TIM Review December 2014: Innovation & Entrepreneurship

The December 2014 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review  editorial theme is Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

This issue includes five articles, the first four of which are a product of our ongoing collaboration with the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM), a network of researchers, industrialists, consultants, and public bodies who share an interest in innovation management. Earlier versions of these four papers were presented at the first ISPIM Americas Innovation Forum from 5–8 October, 2014 in Montreal, Canada.

In the first article, Jens-Uwe Meyer, Managing Director of Innolytics, identifies four types of innovation cultures, each of which fosters a different degree of organizational creativity. Using exploratory factor analysis informed by a literature review, empirical data from a survey of 200 staff members of German, Austrian, and Swiss companies was analyzed. As a further output of the study, Meyer describes a new innovation management tool (Innolytics) to help companies initiate and implement innovation projects that vary greatly in the type, speed, and degree of innovation.

Next, Asceline Groot, Senior Communications Officer at ASN Bank, and Ben Dankbaar, Emeritus Professor of Innovation Management at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, ask: "Does social innovation require social entrepreneurship?" They argue that every entrepreneurial action results in some measure of social innovation, regardless of the intentions of the entrepreneur. Thus, instead of labelling some enterprises as "social", Groot and Meyer propose that all enterprises should be measured on their social impacts, not their social intentions. They support their arguments by examining the social impact and viability of 20 enterprises widely considered as "social".

Then, Finn Hahn, a Product Development Engineer at Egatec A/S in Odense, Denmark, and Søren Jensen and Stoyan Tanev, Associate Professors at the University of Southern Denmark, examine the disruptive potential of value propositions in the 3D printing technology sector. By classifying existing business opportunities and examining the market offers of startups, they assess the degree of attractive and disruptiveness of the associated value propositions. Their article provides empirical support for the conceptualization of the degree of disruptiveness of the value proposition as a metric for the evaluation of the business potential of new technology startups.

In the fourth article, Dap Hartmann, Associate Professor of Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, reports on the impact of a "Turning Technology into Business" course in which graduate students create companies to commercialize technologies based on university-owned patents. Hartmann outlines the structure and the main content of the course and explains the selection process of both the patents used in the course and the students admitted to the course. The article includes a case study and lessons learned by students and course organizers.

Finally, Pinaki Pattnaik and Satyendra Pandey, professors from the Centre for Management Studies at Nalsar University of Law in Hyderabad, India, examine three questions about university spinoffs: i) what are they?, ii) why are they needed?, and iii) how are they created? After examining how university spinoffs are created by reviewing three existing models of university spinoff creation, the authors propose a more comprehensive multistage model.

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