16.9.2010
SC-Research in the 11th CINet Conference

The 11th annual conference of CINet (Continuous Innovation Network) was organized in Zürich, Switzerland, 5-7 September. The theme of the conference was ‘Practising innovation in times of discontinuity’. Accordingly, themes such as the simultaneous management of different types of innovation logics, innovation approaches in the developing markets, and challenges and opportunities of open innovation were well presented by the research papers. Proferssor Paul Carlile from the Boston University was the other scientific keynote speaker of the conference. One of the messages from his excellent presentation was that the engines of innovative thinking and solutions are often questions asked in a new, different way: it is not only difficult to look into an existing area from a fresh angle, but new types of questions may require a new innovation infrastructure in order to be answered. Hence, many important innovations are likely to come from unexpected ‘outside’ sources.

SC-Research presented two research papers in the conference: “Outsourcing failures that hamper service innovation – A case study using the service blueprinting method”, by Pirjo Yli-Viitala, Jari Kuusisto, and Kyrill Meyer. And, “Customers and users as drivers and resources of new service development: Three approaches towards user needs driven service innovations”, by Arja Kuusisto and Jari Kuusisto.