This book is a timely guide for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) researchers, policy makers and strategists. SMEs are the most important sources of job creation and local development especially in knowledge-based economies. As turbulence in the globalized economies expands SMEs will have to learn to sustain competitiveness by developing their 'dynamic capabilities'. Based on the findings of a 4-year European and Latin American research project, this book provides a theoretical framework, practical instruments and cases on how SMEs in diverse economic, social and cultural contexts can develop crisis resilience, increase agility, innovate and thus successfully compete in turbulent times.

Boasts an impressive author list from multiple disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. Explores a wide range of issues, including economic growth, youth employment, gender, regulatory frameworks, business environments, entrepreneurship, and interest-driven power politics. Adds much-needed perspectives to the debates that shape both Europe's and Africa's digital transformation and innovation environments.

This book examines returns on experience and managerial practices to generate deeper collaboration, intensify co-creation, support start-ups and established companies to explore, develop, and accelerate their projects thanks to open labs (living labs, fab labs, coworking spaces, "third spaces", etc.). Open labs are the beatbox to create a rhythm in ecosystems and make all stakeholders move forward, faster, together. This book proposes a framework to understand how open labs, innovation hubs, and collaborative spaces contribute to ecosystems. The book looks beyond the short-term effects of open labs and identifies four main dimensions: communities, physical spaces, events, and portfolios of services offered to private businesses, entrepreneurs, and start-ups, established companies, or public institutions. Drawing on extensive field research lasting over five years, with more than 40 cases and more than 200 interviews plus direct observation within different environments, this edited book investigates how managers run these labs, and how "users" or "clients" evolve when benefitting from their services. All chapters analyse how an actual management impacts the dynamics of communities, how it shapes the co-evolution between open labs and their ecosystems, and how the management of the physical space impacts the mission of the lab and its role in the ecosystem. Open Labs and Innovation Research is written for scholars and researchers in the fields of innovation studies and management science. This book can also inform teaching, public policymaking, and professional practice.

Although largely unseen, the industrial revolution taking place before us is picking up steam dramatically. Dissolution of traditional global trading partnerships, the effect of COVID-19 on supply chains and the formation of new trading blocks, such as China's Belt and Road initiatives, are creating turmoil and rapid change in the international business domain. Continual advances in technology, health treatments, political and societal change are underpinning these transformations. It is unclear just how this revolution will unfold or what the role of the corporation will be in the long run. This book helps us navigate through these challenging times by identifying areas where opportunities will develop. Written by highly qualified experts from a diverse range of backgrounds, the book takes a novel backcast view to present more critical arguments. The book has been set in the not-so-distant future, reflecting back on the changes that have led to a new type of corporation and the conditions that have led to it. Each chapter presents a complimentary view about the nature of and context for the 2040 Future Corporation. The back casting perspective will provide a very effective discipline for readers to analyse contemporary trends while presenting an integrated and balanced future perspective.

While innovation can be defined in many ways, the author sees it as a process. It is not the sudden eureka moment in the middle of the night, nor is it a clear and linear path towards a final destination. Instead, it involves a strong sense of creativity and curiosity. An innovative mind has a natural inclination towards out-of-the-box thinking. It involves a willingness to try something new, without fear or judgment, to develop something no one else has ever articulated. While the mindset comes naturally, it requires fuel to keep it running. Innovators are voracious readers and researchers. They feed their mindset all of the fuel it needs to stay informed and relevant in their field. Many of the same things can be said for the Lean mindset. Lean management doesn't happen overnight, and it is very rarely a clear and linear path to true Lean thinking. Some might consider Lean a subset of innovative thinking, while others see it in reverse. Regardless of the relationship's directionality, one thing is certain: You cannot have one without the other. This book follows John Riley, the CEO of a medium-sized valve company just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who will stop at nothing to create an innovative work environment. Through the ups and downs of his journey, he learns a number of Lean and innovative skills, strategies, and mindsets to help him build the business he's always envisioned for himself. Throughout the book, you see examples of both strong and poor innovative leadership skills demonstrated by each of the main characters. The key messages are ones that help leaders build and access a mindset insistent on continuous improvement. Leadership techniques and abilities that bolster creative thought and problem-solving are the most successful throughout this book. To be truly innovative, you can never stop driving the learning process. For this to happen, leaders need to recognize when there is a need for a change or improvement. This is the beauty of the marriage between Lean and innovation: They both require continuous learning and growth. The desire to improve is only one piece of this equation, however. The other is the willingness to act. Without both of these factors, true innovation will always be out of reach.

