XVII Annual ISPIM Conference: networks for innovation.(Conference reports)(International Society for Professional Innovation Man

Athens, Greece. 11-14 June, 2006

The 2006 ISPIM conference was held in Glyfada, the coastal suburb of Athens in which many of the 2004 Olympic sites were located. ISPIM prides itself on bringing together academics, business leaders and consultants ('abcs') interested in innovation management. The local organising committee, supported by the Technological Education Institute of Athens and the ISPIM board, worked hard to give the delegates from 33 countries an authentic taste of Greece as well as a stimulating and very collegial conference.

Not surprisingly, keynote speakers presenting at the conference came from both academic and practitioner backgrounds. Paul Sloane (CEO, Destination Innovation, UK) presented a very entertaining outline of 'The Critical Importance of Innovation in Business Today' in which he covered three key aspects: vision, culture and process, using exercises and video clips. Costas Politis, an Athens Olympics Organising Committee Member, gave a fascinating final keynote on 'The Contribution of Education and Training in the Olympic Games--Athens 2004' in which he described some of the innovative initiatives the committee devised to enlist the interest and support of the wider Greek community in the games.

From a record 160 submissions, the final programme contained 84 presentations and 39 academic papers. The Knut Holt Award for the best conference paper award went to Murray Millson (University of Maryland University College) and David Wilemon (Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University) for their paper entitled 'NPD Entry Strategies as Mediators of Dimensions of New Product Quality and the Performance of NPD Technical Activities', outlining their quantitative analysis of surveys of new product development managers in the US. The best student paper was awarded to Ana Perez-Luno, a PhD student from the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain, for her paper 'The Impact of Market and Entrepreneurial Orientation on Innovativeness: An Empirical Assessment', exploring the link between the strength of customer (equated to incremental innovation) orientation or entrepreneurial (equated to radical innovation) orientation and innovative capability.

One feature of this conference that was very impressive was the online submission paper and review management process. It was certainly one of the smoothest and most easily accessible procedures I have ever encountered in my (quite extensive) conference experience. I can highly recommend this ISPIM-developed software to others about to organise conferences. Contact information is available on www.ispim.org.

ISPIM, which has an association with this journal as well as a raft of other academic and practitioner groups, has its origins in an initiative taken in the 1970s by Professor Knut Holt at the University of Trondheim. He organized a programme of comparative cross-cultural studies on Needs Assessment and Information Behaviour: the NAIB Program. The objective was to present an array of tools, as well as guidelines for their practical application, for the assessment of user needs in product innovation processes. During the NAIB Project an international group formally founded ISPIM in Trondheim, Norway in June 1983. ISPIM has grown into a worldwide network of academics and a range of professionals with an involvement in innovation management. It has a quarterly newsletter with member news as well as opportunities for collaboration. It also offers 'memobiblio', a quarterly electronic service for members containing a selection of abstracts from interesting articles in innovation management.

The next ISPIM conference is to be held in Warsaw, Poland on 17-20 June, 2007. Extended abstracts (800-1000 words) or practitioner outlines are due by December 31, 2006. See http: //www.ispim.org/conference/ for more details.

Sally Davenport

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

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