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OVER the past twenty years, industrial robots have become increasingly task‐specific, moving away from the original concept of ‘steel collar’ worker, or ‘universal automation’. In terms of tasks or applications, robots can be divided into three broad groups, which also approximate to their chronological development:

Over the past several decades, there has been a growth in nonstandard professional work. One area where this can be seen is the academy, where tenure-track positions are being replaced by non-tenure-track (NTT) positions such as adjuncts and lecturers. Studies of nonstandard professional workers have found significant variation in job satisfaction, and this is also true for NTT faculty. Why is job satisfaction among NTT faculty so variable, and how can we understand it? Drawing on in-depth interviews with one hundred NTT faculty at two large public research universities, the author argues that NTT faculty vary in two important ways: the role of the income from their NTT job in their family and their pathway to the NTT position. The author develops a typology of NTT faculty based on these two dimensions and argues that these two dimensions intersect in important ways that affect the job satisfaction and job experiences of NTT faculty. The only group of NTT faculty that experiences high job satisfaction are those who prefer a NTT position over a tenure-track one, and who do not rely on the income from this job as the primary source of income for their family. This research has implications for understanding the job satisfaction of other nonstandard professional workers, who may vary in similar ways.

Nowadays, organizations have to resist the rising competition more effectively than their competitors and take a step closer to excellence in offering the product to customer demands. To do this, organizations need agile leaders in order to implement agility principles and practices. Especially in the health sector, health managers must be agile because of the specific characteristics of health services. From this view, this chapter aims to develop a theoretical agile leadership model in healthcare organizations. First, the authors define agile leadership and its sub-dimensions based on previous literature. Then, the antecedents and outcomes of agile leadership have been analyzed. “Drivers of agile leadership,” “organizational factors affecting agile leadership” and “individual factors affecting agile leadership” are identified as the antecedents of agile leadership. “Organizational outcomes” and “individual outcomes” are determined as the outcomes of agile leadership in the health sector.

This study attempts to create new insights into innovation management through the integration of innovation management processes and sustainable, iterative circles. Through the exploration of the use of sustainable, iterative circles in a manufacturing environment, this paper explores their role in facilitating customer-focused innovation practices. Other supporting antecedences for innovative behavior are reviewed, and their combined effect upon delivering cost-effective product developments are assessed.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews in manufacturing organizations from the automotive industry. Interviews were conducted with senior functional managers to interpret the application of sustainable, iterative development circles. Analysis of the data was undertaken via thematic analysis based upon pertinent and emergent themes.

Sustainable, iterative development circles overcame the inherent path-dependency of traditional linear development approaches, whereas, traditional approaches structure the involvement of key business functions, iterative circles facilitate more flexible approaches to product development that more closely met the requirements of the customer, especially when those requirements are in a state of flux.

This iterative, customer-centric approach to product development reflects the increasingly dynamic market environments in which manufacturing organizations operate. Using this approach helps to focus the organization’s attention upon customer requirements rather than the challenges of adhering to the rigid dogma of a chosen development methodology.

This study proposes a new approach toward the development of innovations in manufacturing organizations utilizing the sustainable, iterative circles, and therefore, contrasts with the traditional, linear development methodologies that are usually employed.

This paper aims to explore the ways in which firms utilise hierarchical relationships and the market system to supply and acquire intellectual property (IP) and/or innovation capabilities from sources external to the firm.

The authors conduct a field study to explore emerging governance structures for open innovation, using multiple data sources including documents (e.g. white papers) and interviews published by the firms studied, analysis of the firms' web‐based systems (where applicable), secondary content (e.g. news articles) and elite interviews with key personnel.