This book presents the emerging paradigm and methodology, Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2), which aims to help drive significant structural changes and benefits through digital innovation to society and industry. It highlights how new services and markets can be co-created in open ecosystems and how this leads to a transformation from win-lose to win-win situations for all stakeholders. Organized around a number of core patterns of OI2, such as shared purpose, partnering and platforms, this book leverages more than five years of research by the EU Open Innovation Strategy Policy group. Popularized in the early 2000s, open innovation is a systematic process by which ideas can pass among organizations and travel on different exploitation vectors for value creation. With the simultaneous arrival of multiple digital disruptive technologies and rapid evolution of the discipline of innovation, it became apparent that an entirely new approach to innovation was needed that incorporated technological, societal and policy dimensions. Unlike other innovation methodologies, OI2 is an innovation paradigm and methodology with a purpose: to seek and deliver innovations that move us collectively on to a trajectory towards sustainable intelligent living. OI2 is a paradigm advocating for disruptions, seeking the unexpected and providing support for rapid scale-up of successes. As a method, it provides a safety net for both innovations and innovators, inspiring innovators to have the confidence and courage to innovate. Featuring case studies from domains such as energy, telecommunications, transportation, and finance and from companies including Intel, Lego, Alcatel Lucent and Alstom, this book is useful to industry executives, policy makers, academics, and students of innovation and innovation management.

This book is at the cutting edge of the ongoing 'neo-Schumpeterian' research program that investigates how economic growth and its fluctuation can be understood as the outcome of a historical process of economic evolution. Much of modern evolutionary economics has relied upon biological analogy, especially about natural selection. Although this is valid and useful, evolutionary economists have, increasingly, begun to build their analytical representations of economic evolution on understandings derived from complex systems science. In this book, the fact that economic systems are, necessarily, complex adaptive systems is explored, both theoretically and empirically, in a range of contexts. Throughout, there is a primary focus upon the interconnected processes of innovation and entrepreneurship, which are the ultimate sources of all economic growth. Twenty two chapters are provided by renowned experts in the related fields of evolutionary economics and the economics of innovation.

This book presents for the first time a detailed and comprehensive interpretation of Zhongguancun, China's first national self-dependent innovation demonstration zone. Explored in the book are examples of world-class, leading enterprises in fields, such as the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence, green and low-carbon, modern supply chain and high-end service. According to some data, the rate of contribution to the economic increase of Beijing made by Zhongguancun rose to 36.8% in 2015 from 17.9% in 2010. More specifically, in 2015, nearly 40% of the economic increase in Beijing was contributed by Zhongguancun Science Park. By 2017, Zhongguancun fostered 650 gazelle enterprises and 70 unicorn companies. The book also uniquely provides readers with a panoramic interpretation of the environment for innovation and entrepreneurship in Zhongguancun. It is mainly divided into three parts: History of Zhongguancun, Data of Zhongguancun, Cases of Zhongguancun and Policies of Zhongguancun. Through the depiction of history, data, cases and policy, this book clarifies that in most cases, enterprises in Zhongguancun become successes by following such a road characterized by starting from scratch and by relying on science and technology innovation and expanding from small to big by virtue of the capital market. ""Zhongguancun Model: Driving the Dual Engines of Science & Technology and Capital" deepens the reader's understanding of the new economy development in China and is essential reading for business/management researchers and practitioners, economists, IT specialists, and IT policy makers around the world.

* The book is balanced and comprehensive, recognising that both affordability and investment into innovation are necessary * The book is original, using ecological concepts to understand pharmaceutical innovation as an ecosystem. * The book is unique in its research foundation, building on the views of more than 70 expert informants from all parts of the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem and all sides of the debate about drug pricing.

Product design significantly influences product cost and quality, as well as market share and profitability of a firm. Design projects often involve many people belonging to different functional areas and in many organizations several design projects may be under way at the same time. Due to this complexity, management of design has given rise to a rich set of research problems in management and engineering. In this volume, design is considered as the planning and specification activity prior to fabrication. Design determines what products will be produced, how they will be produced, and when they will be introduced into the market. The quality of the products and the speed with which they are developed are significantly affected by the design process. The design process by which a product is developed is determined by the managerial and engineering practices, tools and techniques. This book presents engineering and management perspectives on design. Topics covered include: Decomposition of product development projects; Tools and techniques for preliminary evaluation of designs; Interface between design and manufacturing, assembly and distribution; Design information flows, and Determination of the scope, timing and duration of projects, and the allocation of resources.

