Innovation as a phenomenon and the quest for cool

1. Introduction

Academic journals are on a coolhunt.¹ They seek to attract contributions that not only pose an interesting research question, contain a well-developed theoretical framework, employ adequate methods and add value to existing research, but that are also capable of stimulating controversy and debate, and improving a journal’s reputation and positioning in the field. In fact, with 29 journals listed in the innovation category of the Academic Journal Guide 2015 (in which Industry and Innovation ranks 5th),² a clear positioning in terms of topic scope and the level of ambition is key to differentiate a journal from its competitors. A change in the editorial team offers a natural opportunity to look back, take stock and rethink the distinctive identity of a journal. After being diligently edited for more than a decade by Mark Lorenzen of Copenhagen Business School, the editorial responsibilities for Industry and Innovation were handed over to me in 2015. Together with the associate editors and the editorial advisory board, we set out on a process to define the important elements that, taken together, comprise the journal’s identity and value proposition. Hence, the objective of this editorial is threefold. First, I will look back and provide an overview of where the journal stands today. Second, I will describe the outcome of the thought process which has led to the definition of three focus themes: areas of research that we believe to hold considerable potential for future research and that we would like Industry and Innovation to be known for. Third, I will introduce the three articles in this special issue. The articles are invited contributions by renowned scholars in the respective areas and illustrate the three focus themes in great detail, outlining potential avenues for future research – research that Industry and Innovation will look forward to publish.

2. Twenty-four years of publishing research on industrial dynamics

Industry and Innovation (initially named Journal of Industry Studies) has now published high-quality original research on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional and geographic change for 24 years. From its inception in 1993, the journal has taken up the challenge to describe and ultimately understand the evolution of industries and technologies, as well as the institutions that facilitate or restrain such evolution. Industry and Innovation focuses on innovation as a phenomenon. Interdisciplinary in nature, it is informed by management, economics, economic geography and sociology, and contributes in turn to advancing the theoretical frontier of these disciplines. Over the past years, research has focused on how innovation patterns and economic performance are related to different industrial structures and institutions; how innovation relates to economic performance at the firm, industry, and regional or city level; and the institutional underpinnings for different organisational forms.

Since 2005 the journal has been associated with the Danish Research Unit on Industrial Dynamics (DRUID). DRUID hosts three annual conferences which are regarded as some of the world’s premier academic events in the fields covered by Industry and Innovation. The editors of Industry and Innovation have made great efforts to take advantage of the unique resource constituted by the open and inclusive research community of DRUID. The ties between DRUID and the journal are today closer than ever. Industry and Innovation regularly showcases the conference theme with a special issue that not only includes research articles but also a broader feature of the highly provocative debates and keynotes. Industry and Innovation hands out a biannual best paper award at the DRUID summer conference, and most of the editorial advisory board members are part of the international network of scholars affiliated with and sympathetic to DRUID.

Just as DRUID has grown considerably over the past couple of years, Industry and Innovation has witnessed strong growth in the number of contributions on the topics covered by the journal. The journal currently receives about 350 submissions per year. The acceptance rate is 12%, which reflects the journal’s ambition to publish high-quality and innovative scholarship. At the same time, Industry and Innovation has been successful in the quest for cool: research that few have done before and that is ahead of its time, or research that has been highly thought-provoking in our field. The following three examples are illustrative of this research. Saxenian (2002) studied transnational communities and the evolution of global production networks. The article broke important ground and started a whole debate that is still at the forefront of economic geography. Dahlander, Frederiksen, and Rullani (2008) introduced a special issue on online communities as part of an open innovation strategy. The special issue contains highly influential papers that were the first of their kind to shed light on the role of the Internet in organisational search, now mainstream in open innovation research. More recently, Christensen et al. (2016) edited a special issue on innovation policy and how it can make a difference. The articles in this special issue do not only take stock of what we know about the effectiveness of innovation policy but also contribute insights on how to design and implement innovation policy that actually has a good chance of making a difference. Again, the contributions to this issue are bound to spark a controversy that informs both academic research and policy-making. While these examples clarify the type of research that Industry and Innovation endeavours to publish, the next section will highlight three areas that the editorial team believes to hold considerable opportunities for future research.

