We aim to encourage and support public participation in heritage through the development of Cultural Heritage Forums, a kind of cultural web portal that enables active participation of communities of interest in a way that complements rather than replaces visits to physical cultural institutions. The cultural heritage forum described here (Station X) is concerned with promoting an understanding...

Recent studies on design management have helped us to better comprehend how companies can apply design to get closer to users and better understand their needs; an approach usually referred to as “user centered design”. Yet, analysis of design-intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide and other leading Italian firms, show that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observati...

Open-source R&D initiatives are multiplying across biomedical research. Some of them-such as public-private partnerships-have achieved notable success in bringing new drugs to market economically, whereas others reflect the pharmaceutical industry's efforts to retool its R&D model. Is open innovation the answer to the innovation crisis? This Commentary argues that although it may likely be part...

If the technological situation is unique, the ways to understand the contemporary moral condition are not. We link it to age-old questions: in fact, the power promised by technology only establishes a new form of human finitude. In the face of this continuity of the fundamental moral condition, we examine a number of alternative ways of thinking about the basis of responsible innovation, explor...

Under very complex environment, innovation-oriented crowdsourcing is becoming critical because it is not only the result of cumulative dynamic interaction involving many stakeholders, but also is a social, spatially embedded, and interactive learning process that cannot be understood independently of its institutional and cultural context. Bringing together different crowdsoursing phenomena, th...

Human populations have extraordinary capabilities for generating behavioural diversity without corresponding genetic diversity or change. These capabilities and their consequences can be grouped into three categories: strategic (or cognitive), ecological and cultural-evolutionary. Strategic aspects include: (i) a propensity to employ complex conditional strategies, some certainly genetically ev...

The evolution of cumulative adaptive culture has received widespread interest in recent years, especially the factors promoting its occurrence. Current evolutionary models suggest that an increase in population size may lead to an increase in cultural complexity via a higher rate of cultural transmission and innovation. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of natural s...

The current literature suggests that the concept of consumer innovativeness is universally applicable. Innovators are believed to be novelty seekers and risk takers independent of their national identity, and therefore to be attracted to similar characteristics of an innovation across most countries. However, research in intercultural marketing has shown that cultural norms and values have vary...