The International Handbook on Innovation

[referencebooks]

The International Handbook on Innovation

Edited by Larisa V. Shavinina.

Published by Elsevier Science on their Pergamon imprint, 2003.

This is a very heavy 7" by 10" hardbound book, running to 1171 pages of slick paper including the author and subject indexes, plus a long table of contents section, acknowledgments, contributors' bios, and a preface.

This book covers recent research on innovation, mainly from an industrial psychology perspective, but drawing on many disciplines. The introduction says,

"The purpose of the handbook is multifold: (a) to pose critical questions and issues that need to be addressed by research in a given subfield of innovation; (b) to review and evaluate recent contributions in the field; (c) to present new approaches to understanding innovation; and (d) to indicate lines of inquiry that have been, and are, likely to continue to be valuable to pursue. This handbook does not provide the kind of literature reviews usually found in textbooks. The conventional understanding of a handbook -- as a compendium of review chapters suggesting a guide to practice -- seems to be very restricted in the context of the field of innovation. The 'handbook' title suggests a guide to practice only in cases where the body of knowledge is understood to be complete and more or less unchanging. For example, 'Handbook of Mathematical Formulae', or 'Handbook of Motorcycle Repair'. However, the study of innovation is a body of knowledge under dynamic theoretical development, and so I prefer to use the 'International Handbook on Innovation' instead of the 'International Handbook of Innovation'. I hope readers will find the present chapters lively and provocative, stimulating greater interest in the science of innovation."

The book is classified in the BF's in our library, based on the judgment, following LC's subject tracings, that it is mostly about the personal qualities underlying innovativeness. While it is about that, it is really more about innovation as something that can be pursued by companies, research organizations and educational or cultural institutions in a deliberate, managed way, and therefore might be more appropriately classified in some other way. It is, I grant, not easy to classify well.

The book is divided into fifteen parts, each with a number of chapters. The fifteen parts are:

1. INTRODUCTION
   
2. THE NATURE OF INNOVATION
   
3. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INNOVATIVE ABILITY
   
4. DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATION ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN
   
5. ASSESSMENT OF INNOVATION
   
6. DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATION
   
7. INNOVATIONS IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS
   
8. BASIC APPROACHES TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF INNOVATION IN SOCIAL CONTEXT
   
9. INNOVATIONS IN SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
   
10. INNOVATION IN MANAGEMENT
    
11. INNOVATION LEADERSHIP
    
12. INNOVATION AND MARKETING
    
13. INNOVATION AROUND THE WORLD: EXAMPLES OF COUNTRY EFFORTS, POLICIES, PRACTICES AND ISSUES
    
14. INNOVATIONS OF THE FUTURE
    
15. CONCLUSION
    

This review is getting a little long, but I really want to share the chapter titles under "Innovations in Different Domains" for a sense of the scope of the book:

1. Dimensions of Scientific Innovation
   
2. Do Radical Discoveries Require Ontological Shifts?
   
3. Understanding Scientific Innovation: The Case of Nobel Laureates
   
4. Innovation in the Social Sciences: Herbert A. Simon and the Birth of a Research Tradition
   
5. Poetic Innovation
   
6. Directions for Innovation in Music Education: Integrating Conceptions of Musical Giftedness into General Educational Practice and Enhancing Innovation on the Part of Musically Gifted Students
   
7. Determinants of Technological Innovation: Current Research Trends and Future Prospects
   
8. Innovation in Financial Services Infrastructure
   
9. Innovation in Integrated Electronics and Related Technologies: Experiences with Industrial-Sponsored Large-Scale Multidisciplinary Programs and Single Investigator Programs in a Research University
   

Before seeing this book I had never considered that the phenomenon of innovation itself could be studied as a science. The book makes up an impressive collection of evidence that a real beginning has been made to a science of innovation. Precisely because innovation involves creativity at its core and anything that can be put in terms of static scientific principles or laws seems to be, well, something other than creativity, the idea of a science of innovation seems counter-intuitive. But browsing through the book shows that there is much that we can learn about innovation, how it comes about, and how to foster it.

This is a useful book for people who see themselves as innovators or want to study how to foster innovation in their own organizations.