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Chapter 2 Innovations Few informed observers would deny that the global financial system in the 1980s and 1990s has been marked by an especially rapid rate of innovation. Change has been constant, fast and contagious as between markets, operators and institutions. The effects on the system have been so extensive that it is not too much to say that the whole story of the decade can be traced to different forms of innovation. The last chapter briefly reviewed some of the main differences between the system as it is today, in the late 1990s, and the system as it
Humanitarian innovation emerged as a recognised field with the launch of a research programme by ALNAP in 2008; it was clear at the time that the sector was ready for the systematic approach to innovation proposed by the final review ( Ramalingam et al. , 2009 ). Ben Ramalingam has said that ‘none of us in the team have ever had a recommendation become such a tangible reality in so short a time’ ( ODI, 2010 ), including, most tangibly, the creation of the Humanitarian Innovation
proved useful in overcoming some language barriers, though others persisted ( Munro, 2013 ). The Haiti earthquake illustrates the multilingual nature of humanitarian crises and the importance of translation, as well as the close connection between language and humanitarian ICT innovations. These features are not unique to the Haiti earthquake, and many crises occur in contexts where linguistic diversity is greater. A recent example of the need for translation and interpreting
This book brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process. Starting with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption, it goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. The book then looks at food consumption as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially constituted consumption routines. It includes an analysis of how African Americans use consumption to express collective identity and discusses the involvement of consumers in innovation, focusing on how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. It also argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features.
This book is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. We live in a world where innovation, innovativeness, creativity, and invention are almost laughably over-used buzzwords. Yet comparatively little research has been carried out on the long-term history of innovation beyond and before the Industrial Revolution. This monograph offers both a response and a sort of answer to the wider trans-disciplinary dialogue on innovation, invention, and technological and social change. The idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse is set against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer in dialogue with a range of social theory about the development of new technologies and social structures. The book offers a new version of the story of human inventiveness from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present day. In doing so, it challenges the contemporary lionization of disruptive technologies, while also setting the post-Industrial-Revolution innovation boom into a deeper temporal and wider cultural context. It argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological, and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists, and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations.
3 Infrastructure and innovation: new limits to growth Infrastructure investment and innovation come up repeatedly in discussions of urban and economic growth. To state the obvious, infrastructure is concentrated in cities, and innovation is an urban activity par excellence. Less well known are (1) the gap between the funding needed to maintain and modernize infrastructures and the sums invested and (2) what the European Commission referred to as an “innovation emergency” in 2011: these new limits to growth increase the costs of congestion, add to the problems of
Why study innovation and why do so as an archaeologist? Archaeology has a longstanding and probably inescapable fascination with the temporality of change. Historically, these narratives were often teleological: how did we get here from there ? Early archaeologists took cues from geology and tried to understand the archaeological record through uniformitarian principles: that is that processes in the present could be used to explain patterns from the past (Trigger 2006 , Chapter 4). In practice this meant, among other approaches searching for parallels in
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in May 2016 brought the theme of innovation to the fore yet again. Innovation in a broad sense has arguably always been at the heart of any humanitarian action, at least in the basic sense of the word, as having to constantly adapt and adjust to complex and unexpected situations – to ‘innovate’, in other words. In the understanding of the WHS and within the UN system more broadly, innovation was to be strongly linked to cost effectiveness and
1 Innovation by demand? An introduction Andrew McMeekin, Ken Green, Mark Tomlinson and Vivien Walsh Sociologists and economists on consumption and demand The structure and regulation of consumption and demand have recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, ‘consumption’ being the focus of sociological accounts, whilst ‘demand’ has been the preserve of economists’ analyses. At the same time, there is growing interest, especially among economists, in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. The