73% of Global Companies Will Increase Spending on Innovation in 2005, Up From 64% in 2004, Research Shows – More than 60% of Senior Executives Say Globalization Is Having a Major Impact on Innovation, But Fewer Than 35% Will Boost R&D Investments In China, India, or Other ‘Low-Cost’ Locations and Apple, 3M, and GE Ranked ‘Most Innovative’
Source: BCG on Yahoo News
MIT Professors Study Innovation
Innovation has become an all-purpose tonic, the default prescription for every pain associated with the retrenching American economy. Whatever the problem — slower growth, global competition, fewer well-paying jobs — innovating, we are told, is the solution.
Now a pair of MIT professors has dissected the practice of innovating and found it to be generally misunderstood. In “Innovation: The Missing Dimension“, published by Harvard University Press in October, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore argue that much of the innovation effort in American business goes into solving problems but relatively little into identifying possibilities and opportunities in the marketplace.
“We are in danger of learning the wrong lessons about innovation,” Lester and Piore warn in the book. “As a result, we risk neglecting those capabilities that are the real wellsprings of creativity in the US economy — the capacity to integrate across organizational, intellectual, and cultural boundaries, the capacity to experiment, and the habits of thought that allow us to make sense of radically ambiguous situations and move forward in the face of uncertainty.”
Source: MIT Tech-Edu
Falling numbers of foreign students will hurt US innovation
Post 9-11 restrictions that appear to have cut the numbers of foreign graduate students will also impact on US innovation, says a new study. Keith Maskus, a researcher at the University of Colorado-Boulder, found that “strict enforcement” of student visa regulations would destroy a large proportion of the innovative activity that sprang up following the Bayh-Dole act. Maskus explains, “Our results show that foreign graduate students and immigrants under technical visas are vital when it comes to developing new technologies in the American economy. The impacts are particularly pronounced within the universities but spill over as well to non-university patenting.”
Source: ResearchResearch
