What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the diffusion of policy innovations in the laboratory. Our approach discriminates between policy experimentation...

As innovation becomes the cornerstone for new problem solving and creation of private and public value, this paper introduces the design thinking approach as a new means of systematic innovation. We introduce the approach with two short examples from programs to graduate students. We illustrate the setup of a design thinking program by using the HPI School of Design Thinking as a case study in ...

Health care is in need of innovation on many strands. Patient-centered care appears to be the key to the realization of the main objectives: service quality, cost reduction, access, patient satisfaction and the quality of working life. Innovation, and more precisely, the diffusion and implementation of new methods, new techniques and new processes and systems appears to be a difficult task. Con...

The Technology Innovation Program (TIP) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was established for the purpose of assisting U.S. businesses and institutions of higher education or other organizations, such as national laboratories and nonprofit research institutions, to support, promote, and accelerate innovation in the United States through high-risk, high-reward research...

This article is based on the strategic reflection and discussion that took place on occasion of the first conference on innovation and technology transfer in the health sciences organized by the REGIC-ENS-FENIN-SEMICYUC and held in Madrid in the Instituto de Salud Carlos III on May 7th, 2013, with the aim of promoting the transfer of technological innovation in medicine and health care beyond t...

Social innovation is an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and d...

Professional development of teachers has been recently highlighted as one of the essential conditions for the sustainability of classroom innovation and of the key contributors for the achievement of the world’s top-performing school systems. This paper examines findings from the evaluation of a large-scale professional development program for technology integration “Intel® Teach Advanced Onlin...

The sphere optimization program sphopt was originally written as a sequential program using lapack, and was converted to use scalapack, primarily to overcome memory limitations. The conversion was relatively straightforward, using a small number of organizing principles which are widely applicaple to the scalapack parallelization of serial code. The main innovation is the use of a compressed bl...

Computational biology and bioinformatics (CBB), the terms often used interchangeably, represent a rapidly evolving biological discipline. With the clear potential for discovery and innovation, and the need to deal with the deluge of biological data, many academic institutions are committing significant resources to develop CBB research and training programs. Yale formally established an interde...

Fifty-five public hospitals in all Australian States and Territories participated in the first two phases of National Demonstration Hospitals Program (NDHP). The program was established in 1994 as part of a commitment by the then Department of Health and Family Services to reduce waiting times and improve health outcomes for patients. The program uses a collaborative approach to assist public h...