Acta Astronautica, 2015

i Ozgur Gurtuna, for sharing his time, thoughts, suggestions, and ideas. We would also like to express our thanks to our Team Project Teaching Associate, Matthew Claude, for his continuous support, late night encouragement, and for keeping us on point. Special thanks goes out to our Project Advisor, Julien Tallineau, who brought great spirit, help, and motivation throughout the report work.

2012

Abstract: This paper shows how competition for land may lead firms to optimally innovate in spite of the market being perfectly competitive. When bidding for a location, firms can enhance their bid by investing in innovations that make the land more valuable. Firms are willing to innovate because the non-replicability of land implies that they will not be undercut by some other producer leading to losses as in the standard theory. In the absence of spillovers over space and over time, firms will optimally innovate.

2013

In recent years, innovation processes involve more heterogeneous actors inside and outside the firm. Little is known however about the spatial impact of this organisational decomposition of innovation processes (ODIP): Does it lead to a geographical dispersion of innovation activities as well? Furthermore, which parts of the innovation process are carried out spatially or organisationally separated? To what extent are knowledge-creating activities subject to organisational decomposition? We propose the analytical ODIP framework which integrates research on innovation systems, global value chains and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Thereby we provide a conceptual contribution to the debate on the globalisation of innovation in the identification of different modes of decomposed innovation processes by capturing the participating actors and their contribution in specific innovation events. The exploration of the spatial dimension of innovation processes in the software i...

2012

It could be said without the risk that generalisations often incur that the great products or inventions we deal with on a daily basis are a significant departure from the objects initially designed. Very often all that remains of these are the names, the idea, and what reaches us now is a series of additions or a growing sum of small but good modifications, which encouraged optimisation, improvement, or adjustment to successive and new experiences, requirements that people expect of these products and even spaces. Therefore, we can accept that adding, introducing new visions, new positions in relation to what has been established, offers the possibility of updating and renewing the actual product, often to the point where it becomes new objects and sometimes shifts in paradigm.

Research Policy, 1995

Despite an expanding critique, the idea of the linear model of R & D (and the inequalities implicit within it) still holds sway in what Rosenberg (Science and Public Policy, 1991, 18, 335–346) has termed “our roadmap of the science/technology relationship”. In constructing a new map, we must first recognize R & D as having a social and spatial, as well as a technical, content. In the paper this approach is used to analyse four case studies of the R & D process. In each case, the company conceptualises the R & D process in terms of linearity but it doesn't work quite like that in practice. The variations are not major, but neither are they insignificant. Moreover, they do seem to be associated with social and spatial modifications of the inequalities inherent, or potentially present, in the pure linear model. Maybe if these companies could think less in terms of the linear model, and stop measuring their actual, complex practice against it and thereby conceiving of that complexity as in some way a deficiency, then further positive moves away from the linear model could be made.

2014

Prior to 2004, most of the space activities were dominated by governmental efforts. On June 21, 2004, SpaceShipOne (SS1) was launched from the Mojave Desert; a one-of-a-kind spaceplane developed by aeronautic designer and engineer Burt Rutan. The SS1 became the first privately funded manned spacecraft to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. This particular achievement initiated the era of entrepreneurial space, also known as NewSpace and Alt.Space. The Silicon Valley mentality of entrepreneurs today is causing the rapid development of an industry which was previously in a stagnated situation. Within 10 years of the SS1 launch, the number of private companies has increased remarkably. The development of relatively cheap and reusable commercial launch vehicles, both for space tourism and other commercial endeavors, represent only a fraction of the current ongoing activities of entrepreneurial space. There are companies developing commercial space habitats, interplanetary bases, interplanetary voyages and even asteroid mining activities. The only way to really understand the extent and nature of entrepreneurial space as well as predict its behavior is by analyzing it as a newly emerging complex socio-technical system: the entrepreneurs as the system builders with their inventions in form of artifacts, companies and organizations and technical and social elements that are co-enabling and co-evolving. After 50 years of space activities, only around 500 people have been to orbit until now, most of them being extensively prepared scientists and military men trained both physiologically and psychologically in order to adapt to the highly engineeristic and extremely complicated artificial environments, characterized above all by elementary levels of habitability. A future with privates gaining access to space leads to an unprecedented problem: the presence of the “untrained” public customer who would be interacting with artificial instruments and environments bound to subdue their users and hosts to incredible amount of stress; hence the crucial role of designers to create highly dynamic environments designed to adapt to their users. Priority and budget issues until today have resulted in marginal design considerations in space, except in rare cases such as the historic intervention of Raymond Lowey on the Skylab in the 1970’s, which proved of inestimable value to the success of the entire program. The goal of this research is therefore to analyze entrepreneurial space from a socio-technical point of view. On one hand, this perspective permits us to better understand the mechanisms and dynamics of this reality and to define its unique characteristics. On the other, it serves as a starting point to demonstrate the potential areas of design intervention and the role that the designers will have in the system. In fact, it will be demonstrated how the role of the designer will be a crucial element for the growth of this newly emerging system.

