Innovation Tribune eng

The Economist conference: Fresh thinking for the innovation economy

On March 23-24, The Economist is organizing a conference called "Fresh thinking for the innovation economy".

A multi-part, multimedia, multi-continent forum, this event will expand and possibly overturn established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work. Some of today’s top global innovators will examine and iterate on the genesis of good ideas, the great challenges of the twenty-first century, the question of whether we live in a flat world, the costs and benefits of crowdsourcing, the power of social entrepreneurship, the role of government in catalyzing innovation, leveraging failure, finding innovation in a crisis, organizing the teams of tomorrow, the phenomenon of reverse innovation, the future of open innovation, and how old economy actors are being disrupted in the new economy. Whether the impetus is to improve customer relationships, develop new products and services, explore untapped markets, or improve efficiency, companies today must implement more than just an R&D strategy to survive and thrive. Regardless of geography or industry, an organization lives or dies by how it innovates.

Featured speakers

• Amar Bhidé, Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
• Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO
• Ed Catmull, President, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
• Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School
• Jared Diamond, Author, Guns, Germs, and Steel
• Judy Estrin, President, JLabs
• Kris Halvorsen, Chief Technology Officer, Intuit
• Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder, Acumen Fund
• Michael Porter, Professor, Harvard Business School
• Paul Saffo, Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X

The conference will take place at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, USA.

Call for Papers: Tilburg Conference on Innovation

 Call for Papers - The Tilburg Conference on Innovation: Innovation at the Intersection of Strategy, Organization and Learning. June 10-12, 2010, Center for Innovation Research (CIR), Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Successful innovation is fundamentally about the discovery, use and commercialization of new products, processes and services. Organizations engage in innovation in order to enhance their performance; those that fail to innovate run the risk of losing out to those that do. But innovation as such does not guarantee competitive success, as the degree to which firms are able to benefit from their innovative efforts varies widely. This conference aims to explore the drivers and consequences of this heterogeneity. Innovation strategy involves a number of decisions regarding the nature and type of innovations to engage in, as well as the speed, openness, and flexibility with which the organizations respond to challenges.
Additionally, organizations experience a tension between routine and innovation, which implies that they need to balance the resources dedicated to explorative and to exploitative projects. In many respects, issues related to innovation strategy are inseparable from those related to the organization of innovation activities. 
To begin with, organizations face issues regarding the governance of innovation activities: whether to develop know-how in-house, in collaboration with other organizations, or to outsource it. Additionally, how organizations manage their portfolio of innovation activities and organize the innovation process is critical for success. The timeliness and successful commercialization of innovations are especially important. In
this sense, insight into organizational learning processes in innovative projects and organizations is also crucial to understanding their innovative
performance.   
Hence, the central theme of this conference will deal with innovation at the intersection of strategy, organization and learning. The Tilburg Conference on Innovation, hosted by the Center for Innovation Research at Tilburg University, is a forum in which scholars from intersecting research streams will come together to debate current research and gain insights into future trends. This will be a small conference with a maximum of 45 papers so that participants have the opportunity to receive quality feedback. Our aim is to
include participants from all over the world and to give equal opportunity to younger as well as established scholars, with quality of research being the predominant goal.  
We invite both theoretical and empirical papers that predominantly, though not exclusively, reflect some of the following issues:
*       What organizational capabilities are needed to deploy and govern
innovative activities effectively, especially in fast-changing environments
and across great distances?
*       How does organizational structure affect the learning inputs and
outcomes involved in innovation?
*       In what ways do networks of organizations contribute to the
development of innovations?
*       How do institutional forces affect the innovative performance of
organizations?
       
Any other contributions pertaining to innovation strategy, organization of innovation and organizational learning for innovation are also welcome.
There is no registration fee, and presenting authors will have their accommodation covered during their stay. An added attraction of the conference is the opportunity to visit the southern Netherlands in spring and sample the best local beers Belgium and the Netherlands have to offer.

Confirmed speakers/special guests include:
       
Bart Nooteboom   Will Mitchell    Andrew van de Ven      
Daniel Brass     Terry Amburgey  Maurizio Zollo  
Deborah Dougherty        Joe Lampel       Lee Fleming     
Arjen van Witteloostuijn        Keld Laursen    Gino Cattani    
Anna Grandori                  

Submission process:     
Please submit a full paper to [email protected] by February 15, 2010. Submission
guidelines can be found here.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified by March 15, 2010. 

Effectuation workshop at Vlerick School

On 7 and 8 December 2009, IMD and Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School invite scholars and instructors from across Europe to come to Ghent, Belgium to share their experience, learn from colleagues and co-create the future delivery of effectuation for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Effectuation is a logic of entrepreneurial expertise, developed from a cognitive science based study of 27 founders of companies ranging in size from $200 million to $6.5 billion. Effectuation articulates a dynamic and interactive process of creating new artifacts in the world.  Effectual reasoning is a type of human problem solving that takes the future as fundamentally unpredictable, yet controllable through human action; the environment as constructible through choice; and goals as negotiated residuals of stakeholder commitments rather than as pre-existent preference orderings (Source: www.effectuation.org).

The workshop is run by Stuart Read, from IMD, and Miguel Meuleman and Jan Lepoutre, from Vlerick.

The workshop is organized with the support of Flanders DC.

Adademic Enterprise Award

The Academic Enterprise Awards (ACES) will take place on December 10th in Paris. ACES is the only pan-European programme to recognize entrepreneurship at academic institutions. ACES is a mixture of keynote speeches, roundtable discussions, and networking opportunities.

Speakers inlcude:

• Jean-Philippe Courtois, President, Microsoft International, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corp.
• Bart Gordon, United States Congressman, Chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives
• David Eyton, Group Vice President, Research and Technology, BP
• Cyrille van Effenterre, President of ParisTech.

In addition, ACES organizes awards. The awards gives public recognition to those researchers, engineers, professors, students and government officials in Europe who have done the most in 2009 to foster a culture of enterprise on campus. This can be through taking the risk of launching a spinout company, developing a discovery into a marketable innovation (at the risk of the tenure-track publication record), or promoting policies that create a receptive environment for entrepreneurship on campus.

For more information: ACES.