Sociology of Innovation and Knowledge Management

This chapter describes and problematizes the specific turn to assetization that patents have taken, more specifically, the transfiguration of patents into speculative financial assets. Whereas intellectual property rights are commonly presumed to be key assets in the so-called knowledge economy, the mechanisms by which they are transformed and performed as assets are less examined. This chapter takes a closer look into the ways in which patents are turned into assets by practices and specific knowledge techniques both in and outside of law. With an emphasis on the processes of legal and financial abstractions, it identifies and discusses the modes and practices in which patents act and are transacted as assets that go beyond practices of commodification and monopoly rent-seeking: in patent portfolios, as real options and as instruments of financial hedging. Whereas law has enabled the creation of a market in patents as assets, the argument is that it has now become a financialized market object itself.

Pragmatism has been seen as a viable alternative to positivism in social science research. This paper explores the relevance of pragmatism and its relations to the conducting of research based on narrative epistemology as part of qualitative ideology. The results are supposed to benefit the Mediation Programme at the University of the West Indies in the form of Narrative Mediation. Social science research is based on asking and finding ways of answering questions about human experience. Research questions are about meaning, the self, and transformation. These research questions are asked and answered within a psychosocial framework that recognizes the respondents as agentic constructors of knowledge. These storytellers construct realities with their words, and those realities are the key focus of narrative mediation.

The concept of innovation has entered a turbulent age. On the one hand, it is uncriti-cally understood as 'technological innovation' and 'commercialized innovation.' On the other hand, ongoing research under the heading responsible research and innovation (RRI) suggests that current global issues require innovation to go beyond its usual intent of generating commercial value. However, little thought goes into what innovation means conceptually. Although there is a focus on enabling outcomes of innovation processes to become more responsible and desirable, the technological and commercial nature of these processes is rarely questioned. For these reasons, this paper poses the following research question: what concept of innovation is implicitly taken up by the RRI discourse and what implications does this concept have for the societal purpose of RRI? As a first step, we analyze the extent to which the concept of innovation in the RRI literature is uncritically presupposed to be technological. Subsequently, we examine the diverse meanings innovation has had over time and argue that while innovation originally had a political connotation it is only recently restricted to the meaning of technological innovation. We go on to show that even though the concept of technological innovation can contribute to the societal purpose of RRI, this requires certain conditions that are difficult to guarantee. Consequentially, we argue that future research should explore alternative understandings of innovation that better enable the overall feasibility of the emerging frameworks of RRI.

Napjaink egyik legmeghatározóbb megatrendje kétségkívül a digitalizáció, melyre a globalizáció következő lépcsőjeként tekinthetünk. Ennek eredményeképp új üzleti modellek és technológiák alakítják markánsan a gazdaság és társadalmi lét minden aspektusát, digitális eszközök és megoldások jelennek meg az élet olyan területein is, melyeknél ez korábban nem volt jellemző. Érdemes azt is figyelembe venni, hogy a hálózatosodási folyamatok eredményeképp az ipar-kormányzat-akadémiai szféra szereplői között folyamatosan rendkívül sűrű és komplex kapcsolatrendszerek alakulnak ki. A felsőoktatási intézmények bár évszázadok óta kulcsszerepet töltenek be a tudás megteremtése és disszeminációja kapcsán, felmerül a kérdés, hogy hogyan lesznek képesek a felsőoktatási intézmények versenyképesek maradni a digitális korban, mely a korábbinál jóval magasabb változékonysággal jellemezhető társadalmi és gazdasági környezetet teremt minden iparág számára? Illetve kérdés az is, hogy hogyan változik majd a szerepük egy régió versenyképességének javításában? A tanulmány célja a digitalizáció, a felsőoktatás jövője és a regionális versenyképesség kapcsolatának rendszerezése.

Digitalization is one of the key drivers of accelerated change in our everyday lives, both on an economic and social level. With solutions enabled through ICT technologies, we are more connected than ever on the global scale. In this next chapter of globalization, we currently experience significant transition in the structure of industries, consumer behavior and how we collect and manage data. This transition requires a shift in mindset, as we need to reevaluate the key factors of competitiveness, in order to prepare ourselves for rapid and presumably disruptive changes. These changes, however, mean to ease our everyday lives in the long run. The presence of an advanced regional infrastructure is a crucial factor in enhancing the competitiveness of regional economies, hence the opportunities in mobility in the digital age need to be revised. The aim of the paper is to systematize the key connections between digitalization, mobility and regional competitiveness while mapping potential challenges in the topic as well.