3. One phenomenon and three new focus themes

Congruent with the broad scope of topics that would be of interest to participants in the DRUID conferences, Industry and Innovation has positioned itself as a journal that is broadly interested in the phenomenon of innovation. While the journal has traditionally followed an inclusive approach with regard to scientific disciplines, topics and research methods, this positioning may be perceived as a challenge in the sense that it may imply a generic nature that complicates differentiation from other journals in the field. The editorial team of Industry and Innovation is convinced that the journal’s breadth and inclusiveness have been a strength rather than a liability. Industry and Innovation is committed to publishing a wide range of papers and to attracting a diverse group of scholars as authors in order to ensure that we continue to publish innovative and thought-provoking – or in another word, cool – research.

Although we invite submission of all work that falls under the broader aims and scope of Industry and Innovation, the editorial team has decided to formulate three areas of inquiry which we refer to as focus themes and which we believe to hold considerable opportunities for future research. The aim of the focus themes is to reflect major academic debates, led at DRUID conferences and beyond, on particularly salient facets of the phenomenon of innovation. While the focus themes are meant to trigger research activity in these areas, they shall also help position the journal more explicitly within the field and make prospective authors aware of Industry and Innovation as a particularly relevant outlet for their research.

3.1. Qualifying open innovation

Research on open and distributed innovation has so far addressed a variety of aspects related to the flows of knowledge across organisation and industry boundaries, and their impact on value creation and value capture in different types of organisations and industries. This focus theme specifically welcomes manuscripts that advance our understanding of when and for which projects and organisations various ways of opening up innovation processes are really beneficial. More specifically, we seek novel contributions related to relevant contingencies and moderators, which generate important management implications of the open innovation paradigm. Contingency factors or moderating effects may, for example, relate to the characteristics of knowledge sources, innovation-relevant problems or specific qualities of individuals, organisations or industries. Marion Poetz, an associate editor based at Copenhagen Business School, comments on this focus theme as follows:

With this focus theme we want to inspire and invite new research which qualifies the open innovation phenomenon in terms of the conditions under which different forms of open innovation succeed (or fail), and along these lines contribute to establishing open innovation search and collaboration competences on the individual and organizational level as well as the absorptive capacity and the leadership approaches to enable and leverage open innovation practices.

3.2. Innovation and international business

This focus theme welcomes manuscripts addressing issues related to international knowledge flows and international knowledge sourcing that advance our understanding of the opportunities and challenges of innovating across borders. The ultimate aim of the focus theme is to stimulate a debate on the globalisation of R&D and technology development within and across global networks of multinational enterprises. To this end, we seek contributions offering new theoretical insights and fresh evidence on the localisation of innovative activities and knowledge management strategies, accounting also for different global, national and regional institutional contexts, as well as political environments. In this regard, the focus theme draws heavily from the literatures on international business and economic geography. The importance of the geographical dimension in studying innovation is reinforced by Grazia Santangelo of the University of Catania, an associate editor:

Innovation has traditionally been a major research topic within the international business field. Interest in the topic has recently resurged and a debate on the new actors and directions of international knowledge sourcing has reignited. By hosting this focus theme, Industry and Innovation intends to engage in this debate and welcomes submissions investigating innovation-related issues from an international business and economic geography perspective.

3.3. Innovation in the entrepreneurial process

Entrepreneurship research has traditionally focused on the actors, actions, resources, environmental influences and outcomes related to discovery and creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Moreover, research has addressed the characteristics, actions and challenges of owner-managers and their businesses. This focus theme invites submissions that are particularly interested in the intersection of these areas of entrepreneurship research with innovation. In that regard, we seek submissions that deal with innovation in the entrepreneurial process, both as a source of opportunities and as a consequence of entrepreneurship. We are also interested in the institutional underpinnings of innovation in entrepreneurial firms, for example, the role of intellectual property rights or markets for technology. This Schumpeterian view of innovation is underlined by Karl Wennberg of Stockholm School of Economics, an associate editor:

Innovation in the entrepreneurial process is an important topic since innovation is what allows firms to build capabilities to thrive in competitive markets. Innovations – especially those with ‘disruptive’ potential – tend to come from newly started independent firms rather than incumbents. Yet, most new firms are based on replicative variants of already established opportunities and business models rather than on innovations. A major challenge for research on innovation in the entrepreneurial process is thus to examine the conditions under which new firms develop innovations and the contingencies under which those innovations lead to firm-level capabilities and growth, and potentially also industry-level disruptive changes. Further, whereas much of the innovation literature has relied on patents and R&D spending to measure innovation, alternate measures, such as more informal ‘innovative activities’ might be more germane for young and primarily small firms. For these reasons, Industry and Innovation sees considerable room for theoretical as well as methodological advancements in this area.

