Edward Lorenz

Organisational Innovation, Human Resource Management and Labour Market Structure: A Comparison of the EU-15

No abstract available.

Education in the Learning Economy: A European Perspective.

Innovation is crucial to the competitiveness of the economies of Europe, and learning is crucial to innovation. The most important trend shift is not that knowledge is becoming more important but that it is becoming obsolete more rapidly than before, so that firms and employees constantly have to learn and acquire new competencies. This involves different types of knowledge of which the less formalised, learnt through experience, are often just as important as the formalised, learnt through exposure to teaching. The article opens with a presentation of different categories of knowledge, their consequences for approaches to education and the concept of the learning economy. Drawing on cross-national data it is then shown how European economies are characterised by dramatic differences in work organisation and learning at the workplace. The authors illustrate how such differences are linked not only to inequality of access to workplace learning but also to institutional and cultural differences between different national school systems in Europe. They argue that traditional schooling, isolated from society and organised according to traditional disciplines and educational methods, is insufficient in the context of the learning economy. Educational principles and cultures focusing on collaboration, interdisciplinarity and engagement with real-life problems are needed to prepare people for flexible and innovative participation in the economy and society.

HRM COMPLEMENTARITIES AND INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE IN FRENCH AND BRITISH INDUSTRY

A dominant theme in the high performance HRM literature concerns complementarities among individual practices and the positive performance benefits associated with adopting simultaneously a bundle of HRM practices. While there is little consensus over what practices should be included under the “high performance” label, most authors see employee representation and consultation as representing a traditional management approach. Moreover enterprise performance is commonly measured as financial performance and relatively little attention has been given to innovative performance. In contrast to the mainstream view, we argue that employee representation can be highly complementary to the training and incentive devices focused on in the high performance HRM literature. This proposition is empirically tested for the innovative performance of comparable populations of U.K. and French private sector establishments. The chapter constitutes one of the first major comparative empirical investigations of the HRM/innovative performance link.

Innovation and Competence Building in the Learning Economy: Implications for Innovation Policy

The idea that knowledge matters for the economy is far from new. Adam Smith (1776) refers to the division of labor among specialized ‘men of speculation’ as an important source of innovation. Friedrich List (1841) argues that the most important form of capital is ‘mental capital’. Karl Marx (1868) pointed to science as an important productive force. In the twentieth century the British scholar Bernal (1936) proposed that raising investments in R&D from 0.2 to 2% in Great Britain would stimulate the economy and bring a new kind of economic growth, and a similar message was formulated in The Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush (1945), which laid the foundation of post-war science policy in the United States.

Firm-level innovation in Africa: overcoming limits and constraints

This special issue compiles papers from across the African continent, ranging from Tanzania and Ethiopia in the East to Nigeria in the West.11. These papers were selected after a thorough double-blind review process. Two independent reviewers assessed each paper and several of the papers had to undergo multiple review rounds. We are immensely grateful to all the scholars who gave their time and expertise to the review process. View all notes The six papers included in the collection adopt different but complementary theoretical and methodological approaches. This introductory article proceeds by highlighting some aspects of the innovation landscape in Africa, with particular emphasis on the prevalence of innovation and the distribution of information sources across countries. It then discusses the most important constraints to innovation in Africa and shows how the articles in this compilation advance the related research agenda. Finally, a number of issues on which knowledge remains limited are raised.