Knowledge is increasingly thought of as a common good. This is exhibited in the fact that
many central economies are moving towards economic paradigms where knowledge plays a
fundamental role. This paper explores the confluence between both processes, asking in what
ways an economic model based on the knowledge commons can open up new socioeconomic
scenarios in the face of overwhelming neoliberal financialization.

Offshoring and outsourcing have become the buzzwords of the IT community and the popular media discourse about the current era of globalization in services. Acknowledging the geographic perspective expressed in these dominant terms, in this article I examine the processes and activities that are oriented in the opposite direction. Capturing this inversion, I develop the concept of ‘onshoring’ and use research material from fieldwork conducted with IT firms in St Petersburg, Russia and their affiliates, agents and clients in the USA to provide an empirical case study. Onshoring encompasses the corporeal, representational, material and legal practices of offshore firms developing a presence onshore, with Russia as offshore and the USA as onshore in this case. The lack of an established Russian professional diaspora in the USA created a context in which developing a recognizable onshore presence was necessary for firms based in Russia. By explicitly recognizing that the efforts, risk-taking and experimental strategies of offshore firms to create connections, networks and contacts onshore in the USA are a constitutive part of offshore outsourcing, I document and examine the less acknowledged complex flows and practices of onshoring. I argue that although these actors and processes may seem marginal to the widely recognized narrative of offshore outsourcing, in fact, they are creative and strategic compensations that reveal how the globalization of services is enacted at the micro-level.

Social start-ups constitute a subclass of the innovative entrepreneurship market and they are a relatively new topic in the literature from both the scientific and normative perspectives. In Italy, a start-up can be registered as social-oriented innovative start-up (SIAVS), after demonstrating its ability to make social impacts and satisfy a set of normative requirements. This paper describes and models (at the territorial level) the presence of these innovative companies focused on social, cultural, and/or environmental needs. We combine data on the number of SIAVS and other start-ups in Italy with other socioeconomic quantities at the territorial level (NUTS 3 regions). Variables such as population density, metropolitan cities, number of certified incubators and percentage of non-profit organisations are identified as determinants of new social enterprises through the application of generalised linear models, while also considering the presence of zero inflation.

This study aims to articulate how the importance of the university and technology parks administrations has affected on the development of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in changing environment of the Turkish universities. The forty-five participants were selected from different startups at the university technology parks. By using phenomenological analysis, eight research questions were answered in the semi-structured interviews. The collected data were analyzed in Atlas.ti order to mke depth study. As a result, the data show that the university and technology parks administrations have inevitably affected IPR system in many ways. During the transformations process of the universities towards entrepreneurial universities, academic people and students have been influenced to a greater degree. Academic profession, which is an umbrella term for working conditions for academics, has changed a lot. Most (91%) participants agree that the style of the administration has played important roles to increase performance indicators since they are used to assess and measure individuals, departments and universities against each other; therefore, IRP have gained importance among the academic people  and students. However, the large number (84%) of the participants does not know deeply the details in IPR. More importantly, the large number (91%) mentions that these activities related IPR collaboration and cooperation among academics. Additionally, a large number of the (94%) participants agree that the effects would be different on the elite universities comparing to the socially disadvantaged universities. They (76%)point out that the future of higher education has been changing in terms of faculty organizations, particularly with new IRP policies. Most (85%) of the participants clarify that the university administration would develop a better network in order to increase the patent activities. Most (78%) participants articulate that IRP would change the culture of academic world. Most (81%) claim that competitiveness is important not only for the universities bot also for the academic people so that the university administration would change their performance criteria to prepare properly for the competitive global market. These (61%) participants strongly point out that employability is remrkably importnat for the universities. By improving intellectual property rights and entrepreneurial activities, universities can increase their funding. Hence, they take into account technology parks as the places to develop strategies for different activities to increase income. Furthermore, most (92%) participants mention that the financial autonomy would make the universities aggressive in the market due to the fact that the government is increasingly reducing the support for the higher education. Hence, the university management would try to increase their income by means of the IRP would increase conflicts and inequalities, the rest (71%) agree that the role and style of university management, like in Wisconsin Madison could manage the universities without conflicts and inequalitics. As a result, as most (91%) participants clarify that the university administration play important and crucial role in controlling and managing the conflicts and inequlities through IPR to protect all the stakeholders, particularly those who do not have strong background, like the PhD students. Higher Education, Technology Parks, University Administration and Management, Intellectual Property Rights, Autonomy