The role of an innovation centre

The article describes the function and operation of an innovation centre in the Liverpool area of the U.K. Suich centres attempt to bring together at one focal point all of the advisory expertise needed to help innovators evaluate their ideas and convert them into business projects. In its first 2–3 years the centre concentrated on individual inventors, but found this unrewarding. More recently the centre's attention has been focussed on the region's existing small and medium firms. It has been found that better results are obtained by visiting firms to discover their problems rather than waiting for requests for help.     

The virtue of innovation: innovation through the lenses of biological evolution

We rehearse the processes of innovation and discovery in general terms, using as our main metaphor the biological concept of an evolutionary fitness landscape. Incremental and disruptive innovations are seen, respectively, as successful searches carried out locally or more widely. They may also be understood as reflecting evolution by mutation (incremental) versus recombination (disruptive). We also bring a platonic view, focusing on virtue and memory. We use ‘virtue’ as a measure of efforts, including the knowledge required to come up with disruptive and incremental innovations, and ‘memory’ as a measure of their lifespan, i.e. how long they are remembered. Fostering innovation, in the evolutionary metaphor, means providing the wherewithal to promote novelty, good objective functions that one is trying to optimize, and means to improve one''s knowledge of, and ability to navigate, the landscape one is searching. Recombination necessarily implies multi- or inter-disciplinarity. These principles are generic to all kinds of creativity, novel ideas formation and the development of new products and technologies.     

Computation vs knowledge in materials innovation

The title above reflects a statement by David McCullough, who said, ”Information is a wonderful thing, but it is not knowledge. You wouldn’t be educated if you managed to memorize the entire encyclopedia. You would be weird” [1]. Paralleling this theme, the theoretical physicist, Volker Heine, once said, ”How often have I read a paper about a piece of computational physics which finishes with the words ’and we obtain good agreement with experiment.’ If you know the answer from experiment, I want to cry, why are you wasting so much time calculating it?” Why indeed?     

The concept of entropy in scientometrics and innovation research

The concept of entropy well-know in information theory and thermodynamics is applied in the fields of scientometrics and innovation research in order to introduce an indicator for the institutional involvement in of the location of research and development. By means of this concept four applications in the fields of research and national technology policy, industrial technology management, and innovation research are outlined. First, the national institutional structures in telecommunications research and development in Japan are compared to those of the Netherlands. It is concluded that the institutional involvement is not always more random in a larger country but rather depends on the disaggregation into fields and subfields. Secondly, broad versus narrow national technology strategies in the so-called “high technologies” are compared for various OECD and COMECON countries. Thirdly, corporate R & D strategies of Japanese telecommunication companies are studied. Fourthly, for selected R & D-intensive technologies it is shown that with the progress of time the involvement of industrial branches in a new technology fluctuates. The four analyses are based either on bibliometric or on patent data. The usefulness of the concept of entropy in scientometrics and innovation research is assessed through these examples.     

The Year in Industry scheme: an enterprising partnership

The origins of the Year in Industry scheme are traced, its progress described and the reasons for its success given. The author highlights the importance of industry-based training for pre-university engineers and gives practical examples of cost-efficient training projects with views from employers and students. The mutual benefits to industry and university-based students of set project work during the one year placement programme are underlined     

Pharmacology and Pharmacy: research and innovation analysis

Pharmacology and Pharmacy has a highly vertiginous evolution at international level. Its results are widely applied in the pharmaceutical industry, which is in the first places internationally. The study is aimed to analyse the behaviour of the leading institutions at global level in terms of production of papers and patents; as well as the impact that these contributions generate. The databases used were Science Citation Index and Derwent Innovation Index, both belonging to Web of Science platform. The InCite tool was used to analyse the period from 2000 to 2019. It was demonstrated that there is no correspondence among the highlighted institutions in patent applications, patents granted and number of citations, as well as among entities with the highest number of papers, highly cited papers and number of citations. Leadership in the discipline of Pharmacology and Pharmacy is neither determined by their highly productive institutions nor the impact generated by them.