In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that userinnovators almost always utilize “local” information – information already in their possession or generated by themselves both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue that this finding fits the economic incentives operating on users. Local need information will in general be t...

Executive Summary This report develops a method for quantitatively assessing the role of materials innovation in overall technological development. The report demonstrates the method for one specific case and defines the key requirements to use it in a number of other cases. The new method involves the comparative examination of overall technical capability metrics with performance metrics at m...

E-commerce portals come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they all involve interactions between information technology and people. Information systems are complex socio-technical entities and research into their implementation needs to take account of this. This paper describes the research approach used in investigating the implementation of a business-to-business...

Expectations surrounding the role of e-learning need to be tempered by an awareness of the variety of technical, institutional, social and economic constraints on the innovation process. This paper reports on a case study of the introduction into a university of one of the most central e-learning initiatives in higher education, an enterprise-wide virtual learning environment. Findings identify...

Drawing upon a framework of analysis developed by Thomas Hughes, this paper examines the development of the telecommunications network as a large technical system, dealing with the ways in which innovation is behind the rate and direction of system growth. It focuses on developments in the USA and in Europe since the 1960s in a period when a cluster of radical innovations changed the traditiona...

Using data from in-depth interviews and Delphi method on Open Source Software (OSS) contributors, this study uses a social constructivist and feminist perspective model to investigate the gender’s contribution in OSS innovation process. The results show that both male and female contributors have their preferences in term of roles and contributions in OSS. The type of contributions varies from ...

This paper describes two novel complementary approaches for systematically enhancing the process of innovation and discovery. One approach is workshop-based and the other approach is literature-based. Both approaches have the common feature of exploring knowledge from very disparate technical disciplines and technologies, and transferring insights and understanding from one or more disparate te...