The analysis of seven exemplars of open innovation reveals that inter‐organisational relationships that facilitate open innovation can be categorised based on whether they are mediated or direct, and seek to exchange intellectual property or innovation capability. Using this categorisation, the authors present an analysis that reveals four governance structures along ten dimensions, and discuss the influence of knowledge dispersion, uncertainty and transaction costs on the emergence of such structures. The authors conclude that the appropriateness of hierarchical/market relationships or intermediaries to source IP and/or innovation capability is dependent on the information asymmetry in relation to the existence and availability of potential solutions/solvers; the suitability of potential innovation partners (solution providers and solvers); and the acquisition process for external innovations (including problem specification, solution evaluation, transfer, etc.).

The research is exploratory in nature, and designed to serve as a foundation for future research efforts. In particular, the work highlights the need for research that takes an inter‐organisational perspective on facilitating open innovation.

The research highlights the prominence of information asymmetry as a key issue in choosing and designing appropriate governance structures for open innovation.

The paper presents an exploratory study of an emerging, and consequently under‐researched phenomenon.

Organizations increasingly view their internal staff as a source of innovation and change and tend to involve an increasing number of organizational members in strategy work. This inclusion is a form of decentralized strategy and usually takes place in meetings. This chapter explores how meetings can become a planned emergence strategy for unlocking endogenous innovation potential. Data have been gathered from a still ongoing field project in which employees of six public offices such as the police or fire brigade participate. The public offices’ administration is characterized by a traditional division of responsibility, meaning that strategy has so far been the business of only few people at the top of the organization. For the first time in this organization, managers and other specialists at various organizational levels have been invited to partake in the new bottom-up strategy format Think Tank. The goals of the Think Tank are to identify the needs of the employees, to find and show potential, create a subculture and encourage innovation. The Think Tank meetings are attended by highly motivated employees who want to develop further organizational goals. The investigation illustrates that exchange on an equal basis, voluntary participation and mixed teams form the foundation for planned emergence strategy meetings. The interactions within the groups are characterized by participants having a positive attitude and avoiding negatively connoted behavior. In the strategy meetings, the various organizational members are enabled to join forces and contribute to strategic renewal. Strategic renewal is essential in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world. This chapter illustrates how meetings can facilitate strategic renewal through planned emergence.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the relationship between dynamic capabilities and innovation capabilities. It links dynamic capability with innovation capability and indicates the ways they can be related.

The relationships between dynamic and innovation capability were investigated through a systematic literature review.

The review indicates that common characteristics exist between of the both fields, which demonstrate six relationships. Additionally, findings show some inconsistencies and even contradictions.

In this paper, the authors have compared dynamic capabilities, a relatively new approach in the field of strategic management, with innovation capabilities, a widely recognised crucial domain for sustained competitiveness. Since both areas address issues that are essential to today's environment, future research should seek to clarify both concepts, by undertaking some new research and developing comprehensive and unambiguous framework.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that an unprecedented revolutionary change in the structure of the US economy warrants attention to the internal structures, cultures and strategies. Consequently, it is argued that for businesses, especially large industrial establishments (LIEs), to survive and prosper in the new and emerging economic order, they must aggressively redesign their organizational environments as a business incubator to leverage new and emerging social and economic opportunities in the development and commercialization of new products, new processes, and new business models, among others. These strategic goals and objectives require firms to pursue leverage creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship as well as embrace and adopt business incubation as strategy.

The paper attempts to make business incubation a strategy not only for new and emerging technology‐driven firms but also for large industrialized corporations. In addition, it argues that, in the new economy, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship should not be the exclusive routine or practice of only small firms but should also be a part of large corporations if they are to survive and prosper in the new economy.

Future research may develop testable hypotheses to validate claims and assertions. The last couple of decades have witnessed unprecedented revolutionary change in the structure of the US economy. Whether it is called the “entrepreneurial economy” or the “new economy”, entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity have become the hallmark of economic and business prosperity.

