Innovation - the process of obtaining, understanding, applying, transforming, managing and transferring knowledge - is a result of human collaboration, but it has become an increasingly complex process, with a growing number of interacting parties involved. Lack of innovation is not necessarily caused by lack of technology or lack of will to innovate, but often by social and cultural forces that jeopardize the cognitive processes and prevent potential innovation. This book focuses on the rule of social capital in the process of innovation: the social networks and the norms; values and attitudes (such as trust) of the actors; social capital as both bonding and bridging links between actors; and social capital as a feature at all spatial levels, from the single inventor to the transnational corporation. Contributors from a wide variety of countries and disciplines explore the cultural framework of innovation through empirics, case studies and examination of conceptual and methodological dilemmas.

This book addresses these questions in a comprehensive way. It delves into the inter-relations between the major factors of developmental performance and looks at their effects on sustained societal development. A vast amount of statistical data on social and economic factors in selected European countries is grouped into 31 easy-to-handle tables and analyzed along the following constructs: civilizational competence; social capital; cognitive mobilization; quality of governance; entrepreneurial spirit; social cohesion; and openness to the international environment. The analysis, based on theories and indicators of development, reveals that, in spite of the progress since the fall of Communism, countries in Central and Eastern Europe still fall short of having been transformed into propulsive, "vibrant" societies, with intellectually open-minded, socially and technologically innovative environments

This book provides a critical re-examination of the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) as the main tool used by the European Commission and other policy-making bodies to measure national innovation capacity. Given that contemporary societies and economies are to a great extent characterised by the processes of production, dissemination and application (re-combination) of knowledge, the accurate monitoring and measurement of R&D efficiency and innovation performance on national, regional and firm level are of outmost importance. The contextual reconstruction of the model of indicators used by IUS reveals that the accuracy and validity of measurement are not satisfactory, and that substantial modifications of metrics are needed to achieve stronger theoretical significance and policy-relevance. In this work, the epistemic turn is emphasised and offered as an alternative, namely in the sense of the shift from a mechanicist-positivist orientation toward a more reflective and contextual post-positivist approach. "

Innovation - the process of obtaining, understanding, applying, transforming, managing and transferring knowledge - is a result of human collaboration, but it has become an increasingly complex process, with a growing number of interacting parties involved. Lack of innovation is not necessarily caused by lack of technology or lack of will to innovate, but often by social and cultural forces that jeopardize the cognitive processes and prevent potential innovation. This book focuses on the rule of social capital in the process of innovation: the social networks and the norms; values and attitudes (such as trust) of the actors; social capital as both bonding and bridging links between actors; and social capital as a feature at all spatial levels, from the single inventor to the transnational corporation. Contributors from a wide variety of countries and disciplines explore the cultural framework of innovation through empirics, case studies and examination of conceptual and methodological dilemmas.

The book focuses on some key aspects of social capital in the context of civic participation, governance and civil society at both national and European Union (EU) levels. The role of new EU members is particularly stressed. The texts demonstrate how social capital in the form of cooperative norms and actions facilitates the self-organisation of civil society and its internal ability to articulate policy relevant alternative proposals. The efficiency and responsiveness of governance at different local, national, and transnational levels are also addressed. Besides theoretical reconsiderations, attention is drawn to the issue of the quality of data and greater methodological reflexivity.