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Despite the fact that the transformation of the public sector has been underway for several years, public sector innovation remains a concept that is debated both within the scientific community and among practitioners. Even if evaluating innovation processes is a major concern for academics and companies, monitoring the innovation process through a formalized evaluation is relatively new in the public sector. The determinants of innovation are studied in depth in the literature but the link between these concepts and empirical observations still need further investigation to explain the evaluation processes of innovation management at the local level (city administration). This paper provides some insights into this gap by proposing an innovation capability evaluation framework that relies on best practices. This framework is based on an innovation metric initially dedicated to companies. It has been adapted to the city administration, combining a systematic literature review and an empirical co-construction approach with practitioners from the city of Nancy (France). JEL Codes: C51, C93, H83, L33, O32, O36

Despite the fact that the transformation of the public sector has been underway for several years, public sector innovation remains a concept that is debated both within the scientific community and among practitioners. Even if evaluating innovation processes is a major concern for academics and companies, monitoring the innovation process through a formalized evaluation is relatively new in the public sector. The determinants of innovation are studied in depth in the literature but the link between these concepts and empirical observations still need further investigation to explain the evaluation processes of innovation management at the local level (city administration). This paper provides some insights into this gap by proposing an innovation capability evaluation framework that relies on best practices. This framework is based on an innovation metric initially dedicated to companies. It has been adapted to the city administration, combining a systematic literature review and an empirical co-construction approach with practitioners from the city of Nancy (France). JEL Codes: C51, C93, H83, L33, O32, O36

When launching new products, innovative companies have to anticipate the organization of the supply chain, which will support the manufacture of the product, and thus redefine their role within it. Therefore, anticipating organizational, technological or strategic changes within the initial supply chain is a key to success as early as the fuzzy front ends of the design tasks. Thus the concept of agility is used to describe the evolution of the supply chain. The emblematic case of Swatch is then studied. Data is collected from the literature in order to be modeled so that the new supply chain can be compared to the initial supply chain. This article seeks to better understand the influence of decisions about product and production specifications, as well as strategy in the reconfiguration of a supply chain following the emergence of an innovation. Theoretical propositions are formulated to clarify the concepts of “agile supply chain” and “supply chain agility”. JEL Codes: O300, L100

A well-managed Technology Transfer (TT) project is acknowledged as a means to transform research from universities into high added value products and enhance the innovative capabilities of collaborating companies to support regional clusters. Nevertheless, a TT project is a particular innovation process in which the technological dimension is predominant and multiple autonomous but interrelated stakeholders are involved during a limited period of time. For this reason, the conventional tools of project management are not always adapted to monitoring a TT project. As a consequence, there is a need for new tools and metrics to ensure optimal deployment and results. Based on a comprehensive literature analysis and a long-term field observation of five transfer projects, the contribution of the present paper is twofold. First, a conceptual model for a TT process between a Technology Transfer Centre (TTC) and Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) is proposed. Second, a definition is given for a set of indicators to monitor the TT projects after gathering observable facts throughout the collaborative projects. The level of knowledge materialization turns out to be the most important indicator of a TT project defined here, as the IOT (Intermediary Object of Transfer). JEL codes: O31, 032, L24