Innovation Management and Innovation Networks

Innovation is the creation and transformation of new knowledge into new products, processes, or services that meet market needs. As such, innovation creates new businesses and is the fundamental source of growth in business and industry and can be the key driver for the creation of more sustainable economies and company strategies.

The ability to generate and sustain innovation has become critical for companies as markets grow more global, open, and competitive, and as customer expectations grow more diverse and demanding.

This special issue wants to cover the current issues in innovation management and innovation networks and is interested in topics like: 

• The impact of new sustainability requirements on the dynamic capabilities that a firm should develop and sustain to remain innovative and therewith competitive in turbulent environments. In particular, which new innovation capabilities are required to integrate environmental, social and financial objectives? 
• How, and under what conditions, do entrepreneurs in developing countries innovate? And what can be done to support innovation by entrepreneurs in developing countries?
• Balancing capability building for radical and incremental innovations. Incremental innovation capabilities consist of skills and competences that refine existing products, while radical innovation capabilities are covering skills which are needed to significantly transform existing products or services. What kind of learning creates capabilities needed for the generation of incremental or of radical innovations? What kind of lessons can be taken respectively how to manage the process of developing capabilities in innovation management?
• Analysis of innovation networks: Economic operations and thus innovations are embedded in social relations and structures. Therefore, the organizational units that create innovation are not individual businesses, but usually networks. From a resource point of view, networks hold a variety of advantages for their members, such as access to material and immaterial resources, information and knowledge. How can the new role of intermediaries as an architect of collective exploration and creation of knowledge in open innovation be described? What are the key variables in the process of managing innovation networks? Any kind of discussions and analysis of innovation networks are welcome.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Deadline

Full papers for this special edition of 'management revue' must be with the editors by July 31st, 2014. All submissions will be subject to a double blind review process. Please submit your papers electronically via the journal submission system at http://hermes.hsu-hh.de/mrev/ using 'Innovation Management' as article section.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Susanne Gretzinger, University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg (sug@sam.sdu.dk)

Simon Fietze, University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg (simonf@sam.sdu.dk)

Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg (Germany) (matiaske@hsu-hh.de)