In the knowledge economy, the value of corporations, organizations and individuals is directly related to their knowledge and intellectual capital. This does not only apply to organizations in the ...private or public sector but also to entire nations. If intangibles and intellectual capital are important to organizations, they are also important to the productivity and competitiveness of nations as a whole. The question we try to answer is how can we better understand the dynamics of intangibles on a national scale?
Abstract
Why open innovation? Imagine having a fortress or a bunker for innovation: what would be the impact? Imagine further that to be open is to focus on the growing tips of the roots of a tree to ...see what new ground they penetrate. The essential space for open innovation is that liminal space between the roots and the new ground to be penetrated. This space might be seen as the ‘Twilight Zone’, the zone for open flow innovation. As is the case for the developing areas within a nation, it is often what is happening at the periphery that is most dynamic. According to Tone Ringstad, a founder of Culturengine, innovation builds on values like curiosity, creativity, flexibility and diversity. The ‘open’ dimension requires values such as openness, trust, responsibility, authenticity and sustainability. A key prerequisite is an altruistic culture with ‘capacity givers’, who form a bridge between brains – for smart alliance building or brain circulation. To support these cultural innovation drivers, there is a need for a space. In response to this need, the first Future Center was established in Sweden in 1996, known as the Skandia Future Center. The Center later mutated into Mind Lab, Media Evolution Hub, Living Labs, LEF, etc., marking the evolution of these capacity-giver spaces. The most recent mutation is Wise Place, a creation of the Future Center Alliance Japan and now in its third iteration. It is a place, or cultural space, for mind evolution and is based on, among other things, Zen cultural insights.
In the past few years, the concept of intellectual capital has been expanded from organizational level to national and regional level. A model of 29 national intellectual capital indices (NICI40) has ...been constructed and validated by utilizing data of the IMD Competitiveness Yearbook. Research on the 14 years data, spanning from 1995 to 2008, indicates the pattern and progression of national intellectual capital in 40 countries. Trend analyses of this set of panel data disclose very interesting phenomena, such as Iceland shows the most rapid progress in national intellectual capital and is a rising star in economic development with an outstanding 94% GDP per capita (ppp) growth over 14 years. Moreover, it was number one of the OECD countries according to The Global Benchmark Report 2006 and received a consistently high ranking in world standard-of-living surveys. Unfortunately, the recent financial crisis almost crippled its national financial system and wrote off its past economic performance. On the contrary, Norway lags behind its Nordic peers in national intellectual capital development; yet its resilience to the 2007-2009 financial crisis impact is noticeable. Furthermore, Norway generously offers financial support for IMF to assist some ailing neighboring countries. Why the intellectual capital rising star crumbled down and the seemingly static country sustained the crisis? What is the implication of this controversy? The research results of this study have some implications for relevant policy makers.
For quite a while the issues of knowledge management, innovation and performance measurement have been on the agenda of researchers and practitioners alike throughout the world. Not too long ago it ...was recognised that there are direct cause and effect relations between knowledge reuse and invention. The present paper therefore discusses the constituent elements of innovation from a knowledge perspective which have been identified in the context of a European Union co‐sponsored research project. The six facts of the “innovation cube” are: reuse of existing knowledge; invention of new knowledge; exploitation (i.e. turning knowledge into value); stakeholders' contributions (to the innovation life cycle); the enabling ecology or operating context in which the innovation occurs; and the performance facet, i.e. the bottom line. A toolkit based on performance measurement thinking and implementation process for better management of the balance between reuse and invention in development environments is proposed and results from their deployment in three real‐life case studies are discussed.