4. The articles in this special issue

This issue introduces the three focus themes described above through an overview and perspectives article on each topic. The editorial team approached a number of experts with extensive experience in the areas covered by the focus themes and invited them to contribute. The contributors were given no instructions apart from a short description of the focus theme. The resulting articles, therefore, represent a ‘bottom-up’ characterisation of important research questions and challenges within the respective fields of research.

In their article ‘The open innovation research landscape: established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis’, Bogers et al. (2017) present opportunities for future research on open innovation at different levels of analysis. The authors discuss contingency factors at these different levels and propose questions for future research that span across research domains that until now have been isolated. One of the lead authors, Marcel Bogers of the University of Copenhagen, argues:

It is important to qualify open innovation because we know quite a lot about certain parts of the open innovation process but we lack understanding of more specific mechanisms, interdependencies and contingencies. Therefore, I believe an important next step for open innovation research is to further investigate what the specific conditions are under which open innovation may be more or less successful. In our paper, we specifically highlight how addressing open innovation across levels of analysis can help improve our understanding in this respect.

This view is supported by Ann-Kristin Zobel of ETH Zurich, another lead author on this paper:

Open innovation is often understood as an umbrella term that describes different levels (e.g. individual, organizational), dimensions (e.g. intellectual property, organizational identity) and modes (e.g. alliances, crowdsourcing) of ‘openness’ in the innovation process. While it is crucial to clearly delineate and define those modes, dimensions and levels, it is even more important to study the links and interactions between them. The paper in this special issue sheds light on the diversity of these ‘open’ approaches, while at the same time developing a research agenda that enables studying their interactions and their joint implications for managing innovation.

The article is remarkable for another reason, namely, the process through which it has been written. Because the article reflects insights from two professional development workshops (PDWs) held at the Academy of Management conferences, the editorial team encouraged the PDW organisers to apply open innovation principles in the development of the article and to involve the PDW panellists into a collaborative effort. The result is an article co-authored by more than 20 experienced scholars in the field of open innovation which is a rare exception in the social sciences. As Ann-Kristin Zobel notes:

This collaborative writing experiment has been a very fruitful exercise for developing the research domain of open innovation. While it elucidates the heterogeneity of approaches to ‘open innovation’, it will help to mitigate the compartmentalization and creation of knowledge silos in an emerging research field. However, the consideration of so many heterogeneous perspectives seems to be a challenge in empirical research settings that require a much narrower scope and more concise definitions.

Anne ter Wal of Imperial College London comments on some of the opportunities and challenges as a contributor to this collaborative effort:

Writing a paper with such a large group of academics is a challenge as well as an opportunity. It is a challenge in many ways (managing time, avoiding free-riding) but perhaps particularly because authors may feel the urge to express their own views and push their own agendas rather than seeking to reach a more coherent, higher-level view on where the research in a particular field stands and where it may go. One of the challenges of the published phases was to move beyond the research agendas at the various levels of analysis, and seek to provide insights into avenues of new research at the intersection between these levels. At the same time, I felt that the project was an opportunity. An opportunity as a scholarly community to unite around the research challenges in the field. Too often, after initial seminal papers, new contributions to the field become increasingly incremental. They build on emerging mini-paradigms and established concepts, rather than taking on the grander ambition of continuing to push the frontier of the field by looking at the more complex questions that cut across such mini-paradigms and emerging research traditions. Ultimately, it was great to be part of the coordinated effort of the OI community to do just that: to signal to the field the tremendous potential of exciting questions still open, despite the extensive progress already made. I commend Marcel and Ann-Kristin for their critical role in bringing this complex and challenging coordination task to successful completion.

