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Weekly UpdatesINTRODUCTION
This special issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice (ISBN 0-9750436-7-6) addresses 'Conditions for Innovation in Biotechnology and Telecommunication'. Each article addresses one or both of these emerging technologies as well as aspects of innovation processes, and each thereby contributes to the growing literature on technologies. The editors have worked extensively on modern biotechnology and telecommunication, and therefore we also have broader ambitions beyond the selection of individual papers to be published. Taken as a whole, this special issue aims to contribute towards specifying the similarities and differences during innovation processes in emerging technologies. This piece provides some background information on the editors, the general problems and three themes to be addressed in this special issue, before introducing each subsequent article.
This special issue is the result of a longer debate about how and why modern biotechnology, ICT, and telecommunication develop and impact on society, among us and among many other researchers. Both of us, Erik Bohlin and Maureen McKelvey, work at the School of Technology Management & Economics, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where we have the great fortune to have many excellent students and colleagues interested in innovation and interested in these particular technologies. Earlier versions of papers for this special issue were presented at a workshop we organized at Chalmers (May 19--20, 2003) entitled 'Innovations and Entrepreneurship in Biotech/ Pharmaceuticals and in IT/ Telecommunication'. (1) Hence, as guest editors, we wish to gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Chalmers to stimulate research and teaching related to management & economic issues in telecom and biotech.
One reason for putting together a special issue is that we are convinced that comparing and contrasting conditions for innovation is a crucial issue for researchers, government policy-makers, firm managers and others associated with emerging technologies.
* To what extent can general principles be identified for this type of innovation process?
* To what extent can general principles be identified for innovations as drivers of a particular type of economic dynamics?
* To what extent can each emerging technology be understood as a unique historical case?
Deciding about the range of possible policy interventions requires a re-assessment of the extent to which emerging technologies are influenced by general principles, as opposed to the vagrancies of historical circumstances. Our ambition with devoting a special issue to modern biotechnology and telecommunication is to encourage others--and ourselves--to move beyond the details of innovation in specific technologies to strive for more systematic and comprehensive comparisons.
PROBLEMS TO BE ADDRESSED
The social scientific literature has long established that innovations based on emerging technologies are crucial for growth. In spite of this, the specific interactions among science and technology that lead to economic growth remain a black box in many ways. In particular, we still have a limited understanding of the conditions and processes that make it possible for actors to innovate, based on new technologies. For instance, there is an abundance of theories concerning the role of intellectual capital in creating value, but relatively little empirical evidence explaining the nature of the linkage between such capital, innovation and commercial success of a firm. Similarly, the concept of technological discontinuities is often applied to emerging technologies, in order to stress the radical nature of certain innovations. Yet, it is not clear why some actors manage to take advantage of technological discontinuities, while others fail to grasp the opportunities associated with such changes and thereby suffer from them. Thus, even though innovations are now widely accepted to contribute positively to firm and economic growth, the specifics at the micro-economic level often tell a story of diversity, experimentation and selection, and in doing so, open up new puzzles for explaining how and why innovation causes growth.
Micro-economic mechanisms
Existing literature on innovation has made many steps toward sorting out general starting conditions for innovation from historical events. Yet, we would argue that in order to understand economic growth on a macro level, it is crucial to understand the micro-economic mechanisms that drive technological development and innovation. The paradox of setting out to consider the general conditions for innovation is that the micro-economic mechanisms tend to express themselves in a variety of ways. As outlined in the subsequent materials, some of the mechanisms driving innovation consist of experimentation, collaboration and knowledge-creation--yet discovery is at most half the story. Other mechanisms involve commercial exploitation, such as adaptation of knowledge to specific industries or adaptation of services to specific groups of users. It appears that aspects such as the maturity of the industry and nature of the technology involved most likely affect how these micro-economic mechanisms are expressed within a particular case.
Empirical diversity
Empirical 'reality' about emerging technologies often provides us with a diverse wealth of empirical details. The difficulty of 'testing' theoretical ideas in a strict sense has to do, we would argue, with the normal course of economic dynamics, where diversity and selection (based on criteria) affect the outcomes. The outcome is not given from the beginning, but instead unfolds through historical processes, driven by individuals as they interpret societal structures. Indeed, empirical reality provides us a great diversity of success, failures and experience--and these results may sometimes support (or reject) predictions from one theory. Yet the empirical diversity surrounding emerging technologies more often provides partial support to several existing, sometimes competing, theories--or they may help develop new ways of conceptualizing the modern economy. Theory-driven empirical studies have been common for research on both modern biotechnology and telecommunication, and lead to new concepts and theories about innovation, including examples of 'knowledge spillovers', 'network externalities', and 'competition among standards'. The apparent vagueness of human factors affecting innovation should not discourage study of the conditions for innovation, but rather provide motivation for more systematic research efforts.
Human versus structural capital
The broader perspective on modern biotechnology and telecommunication provides many interesting points of comparison. On the one hand, modern biotechnology is a knowledge-based industry that depends on complex, and to some extent ambiguous, research activities. The knowledge underlying innovations in biotechnology is often located within specific individuals and organizations, thereby making difficult to separate those who produce it from those who possess it for commercial gains. Many companies are striving to turn this human capital into structural capital, but, so far, individuals interacting in teams and through social links are responsible for most of the innovative activity resulting in new products and services. As a result, the biotechnology industry provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the relationship between individuals, innovation and commercial success. Telecommunications, on the other hand, is interesting not primarily because of the role of individuals, but as a technological system of many interacting forces and actors. The human capital held by individuals has to a greater extent value within the larger technological system. The ability to innovate thereby often relies on a whole series of services, hardware, development teams, existing computer programs, user behaviour, etc. Even so, both are highly dynamic and complex technologies affecting industries, which are characterized by interaction between technological change, markets, demand, and regulation.
Within this broader perspective, this special issue considers three themes related to modern biotechnology and telecommunication.
Theme 1: Evolutionary, long term processes
One theme is that innovation processes are largely characterized as an evolutionary, long term process. This process involves exploration and exploitation of new knowledge and of new commercial opportunities by a variety of actors. Another way of stating this theme is that the characteristics include diversity, much experimentation, failures and successes, organizational heterogeneity, and the like. While these characteristics apply to many technologies and industrial sectors, they are highly visible within these two highly dynamic and complex technologies. This first theme implies that stimulating innovation characteristics--rather than trying to rationally design outcomes--should be the aim when designing regulation and control mechanisms. For example, deciding upon a centralized, tight control of inputs into innovation processes in order to achieve one pre-defined outcome may not work terribly well. Instead, one must consider how delineating the characteristics can be used to design policies stimulating such processes. In some instances, government and firm policy needs to differentiate the roles of organizations/ actors, in order to specify which parts of the exploration and exploitation process each is/should be involved in. Different roles are possible. Therefore, we do not suggest a romantic looking-back to the telecoms era with government sponsored telcos and nationally favored equipment suppliers. Even so, in the present increasingly competitive market place, there is room for government policies with industrial ambitions and goals to stimulate the development of technologies.
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