Innovation studies: a North–South global perspective

ABSTRACT

The student of innovation studies is faced with a vast, multi-national and interdisciplinary field on which she must gain an overview and make a novel contribution. There exist a plethora of academic journals, networks, conferences and fora wherein researchers of innovation discuss and advance the topic. How to manage and understand this is a major challenge. This paper helps to make sense of this often confusing and ever-shifting field by reviewing the major developments over the past 20 years, highlighting the present ‘state of the art’ and identifying some important trends going forwards. It does this through a review of the published themes of two major international conferences in the field – Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID) and Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS) – to gain a global view on the field. At the heart of the exploration is whether the sphere of innovation studies has evolved coherently worldwide, or there are geographic differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation studies
• DRUID
• Globelics

Acknowledgements

Opinions expressed herein are those of only the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of, or involve any responsibility for, the institutions to which they are affiliated. We would like to thank the following for their feedback when developing this paper: the CIND research group at Uppsala University and the anonymous reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief of this journal for their valuable comments, and the Globelics Alumni community for their assistance. Any errors are the fault of the authors. Early results of this research were presented at the 14th Globelics International Conference, 2016, Bandung (Indonesia).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tulio Chiarini http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3758-8413

Notes

1 Our perspectives on the field and the academic networks are undoubtedly strongly tied up to our positionality, and another set of researchers may view the situation very differently. For this reason we explain our situation. We are both what could be termed ‘early career’ academics, involved in both Globelics and DRUID to varying degrees. We have both participated in the Academies of these networks (as PhD students) and are involved in the Globelics Alumni network. We have also attended the conferences and workshops and have several colleagues that we work with from with these networks. One author is from what would be considered the ‘developed’ world context: the UK and Sweden; the other is from Brazil, which we could class as ‘developing’ or ‘emergent’, yet working in Europe. As such, we bring our multi-national perspectives into our work. The motivation for this paper came about as a result of a series of stimulating and challenging conversations about the state of innovation studies, and how our differing perspectives being from and working in different countries influences our view of the field and the topics we consider most relevant. We felt that this was a debate we should be having on a wider level, involving more colleagues, and considering more systematic means to achieve an overview. We identified some specific benefits to undertaking this work beyond improving our own learning processes: our perspective on the field could be somewhat novel or interesting to others based on our experiences and knowledge; our review could help new scholars (such as post-graduates) or those interested in innovation studies to get an overview of the field as it stands; opening up the discussion between the different generations of innovation scholars could act as a bridge and ensure knowledge flows both ways; a better understanding of the current state of the art could help us to better direct our future research efforts.

2 For more information on both the reader is directed to their comprehensive websites: <www.druid.dk> and <www.globelics.org>.

3 We would encourage colleagues with long memories and good filing systems who could fill in any details to do so, in order that we have a record of activities for future scholars to refer to.

4 Available at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjewAhoe-M>

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Commission on Qualification of Graduated Human Resources (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES) from the Brazilian Ministry of Education [BEX 5796/15-6].