These concepts should hopefully encourage managers to view their organizations as business incubators on the basis of certain enabling structures, cultures (values, beliefs, norms, etc.) and policies and strategies that may either unleash and leverage creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship or inhibit them. After thinking about their organizations in terms of a business incubator, managers, hopefully, will craft business incubation strategies – programs, activities, and events that will bring a community orientation and collective action to existing product improvements, new product developments and the commercialization agenda via creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Business incubators have traditionally been recognized as new organizational forms for promoting entrepreneurship and stimulating new business formation. Similarly, business incubation programs, activities, and events have routinely been perceived as being beneficial to entrepreneurs, start‐ups, and small business. It is possible that no one so far has conceptualized and endogenized the firm as a business incubator and business incubation as strategy.

Problem specification is a key front-end step in the innovation process. This paper aims to introduce ‘purpose-context’ – a conceptual framework to systematically explore problem-specification across mapped contexts. The framework’s logic is operationalized by the inherent structure of language – its syntax/grammar, which enables the systematic exploration of problem-specification. The method showcases two approaches to structurally explore the vast textual databases available to us today for problem-specification in innovation science, thereby furthering the pursuit of innovation through its foundational elements.

The conceptualization of the purpose-context framework was guided by logic and the scholarship of integration applied to bodies of work including innovation, design and linguistics. Further, the key elements of the conceptual framework were unpacked and structured using the syntax of language. Two approaches to operationalize the method were developed to illustrate the systematicity of the process. The construct was then validated by using it to systematically specify problems in the technical context of Raman spectroscopy and in the socio-technical context of international development. Overall, this paper is a work of relational scholarship of integration that bridges academic-practitioner gaps.

The purpose-context framework is well-suited for application in the innovation process with applicability across several abstraction levels. One key contribution is the recognition that a broader problem-specification exercise covering one-one, one-many, many-one, many-many problem-context mappings expands the range of potential solutions (innovations) to address the problem-space. Additionally, the work finds that it is possible to provide structure to the cognitive elements of the innovation process by drawing inspiration from the structure inherent in other cognitive processes such as language (e.g., parts-of-speech, phrase composition). Drawing from language is particularly appropriate as language mediates communication in any collective pursuit of the innovation process and furthermore because a large amount of information exists in textual form. Finally, this paper finds that there is merit in approaching innovation science from its foundational elements – i.e. data, information and knowledge.

While the purpose-context framework is broadly applicable, the methodical approach to provide structure to the front-end cognitive process is ‘one’ fruitful approach. We suspect other approaches exist.

The purpose-context framework is simple in its framing yet provides innovators, scholars and thought leaders, the ability to specify the problem space with greater coverage and precision. Further, in the solution-space, it provides them the ability to choose the breadth of solution scope (e.g. targeted solution addressing a single problem, targeted solution addressing a set of problems, the combination of solutions addressing a single problem and combination of solutions addressing a combination of problems). In addition, by pairing the creative front-end innovation process with machine power, this study provides a formal method to scale-up the coverage of creativity (and potentially that of solutions to those problems) and reduces the chances of missed/blind-spots in problem-specification. Finally, evaluating purpose-contexts leads to ‘capability-contexts’ – a capability-oriented viewpoint informing capability development decisions such as the focus of R&D programs and related resource allocation decisions.

The paper uses logic to connect multiple bodies of research with a goal to provide systematicity to problem-specification – problem-specification, which is an under-addressed part of the innovation process. The use of data to systematically explore problem-space lends it systematicity (repeatability and measurability) and is therefore, valuable to innovation science. The proof-of-concept demonstrates the conversion of concept into a method for practical application.

This paper considers a peer education initiative through which incarcerated men provide English as a Second Language instruction to other incarcerated men. Programs such as this are sometimes criticized for objectifying and exploiting their incarcerated participants. I argue that prison programs that support the demonstration of competence and meaningful collective action can bring out the best in their students, transform the climate of the institutions that house them, and promote progressive social change. This study suggests how thoughtfully designed prison programs can create communities committed to personal growth, social responsibility, and engaged citizenship.