17.9.2008
SC-Research in the annual CINet conference

The Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) organised its 9th annual conference this year in Valencia, Spain, 8-9 September. The conference hosted several academic tracks as well as an industry track. Overall, more than seventy research papers were presented and discussed during the two intensive conference days. The vast majority of the papers focused on innovation in manufacturing context: on creating and managing innovation networks, leveraging manufacturing firms’ absorptive capacity, new trends in ICT-based innovation, supporting organisational and employee creativity, different ways in which the new product development process can be improved, and selection strategies for discountinous innovation, to name a few.

Two distinguished scholars from UK, professor John Bessant (Imperial College) and professor Ben Martin (University of Sussex) gave highly insightful presentations on the history, present, and future challenges of innovation research and management. Ben Martin concluded that one of the ‘black spots’ in innovation studies remains inadequate understading of innovation in service industries. Among the few papers that specifically focused on services, was the one presented by Arja Kuusisto from SC-Research: “Customer interaction in service innovation: Seldom intensive but often decisive. Case studies in three business service sectors.” Download (Pdf, 237 KB)