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Innovation project development is becoming more important in boosting competitiveness of universities and enterprises. It will not be possible to ensure rapid economic growth of enterprises without competitive innovations and without their introduction into education and business practice. The object of the research paper is innovations in teaching entrepreneurship. The subject of the research paper is analysis of the effective entrepreneurship education at the universities. The objective of the research paper is to study the integration process of technological business environment (TBE), intellectual capital (IC) formation, innovation project (IP) development at the universities and enterprises.

The tasks advanced in order to reach the objective: to identify the concept of IC, IP, the methodology of IP development at the universities, their main actions and methods; to carry out analysis of the TBE in Latvia, indicators characterizing it environment, the factors of TBE influencing IC, IP development at the universities and enterprises; to estimate the IP development as the teaching method at the universities and business practice in Latvia. The research period is from the year 2007 till the year 2020. This is the first research on the analysis of indicators of TBE influencing IC formation, IP development at the universities; the efficiency of involvement of academic staff in the formation of IC and IP development into entrepreneurship education in Latvia; definition of the IP development as the teaching method and presentation of its theoretical and practical interpretation.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

Low labor costs and market access are no longer competitive differentiators; increasingly companies are looking to design and develop new products and services as a crucial source of competitive advantage. As the pressure to innovate increases, so does the tension between shorter-term exploitative development and longer-term exploratory innovation activities. We explore this tension using interview data from software SMEs and venture capitalist firms who invest in technology-driven companies. Findings indicate that, despite firm’s having established solid innovation plans, short-term exploitative demands crowd out their longer-term exploration innovation during the development phase. Agency and resource dependence theories are used to start to explore some of the reasons for this shift. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

For at least the last 10 years, the Russian authorities have been declaring the need to move to an innovative path of economic development. The government actively initiates and applies various instruments and measures to promote innovation. However, the effectiveness of the Russian innovation policy is still in question. The chapter examines the evolution of state policy to foster innovation growth in Russia since 2000 and describes some sets of achievements and problems for different stages of this policy. In addition to analysis of changes in the innovation sphere at the macro-level, we discuss the primary motivations and limitations at the micro-level (firm level). As a result, the critical institutional barriers to innovation-based growth are revealed. In the same time, certain successes have been achieved in some sectors, and we consider various opportunities to improve Russian technological and innovation policy.

Sustainable development challenges have been gaining increased attention from scholars across a wide range of disciplines and governments and business leaders of developed and developing countries. In this chapter, we present selected Latin American socioeconomic indicators, and we note that much progress is needed to achieve the region's many sustainable development goals. We bring forth contributions from different streams of innovation studies for addressing grand challenges, and we discourse on how they push the sustainable development mandate forward. Innovation scholars have highlighted the need to elaborate novel transformational approaches to innovation for addressing such pressing grand challenges. Some scholars have also proposed that while the innovation systems framework is well-suited for addressing sustainable development challenges, it must first be profoundly and radically transformed to account for the novel ways of innovating and integrating a diversity of systemic economic actors and social stakeholders who have conflicting visions, interests, norms, and expectations. We present the different foundational strengths and weaknesses of the innovation systems framework and we discuss the pertinence for its profound and radical transformation. We conclude by organizing these different, yet complementary views of innovation in a conceptual framework while discussing the implications for Latin America and future research.

Purpose – To investigate the effects of headquarters (HQ) involvement in innovation development and transfer at unit level.

Methodology/approach – We develop a theoretical model that we test on a sample of 71 innovations belonging to 52 business units located throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA. The data were collected by personal interviews and analyzed using the partial least squares (PLS) technique.

Findings – While HQ involvement in innovation development enhances the effects on the unit engaged in the development, it is detrimental to performance of the innovation transfer process. We also find higher HQ involvement in the innovation development process and stronger innovation impact on the subsidiary to be associated with higher HQ involvement in the transfer process.

Research limitations/implications – There is a significant beneficial effect of HQ involvement in the development process in terms of the increased impact of the innovation in the unit, and a harmful influence on the specific performance associated to the transfer process.

Practical implications – HQs will benefit from improved performance if they become more involved in important innovations while limiting their direct engagement in the transfer of “marginal” innovations. It might also be wise for the HQs to rethink their involvement at unit level by separating the development process from the transfer process in their decision framework.

Originality/value of the paper – This is one of the first attempts to empirically connect the processes of innovation development and transfer at unit level in MNCs and to show the implications of HQ involvement in innovation projects at subsidiary level.

This chapter considers the role of technology transfer intermediaries (TTIs) in the processes of innovation in networks involving universities, research and development centres, and business firms from an international perspective. A diversity of types of TTIs is recognised in terms of their particular interests in the operation of innovation processes and the conditions they impose in transactions involving intellectual property. It will identify the various objectives of sponsoring stakeholders as differentiating the missions and accountabilities and, in turn, determining the focus and roles of different types of TTIs and the interactions and networking between them, both formal and informal.

In discussion, the chapter will propose that the significance of systemic influence on the processes of technology transfer and innovation should be researched at two levels. At the micro-level of personal interactions, examining how systemic influences shape tacit knowledge transfer between and learning by individuals engaged in research and innovation processes. Second, at the level of national cultures, examining the ways in which the cultural context institutionalises patterns of innovation and technology transfer networking.

The chapter aims at advancing existing knowledge on innovation-oriented public-private partnerships for developing smart tourism services at destination level. Recent research has emphasized to the importance of collaborative arrangements involving public sector organizations and private companies for the development of new or improved ICT-enabled tourism services towards the smart transformation of destinations. However, knowledge on public-private partnerships specifically set up for realizing smart innovations is still scarce. This chapter develops a framework for understanding the nature and functioning of this type of partnerships at destination level by integrating literature on tourism partnerships, smart tourism, and innovation in services with a case study of a successful partnership in the Italian destination of Siracusa.

Researchers continue to seek understanding of industrialization as a state managed process. How to create and implement new industries based on advanced knowledge is on the policy agenda of many advanced nations. Measures that promote these developments include national capacity building in science and technology, the formation of technology transfer systems, and the establishment of industrial clusters. What these templates often overlook is an analysis of use. This chapter aims to increase the understanding of the processes that embed new solutions in structures from an industrial network perspective. The chapter describes an empirical study of high-technology industrialization in Taiwan that the researcher conducts to this end. The study shows that the Taiwanese industrial model is oversimplified and omits several important factors in the development of new industries. This study bases its findings on the notions that resource combination occurs in different time and space, the new always builds on existing resource structures, and the users are important as active participants in development processes.