This book analyzes the impact of the digital economy on customer satisfaction, shopping experience, resistance to change, script theory, and loyalty. The model introduced assumes that online markets have led to a redefinition of the concepts of loyalty and shopping scripts as a way to reduce customers' cognitive effort, by optimizing purchase time and increasing the speed and satisfaction of the shopping experience. It describes the utility function of the script by retaining customer loyalty and making the customer more reluctant to abandon his regular supplier. It also explores the difficulty faced by the higher churn rate on the Internet and the minimization of search costs, by integrating more functionality to achieve the ultimate goal of behavioral and cognitive loyalty. The authors provide an analysis in a "digital" view of the economic theory of switching costs and the resulting lock-in mechanisms which, in a classical economy, are often a barrier to disloyalty. It is a useful and effective tool for online businesses, their main managerial and strategic implications, and the adaptability to existing contexts.

Navigating Digital Transformation in Management provides a thorough introduction to the implications of digital transformation for leaders and managers. The book clearly outlines what new or enhanced roles and activities digital transformation requires of them. The book takes a practical approach and shapes an actionable guide that students can take with them into their future careers as managers themselves. With core theoretical grounding, the book explains how the digital transformation imperative requires all organizations to continuously undertake digital business transformation to adapt to ongoing digital disruption and to effectively compete as digital businesses. The book discusses the critical roles managers need to play in establishing, facilitating, and accelerating the day-to-day activities required to build and continuously upgrade these capabilities. Drawing on cutting edge research, this textbook: Explains how digital technology advancements drive digital disruption and why digital business transformation and operating as a digital business are critical to organization survival Unpacks the different digital business capabilities required to effectively compete as a digital business Considers the new or digitally enhanced competencies required of leaders, managers, and their supporting professionals to effectively play their roles in digital transformation Discusses how leaders, managers, and their supporting professionals can keep up with digital technology advancements Unpacks key digital technology advancements, providing a plain language understanding of what they are, how they work, and their implications for organizations Enriched with pedagogical features to support understanding and reinforce learning, such as reflective questions, learning summaries, and case studies, and supported by a suite of instructor materials, this textbook is an ideal choice for teachers that want to enable their information systems, information technology, and digital business students to compete and thrive in the contemporary business environment.

Navigating Digital Transformation in Management provides a thorough introduction to the implications of digital transformation for leaders and managers. The book clearly outlines what new or enhanced roles and activities digital transformation requires of them. The book takes a practical approach and shapes an actionable guide that students can take with them into their future careers as managers themselves. With core theoretical grounding, the book explains how the digital transformation imperative requires all organizations to continuously undertake digital business transformation to adapt to ongoing digital disruption and to effectively compete as digital businesses. The book discusses the critical roles managers need to play in establishing, facilitating, and accelerating the day-to-day activities required to build and continuously upgrade these capabilities. Drawing on cutting edge research, this textbook: Explains how digital technology advancements drive digital disruption and why digital business transformation and operating as a digital business are critical to organization survival Unpacks the different digital business capabilities required to effectively compete as a digital business Considers the new or digitally enhanced competencies required of leaders, managers, and their supporting professionals to effectively play their roles in digital transformation Discusses how leaders, managers, and their supporting professionals can keep up with digital technology advancements Unpacks key digital technology advancements, providing a plain language understanding of what they are, how they work, and their implications for organizations Enriched with pedagogical features to support understanding and reinforce learning, such as reflective questions, learning summaries, and case studies, and supported by a suite of instructor materials, this textbook is an ideal choice for teachers that want to enable their information systems, information technology, and digital business students to compete and thrive in the contemporary business environment.

Current debates about experts are often polarized and based on mistaken assumptions, with expertise either defended or denigrated. Making Sense of Expertise instead proposes a conceptual framework for the study of expertise in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the role of expertise in contemporary society. Too often different meanings of experts and expertise are implied without making them explicit. Grundmann's approach to expertise is based on a synthesis of approaches that exist in various fields of knowledge. The book aims at dispelling much of the confusion by offering a comprehensive and rigorous framework for the study of expertise. A series of in-depth case studies drawn from contemporary issues, including the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, provide the empirical basis of the author's comprehensive approach. This thought-provoking book will be of great interests to students, instructors and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology studies.

