Future of Innovation

The way innovation is organised is changing. One hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Alois Schumpeter (1911) saw the entrepreneur and the development lab as prime locus of innovation. Today innovation is seen as something happening anywhere at anytime. New forms of organising and doing innovation such as open innovation (Chesbrough 2003), user innovation (von Hippel 2004), Crowdsourcing (Howe 2006) or community innovation (Tuomi 2002) have raised much attention in academia, business and policy in the last decade. The proponents of these models often highlight the need to adopt these approaches in order to increase competitiveness in the global innovation race or to explore new inroads for tackling major societal challenges. New paths and arrangement for developing and adopting new products, services and solutions are driven by new technologies, the willingness of customers and citizens to contribute to innovations and global economic competition and rising educational backgrounds. While individual new forms of innovation have been discussed intensively in recent years, there is little systematic exploration about the potential in different areas, the underlying mechanisms, and the implications for economy and society.