density of the university research environment. The findings suggest that significant differences exist between those businesses that cooperate with local universities and those that cooperate with non-local universities. These differences relate to business size, sales profile, location, absorptive capacity and innovation activity. In addition, we also find that if a business is located close to a research excellent university, cooperation tends to remain local, however, the distance between businesses and the nearest university is not a significant determinant of university-business cooperation and further, the higher the concentration of universities in the business locale, the more likely businesses are to cooperate with non-local universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that designing collections of 'closed' educational resources (content and technologies) for use by specific student cohorts and collections of open educational resources for use by any 'learner' require different design approaches. Learning design for formal courses has been a research topic for over 10 years as the ever growing range of digital content and technologies has potentially offered new opportunities for constructing effective learning experiences, primarily through greater sharing and re-use of such content and technologies. While progress in adopting learning design by teaching practitioners has appeared slow so far, the advent of open educational resources (OER) has provided a substantive boost to such sharing activity and a subsequent need for employing learning design in practice. Nevertheless there appears to be a paradox in that learning design assumes a reasonably well known and well defined student audience with presumed learning needs and mediating technologies while OER are exposed to a multitude of potential learners, both formal and informal, with unknown learning needs and using diverse technologies. It can be argued that innovative designs for formal courses involve creating structured pathways through a mixture of existing and new content and activities using a mixture of media and technologies in the process. This type of 'configurational' design that blends together given items to meet a particular need, rather than designing something fully de novo is typical in many areas of work and not just teaching. Such designs work very well when there is a small set of users of the innovation or their use of the innovation is narrow. However many innovations in information, communication and computing technologies often have multiple types of users and many more layers of complexity. In these cases, rather than heavily pre-define an innovative solution just to meet certain user requirements, it is necessary to design for greater flexibility so as to allow the users to adapt their use of the innovative solution for their own requirements once it has been deployed. The use of such an 'innofusion' approach for OER is highlighted using the case study of OpenLearn (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marked differences exist between the institutional and social context for innovation in the UK and Germany. The question addressed here is how these different contexts affect the objectives and organisation of innovation in UK and German manufacturing. In particular, the paper examines the extent to which UK and German plants engage in inter-plant collaboration and cooperation and multifunctional working as part of their innovative activity, and explores the reasons for differences in these patterns of involvement. The investigation is based on a large-scale, comparative survey of manufacturing plants in the two countries. In Germany, institutional and social norms are found to encourage collaborative inter-plant innovation, but aspects of the German skills training and industrial relations systems make the adoption of more flexible internal systems more difficult. In the UK, by contrast, the more adversarial nature of inter-firm relations makes it more difficult to establish external collaborations based on mutual trust, but less restrictive labour market structures make it easier for UK plants to adopt multifunctional working. This is linked to differences in attitudes to the property rights and transaction cost problems inherent in innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

External partnerships play an important role in firms' acquisition of the knowledge inputs to innovation. Such knowledge acquisition may be interactive - involving exploration and mutual learning - or non-interactive - involving exploitative activity and learning by only one party. Here, we consider how firms' innovation objectives influence their choice of interactive and/or non-interactive knowledge search. We conduct a comparative analysis for Spain and the UK, which have contrasting innovation eco-systems and regulation burdens. Three empirical results emerge. First, we find strong support for complementarity between non-interactive and interactive knowledge search. Second, we find that where firms have innovation objectives relating to product or service improvement, they are more likely to establish non-interactive search strategies. Third, the innovation objective of reducing environmental impact is significantly related to both, interactive and non-interactive knowledge acquisition strategies. This is likely related to the increasing awareness of the need to promote an agenda based on sustainable growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much has been made of the trend towards knowledge and technology outsourcing by firms and organisations, few studies have attempted to analyse the specific factors associated with the decision to use external technological knowledge sources in the innovation process. This paper outlines some key results from a study of the practices of a number of UK firms and organisations and the development of a Decision Support Framework (DSF) model, to aid understanding of the decision-making process surrounding the external sourcing of technological knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undertaking innovation involves a range of different activities from ideation to the commercialisation of innovations. Each activity may have very different resources and organisational requirements, however, most prior studies treat innovation as a single un-differentiated activity. Here, using new survey data for professional service firms (PSFs) in the UK, we are able to examine separately how a range of organisational work practices influence success in ideation and commercialisation. In particular, we use principal component analysis (PCA) to identify and compare the benefits of four groups of organisational work practices relating to strategy & information sharing, recruitment & training, work flexibility & discretion and culture & leadership. Strong contrasts emerge between those work practices that are important for success in ideation and commercialisation. Work practices linked to culture & leadership are important for ideation activities, while strategy &information sharing practices are more strongly associated with commercialisation success. The results suggest clear managerial implications depending on the priority [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A range of evidence informs healthcare decision-making, from formal research findings to 'soft intelligence' or local data, as well as practical experience or tacit knowledge. However, cultural and organisational factors often prevent the translation of such evidence into practice. Using a multi-level framework, this project will analyse how interactions between the evidence available and processes at the micro (individual/group) and meso (organisational/system) levels influence decisions to introduce or diffuse innovations in acute and primary care within the National Health Service in the UK.Methods/design: This study will use a mixed methods design, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, and involves four interdependent work streams: (1) rapid evidence synthesis of relevant literature with stakeholder feedback; (2) in-depth case studies of 'real-world' decision-making in acute and primary care; (3) a national survey and discrete choice experiment; and (4) development of guidance for decision-makers and evaluators to support the use of evidence in decision-making.Discussion: This study will enhance the understanding of decision-makers' use of diverse forms of evidence. The findings will provide insights into how and why some evidence does inform decisions to introduce healthcare innovations, and why barriers persist in other cases. It will also quantify decision-makers' preferences, including the 'tipping point' of evidence needed to shift stakeholders' views. Practical guidance will be shared with healthcare decision-makers and evaluators on uses of evidence to enable the introduction and diffusion of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay undertakes a comparative review of radical innovation in the early Cold War, when UK jet propulsion development far outpaced any US efforts. British ingenuity created a series of jet engines which Americans adopted. One among these, which captures contrasting organisational formats for handling complexity and innovation, was the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a tough, reliable propulsion system. The USAF's licence assigned production to Curtiss-Wright, which had made piston engines for decades and which spectacularly botched the project, wasting millions. Eventually, the Pentagon shifted the J-65 American Sapphire to GM's Buick division, which finally fabricated adequate but obsolete engines in the mid-1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]