In recent years, there has been steady increase in the interest shown in both big data analytics and the use of information technology (IT) solutions to improve healthcare services. Despite the growing interest, there are limited materials, to addressing the needs and challenges posed by the activities and processes including the use of big data. From IT solutions' perspectives, this book aims to advance the deployment and use of big data analytics to increase patients' big data usefulness and improve healthcare service delivery. The book provides significant insights and useful guide on how to access and manage big data, in improving healthcare service delivery. The book contributes a fresh perspective, which primarily comes from the complementary use of analytics approach with actor-network theory (ANT), and other techniques, in advancing healthcare service delivery. Accessing and managing healthcare big data have always been a challenging exercise. Due to the sensitivity of the health sector, the focus on patients' big data is from either technical or social perspective. Thus, the book employs sociotechnical theories, ANT and structuration theory (ST) as lenses to examine and explain the factors that enable and constrain the use of patients' big data for health services. By doing so, the book brings a different dimension and advance health service delivery. Providing a timely and important contribution to this critical area, this book is a valuable, international resource for academics, postgraduate students and researchers in the areas of IT, big data analytics, data management and health informatics.

This book explores the various considerations for achieving an effective regulatory strategy to improve financial access and usage in Nigeria and beyond. Gaps in the legal and institutional framework for digital financial services (DFS) as well as the barriers that contribute to financial exclusion are identified as are the policy changes needed to provide more extensive, accessible and sustainable financial inclusion value. In addition, the book covers divergent themes around the use of and insights for regulating industry financial services providers and challenger entities that herald industry disruption. The book adopts three research methods. The doctrinal research method is used to buttress the law and development analysis and the themes around regulation, adoption and usage of financial services. To elucidate the application of financial innovations, comparative case studies are drawn from selected jurisdictions including Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, The Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Uganda, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Lastly, using the empirical research method, the author reports the burden experienced by the residents of a community without banks in accessing finance. Included in this discussion are the barriers to finance as well as the coping strategies adopted by the community residents to access formal and informal finance.

* The book is balanced and comprehensive, recognising that both affordability and investment into innovation are necessary * The book is original, using ecological concepts to understand pharmaceutical innovation as an ecosystem. * The book is unique in its research foundation, building on the views of more than 70 expert informants from all parts of the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem and all sides of the debate about drug pricing.

Trust and Digital Business: Theory and Practice brings together the theory and practice of trust and digital business. The book offers a look at the current state, including a comprehensive overview of both research and practical applications of trust in business. Readers will gain from this book in the following areas: knowledge across disciplines on trust in business, theoretical underpinnings of trust and how it sustains itself through digital dissemination, and empirically validated practice regarding trust and its related concepts. The international team of authors from seven countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Turkey, and the U.S.) ensures the diversity and quality of the content. The intended audiences of this book are professionals, scholars, and students.

Due to its potential transformative nature, empathy has increasingly received attention in business, psychology, neuroscience, education, medicine, social sciences and design, to mention only a few. During the last two decades, discussions about the role of empathy in design and creative research and practice have developed, with empathy perceived as a key instrument in human-centred design and design thinking. This book revisits the powerful concept of empathy in the new post-pandemic era in which ubiquitous digitalisation presents challenges to retaining human-centredness when developing products and services. The book presents a practical four-step approach to the challenges presented concerning how organisations can turn from merely feeling empathy with or for people, to actions of empathy and compassion that can be implemented with and by communities. A wide range of organisations and organisational settings can benefit from the presented case studies and research methods. Through them, the book explores how to discover, share and act with empathy and compassion in the new digitally driven post-pandemic era to innovate across a wide range of organisations, including for-profit and not-for-profit businesses and those in the public and third sectors. This edited volume will appeal to global researchers in the fields of product and service design and digital, social innovation, as well those interested in organisational development. The practical, interdisciplinary nature of the book and innovative four-step approach will also appeal to upper-level students.

This book provides a comprehensive view of the entrepreneurial dynamics within startups by analyzing their marketing strategies in the context of exploiting new opportunities, enhancing stakeholder values, and protecting their business ecosystem for continuous growth. Managing startup enterprises is a complex managerial task, as these businesses need to overcome the competition by understanding thoroughly all the moves of rival firms in the local-global markets. This book explores the incidence and severity of problems pertaining to organizational design, marketing strategy, the consumer-centric approach, and the transaction-based approach faced by start-up enterprises in order to improve business performance. This text will motivate future research on managing start-up enterprises in terms of developing efficiency in leadership and achieving market competitiveness and organizational growth. It will serve as an important work to those studying entrepreneurial leadership and marketing.