Innovations, Regions and Projects: Studies in …, 2003

Innovation is a fascinating and challenging topic, because it is something that is always changing. It is more or less a tautology that we draw on new knowledge and new combinations of knowledge, for example, as our society becomes increasingly knowledge-based and dependent on high technology. This is one of the reasons (not the only one) for the growing emphasis on open innovation – it is harder to gather all of the relevant knowledge together within the boundaries of an established organisation, and new sources of knowledge, and ways of leveraging their resources, are called for. It is also important to combine technological knowledge with understanding of market dynamics and social processes – especially when we are in the business of designing a complex new offering that features not only goods but also services, and thus the prospect of multiple interactions between the system and its users extending over periods of time. Not only are new ways of integrating knowledge required, but also we may need to employ new tools and techniques – for example in the activity of service design. The locus of innovation thus changes. It is not that the conventional R&D laboratory is disappearing – though it too may be transformed through the application of new techniques (such as simulation and modelling) and organisational changes (e.g. outsourcing and offshoring of parts of R&D and other innovation support services). But innovation can also depend much more on cooperation among many parties in a much more distributed process, with ideas emerging, being turned into prototypes or models, being tested and trialled, being implemented and redesigned, across many locations. The ways in which such cooperation can take place are enormously varied, so a wide variety of innovation processes is emerging. Large firms (or public services) can simply outsource some operations or engage in new partnerships, or they may go for crowdsourcing or working with new communities (e.g. the Open Source movement). Virtual organisations may arise, more on a bottom-up basis, to respond to invitations to undertake projects – or more spontaneously, to address problems they feel are being neglected by existing initiatives. It has long been known that users are the source of many innovations and innovative ideas, but this theme has only risen to the fore recently; again we see the locus of innovation moving away from the traditional sites of activity – which is where we tend to undertake statistical measurement and to aim policies. Of course, the locus of innovation is also changing in global terms, as emerging economies (in particular) become important investors in STI activities. While the massive efforts being made by China, in particular, may be felt to be a competitive threat by many in the West, one response is to establish new approaches to innovation cooperation on a global scale. We can also be hopeful that these efforts will contribute to innovations that help to address some of the Grand Challenges we now confront – especially those concerned with environmental sustainability and human health. If one major theme we encounter in this publication is change in the locus of innovation, we should also be prepared to consider change in the focus of innovation. As just mentioned, innovation can be explicitly directed towards addressing Grand Challenges. It is practically unthinkable that our societies will successfully meet challenges associated with demography; sustainability; food, energy and water security, and the like, without innovation being a large part of the picture. Social change may also be required, for example to curb the more damaging aspects of contemporary lifestyles (consider, for example, the obesity epidemic). But many social innovations require at least some new technology, and when we think about the changing focus of innovation, the issue is less one of a move away from conventional technological innovation, to a much more thorough understanding of how technological and social change are both required for service innovation. This itself requires some rethinking of management practice and policy development; but such a shift in focus is required if the objectives of innovation efforts are to be focused more on meeting Grand Challenges. Practitioners will need to examine just how to incentivise and facilitate such efforts, so that we can more effectively face the complex environment that the last two centuries of industrial development and innovation have bequeathed us.

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2021

Research SummaryAnticipating that innovation nurtures entrepreneurship, we began an extended case study of an innovative start‐up in the space industry. We quickly saw that institutions imposed formidable barriers to implementing entrepreneurship from innovation. Curious about how, why and the extent of this situation, we widened our study to other start‐ups, CEOs of existing businesses, an incubator, a technology transfer office and key influencers in large space companies and agencies. We found that institutions and policies had, in effect, shrunk the entrepreneurial field, leaving little room for enterprise. Conceptualizing from this, we propose the institutions create an “entrepreneurial space.” Theoretically, we explain how this concept of an entrepreneurial space can be usefully applied in other contexts.Managerial SummaryThe space industry is extremely innovative. It is also dominated by two powerful incumbent firms and a third that is highly regulated. This research examines...

2013

The purpose of this working paper is to provide a short overview of actual topics in contemporary research concerned with global, national, regional and local knowledge and innovation dynamics. In the text, we stress the importance to understand the current changes of the global and their implications for knowledge generation and innovation. Treating knowledge as a key resource for innovation shifts the focus from the innovation itself to the process of knowledge generation, transformation and diffusion, i.e. to knowledge dynamics. This necessitates integrating spatial aspects since knowledge generation and as a result, innovation exhibits a strong geographical clustering, which implies that innovation ability and innovation resources also are strongly clustered geographically in particular to urban regions. The role of interaction and proximity for knowledge generation and innovation is highlighted and instead it is stressed that relational, cognitive, organizational, social and institutional proximities are not substitutes or complements to spatial proximity but that they are all functions of the prevailing spatial proximity. Another important factor for interaction is social capital, which by fostering trust makes information and knowledge to diffuse faster.