You may participate to this conference

http://www.continuous-innovation.net/events/conferences/2016.html

This year the theme of the conference is Innovation and tradition: combining the old and the new.

The essence and the consequences of innovations are often studied taking into account the disruptive role of new enabling technologies and solutions. However, successfully combining old and new knowledge provides firms with the opportunity to develop highly valuable and appropriable innovations. This depends on the fact that old knowledge often resides in specific firms or territories’ traditions, increasing thus the uniqueness of resulting innovations.

Past innovation research has debated the topic of combining the old and the new in innovation processes, by showing that the deployment of mature knowledge has supported radical innovation in industries such as telecommunications, pharmaceutics, mechanics or by studying the foundations of retrovation and “innovating through tradition” approaches in product design. However, today firms face the challenges of combining old and new knowledge in an increasing variety of mature settings. New technologies such advanced robotics, new lightweight materials, and Internet of Things are paving the way for disruptive innovations in the agriculture, textile, construction, cultural heritage and many other traditional sectors in manufacturing. In a similar vein, various examples of social innovation stem from applying digital technologies for reviving old practices in market relationships: on-line sharing platforms enable new models of collaborative consumption that have their foundations in the old logics of a “pre-capitalist” era of local consumption.

Combining “the old with the new” is not trivial and deserves attention since it presents significant tensions for firms. The way in which firms can combine temporal exploration of mature knowledge with the exploitation of current and emerging technologies still presents many gaps. We know little on how firms should decide what to unlearn and what products and technologies to develop on the top of their tradition, or how they should manage creativity in the design process. Also, reusing traditional knowledge to innovate offers new insights for analysing the technology transfer endeavours of universities, since this calls for developing ad hoc approaches to combining new technological and scientific paradigms with firms’ traditional assets, resources, and competencies.

The way through which firms develop innovations and economic value from combining new with old stands out as an important field of research, with a promising potential for studies on continuous innovation, R&D management, strategic management, industrial change, business model innovation, service and systems design. We thus encourage papers using one or more of these perspectives. Furthermore, papers are welcome, which address continuous innovation topics such as:

•Continuous innovation strategies

•Continuous innovation in products and operations

•Knowledge, learning, and continuous innovation

•Organizing for continuous and/or discontinuous innovation

•Management of ideas and creativity

•Ambidexterity and tensions in innovation processes

•Business model innovation

•Continuous service innovation

•Innovation with external partners

•Innovation, creativity and design

•Continuous innovation in cultural industries

•Continuous innovation practices and performance