The editorial team believes that open innovation in science (OIS) holds considerable potentials. As Marion Poetz notes:

Industry and Innovation generally aims at being at the forefront of novel ideas in innovation studies and inspiring new ways of thinking about innovation practices. In an attempt to ‘practice what we preach’, it became obvious to us that a promising way of producing a review article on the open innovation phenomenon may be to access and leverage knowledge of many innovation scholars with different backgrounds, viewpoints and approaches to open innovation. Although collaborative research and publication processes involving more than three co-authors are very uncommon in the social sciences and thus related collaboration models and processes were lacking, we considered this to be an interesting experiment worth trying out. Our goal was not only to develop a valuable research article that may inspire new empirical research on open innovation contingencies but also to provide insights into new forms of producing research in the social sciences.

In fact, initiatives such as the OIS initiative of the Austrian science organisation Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft,³ whose focus is on the health sciences and the integration of individual stakeholders in research projects, or the emphasis of the European Union on open innovation and open science (European Commission 2016) indicate a paradigm shift that will affect research in the areas of interest to Industry and Innovation. We welcome submissions that investigate this phenomenon or that were created in a collaborative way involving a multitude of authors.

In his article ‘Innovation and international business’, Cantwell (2017) presents his view on our second focus theme. The article focuses on the interconnectedness of innovation and internationalisation processes as the main drivers of economic development. He outlines four areas relating to the knowledge-seeking motive for international business networks and competence-creating subsidiary activities to explain what the international business and economic geography perspectives have to offer to the study of innovation phenomena. Grazia Santangelo comments on the contribution of the article as follows:

The article by John Cantwell effectively summarizes the nexus between innovation and international business research and proposes inspiring new avenues of investigation at the intersection of the two research fields.

Mark Lorenzen, the former editor-in-chief and now director of DRUID, highlights the interconnections between the first and second focus theme:

Innovation is increasingly open and consequently more distributed across geographical space. This crucially influences not just strategy, but also local and national economic development. The currently most exciting development in the study of the geography of open innovation is taking place in the nexus of three complementary disciplines: International Business, Economic Geography, and Innovation Studies.

Finally, the article ‘The Schumpeterian entrepreneur: a review of the empirical evidence on the antecedents, behavior, and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship’ by Block, Fisch, and van Praag (2017) presents the third focus theme. On the basis of a systematic analysis of 102 empirical studies, the authors provide a summary that takes stock of the academic knowledge on innovative entrepreneurship and the antecedents, behaviour and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship. Asked about why it is important to study innovation in the entrepreneurial process, Joern Block of the University of Trier responds:

Because innovative ventures matter very much for economic growth and job creation. However, they must be treated separately (as their own category) from other ventures because they face different issues and challenges than non-innovative ventures. These concern, for example, the attraction of resources (financial resources, human resources), the role of intellectual property, and the mechanisms to generate profits (i.e. the different appropriation strategies).

The choice of this focus theme is at least in part motivated by the separation of the entrepreneurship and innovation literatures. The editorial team believes that a stronger integration of the two literatures offers considerable opportunities for cross-fertilisation, a view that is supported by the following comment of Joern Block:

The literature on innovative entrepreneurship is separated across different disciplines and journals. The entrepreneurship and innovation literatures do not always talk to each other. Our paper brings together empirical papers on innovative entrepreneurship and describes the knowledge that we have gained so far. This could help policy makers to get an overview of this topic. Our article can also serve as a starting point to develop future research on this important topic.

In sum, the editorial team believes that the three focus themes serve to clarify our view on exciting and promising areas of research that we would like to see published in Industry and Innovation. We look forward to continuing our relationship with a growing research community in the years to come.

Christoph Grimpe
Editor-in-chief, Industry and Innovation,
Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
[email protected]
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7644-2054

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the associate editors of Industry and Innovation for helpful discussions and valuable feedback on this editorial as well as for the work they dedicated to the journal. Moreover, I would like to thank the editorial assistant Geoffrey Thilo Borchhardt for working tirelessly in the journal’s back office.

Notes

¹ On the origin of this term, see http://gladwell.com/the-coolhunt/.

² See https://charteredabs.org/academic-journal-guide-2015/.

³ See http://www.openinnovationinscience.at/initiative-en.html.