Case Studies in Innovation Research : For Researchers, Teachers and Students

In Leading Issues in Innovation, the companion volume to this book, the editor, Daniele Chauvel, notes that "the concept of innovation has spanned R&D laboratories and organisation boundaries by extending to the whole organisation and its environment, integrating the duality of internal vs ex-ternal sources of innovation" (Chauvel 2011:iv). This shift in focus, she comments further, has "a direct impact on actors" with the result that "in the knowledge society, any knowledge worker becomes a potential inno-vator".

The ten cases and research studies presented in this volume serve to illus-trate the points that Chauvel has made regarding the reach and scope of the innovation function: in today’s knowledge economy, innovation is about interaction and interfaces, collaborations and combinations, and enterprise and education. The studies have been selected from papers presented at the European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and published first in the refereed proceedings of that conference. They have been chosen because they present interesting and topical discussion points for both students and lecturers in the areas of innovation management, types of innovation, sources of innovation, knowledge transfer and exchange, entrepreneurial processes, and commercialisation. Each study is prefaced by some brief editorial commentary, together with some indications of specific topics that could be discussed in relation to the study. It is envisaged also that these discussion topics could act as useful points of departure for further research and academic inquiry in these areas.