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The cover artwork is credited to Monthalay Chanthapanya. We are grateful to the contribution of Professor Jane Marceau to the early developments of the KISA project. The study is part of an ARC Linkage funded project (LP 0349167) in partnership with Australian Government Departments DITR and DCITA. The report also informs the OECD based KISA project.

Fostering greater firm innovativeness may just be the most critical advantage organisations must develop to effectively compete in the markets of not only today, but those of tomorrow as well. The connection between volatile and dynamic environments and the need for firms to be more innovative is oft made, and Japan in particular has faced trying conditions, experiencing perhaps the most prolonged recession any developed country has witnessed since the Great Depression. This article reports on research undertaken into the underlying components of firm innovativeness in Japanese SMEs. Ten case studies were developed building on results of a quantitative study of over 2000 Japanese SMEs which investigated the underlying components of firm innovativeness. Findings from the case studies support and extend results of the quantitative study, detailing critical associations amongst management and firm employees, individual firm members, groups and work teams, leaders and mentors, along with firm environment issues including regional systems of firm agglomeration and consumer and market uncertainty; associations which have significant impacts on a number of levels in regard to firm innovativeness.

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Innovation has emerged as a ‘hot ’ research topic in the management field. Currently, considerable research effort is being applied to developing better understanding of how it can be effectively developed within organisations. However, recent trends in the literature suggest that there is a lack of convergence of ideas and that the knowledge in the area is still in a relatively ‘untidy’ state. This is despite an excellent foundational literature base. In this paper, the role of research is investigated. An analogous approach is taken whereby some research shortcomings in the area of quality management are examined to demonstrate how similar problems have arisen in the innovation management area, and ways in which researchers in the area can avoid these pitfalls. These, hopefully, will be taken into consideration in future innovation management studies, and will result in increased quality and more credible research findings. Key words: innovation management; quality management; ontology; epistemology; research methodology.

Study protocol for the translating research in elder care (TREC): building context – an organizational monitoring program in long-term care project (project one)

explorative case study of the transition to the

Communities around the country are facing an increasing number of problems for which traditional government action is failing. This has led to a growing realization that the public sector must increase its capacity to innovate. In an effort to do so, the public sector has increasingly turned to networks of public, private, and non-profit organizations. While a considerable body of academic research has examined the relationship between collaboration and innovation, the research has focused primarily on the network’s capacity to generate new ideas. Recognizing that innovation is a dynamic and iterative process, which includes the generation, acceptance, and implementation of a new idea or approach to an issue, we argue that previous studies have provided for a somewhat limited understanding of this relationship. Consequently, these studies have provided little to no practical guidance for public managers. To address this gap in the literature, the present study makes a first step in the development of a management perspective on the relationship between collaboration and innovation. In doing so, we present an exploratory case study of the Texoma Regional Consortium, a regional partnership that brought together Texas and Oklahoma workforce development efforts, that suggests the design, development, and institutionalization of specific mechanisms (integration, dialogue, and coordination) to facilitate the use of the network form of governance for the specific purposes of public sector innovation.

Although recent empirical research shows the value of empowerment, and top management support (TMS)for new product development (NPD) efforts, it remains an open question as to whether empowerment and TMS are always beneficial for NPD performance. In a study of a large number of NPD projects we examined this question by (1) assessing the direct contributions of empowerment and TMS to speed and success in NPD, and (2) examining the potential moderating influence of uncertainty on the effects of empowerment and TMS. Our results indicated that empowerment is positively associated with NPD speed under all conditions of uncertainty, but is more highly correlated with overall project success when uncertainty is high than when it is low. TMS is positively associated with both NPD speed and success regardless of uncertainty, but we found some suggestion that Sponsorship is less important for speed-to-market under more certain environments, particularly when NPD projects are routine incremental innovations. The implications of these findings for a contingency-oriented view of NPD process are discussed. 1 Empowerment 2

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