The radical transformations to which the economy and society have been subjected for decades have gained momentum in recent years, not least because of the coronavirus pandemic, the consequences of which are yet to be fully understood. As a result, certain economic models and business practices are becoming less sustainable. One of the reasons for this is the rapid advance of Revolution 4.0. The issues raised in this book are central to understanding the theoretical and practical aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its overwhelming impact on emerging socio-economic relations. The book addresses the future and flexibility of the labour market in the era of digital transformation; issues related to the emergence of new patterns of production and the distribution of public services. It examines the impact of Revolution 4.0 on the global business services sector and business project management models, in times of increasing complexity. The book covers a broad spectrum of concerns associated with Industry 4.0, such as social, economic, technological, and environmental, making it a comprehensive resource offering state-of-the-art knowledge. Further, it includes a discussion on the perspectives for the development of Revolution 4.0 in the context of the post-pandemic world. This book skillfully combines theoretical considerations with practical applications, offering a valuable, engaging and accessible resource for researchers, scholars, students, policymakers, public decision-makers, and businesspeople alike.

The aftermath of the 2008 crisis has substantially increased the regulation of banks and insurance companies and curtailed their risk taking, which has shifted much of the risk to their clients: firms and consumers. At the same time, digitalization has encouraged the entry of new firms combining finance and technological innovation, a phenomenon known as FinTech. The emergence of non-bank financial entities has contributed to the fragmentation of financial services, and also opened up new markets. Furthermore, the growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility has made it increasingly important for financial organizations to care about their public image. Drawing together these diverse strands, this book examines how the financial sector is evolving and how the existing actors are adapting to the institutional change and to the challenges from new actors and competitors. It also addresses the issue of how financial organizations are providing fixes to the challenges at the systemic level and how a healthier, more diverse and socially responsible financial sector is beneficial to the operations of the market economy as a whole. While there are books that address each of these issues, and also books that look at organizational diversity, there are few that investigate their interconnectedness. Responsible Finance and Digitalization offers a topical overview of the changes that are taking place in the financial sector and how the financial sector itself can contribute to solving global challenges. It equips both students (at MBA and other levels) and practitioners with analytical tools to reflect on this change and to take appropriate action to ensure that their organization can successfully navigate it and create value.

Power and Authority in Internet Governance investigates the hotly contested role of the state in today's digital society. The book asks: Is the state "back" in internet regulation? If so, what forms are state involvement taking, and with what consequences for the future? The volume includes case studies from across the world and addresses a wide range of issues regarding internet infrastructure, data and content. The book pushes the debate beyond a simplistic dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism in order to consider also greater state involvement based on values of democracy and human rights. Seeing internet governance as a complex arena where power is contested among diverse non-state and state actors across local, national, regional and global scales, the book offers a critical and nuanced discussion of how the internet is governed - and how it should be governed. Power and Authority in Internet Governance provides an important resource for researchers across international relations, global governance, science and technology studies and law as well as policymakers and analysts concerned with regulating the global internet.

This book is part of the Human Centered Book Trilogy, the 2021 volumes of the Routledge Human Centered Management HCM Series. HCM books are pioneering transformation from the traditional humans-as-a-resource approach of the industrial past, to the humans at the center management and organizational paradigm of the 21st century. HCM is built on the talent and wellbeing of people in the workplace driving work engagement, quality standards, high performance and productivity to attain long-term organizational sustainability in the global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment. This book was carefully crafted by recognized international human centered scholars from four continents. Models presented bridge persistent Soft Skills gaps in management and business and particularly between education and the workforce due to excessive testing and hard/technical skills. In contrast with hard skills, Soft Skills are transferable across jobs, industries and applicable to all dimensions of life. Soft Skills are the common language of empathy, collaboration, team building, resilience and agility transforming organizations. Human and social challenges cannot be solved only with hard skills. This is a "must read Soft Skills manual" for survival and success based on attributes all human beings possess but not everybody is optimizing to excel in life and work. This and its two complementary titles Human Centered Organizational Culture: Global Dimensions and Sensible Leadership: Human Centered, Insightful and Prudent are timely readings for leaders, managers, researchers, academics, practitioners, students and the general public responsible for organizations across industries and sectors pursuing quality standards, organizational transformation and sustainability.