Roy Rothwell

Towards the Fifth‐generation Innovation Process

The growing complexity and pace of industrial technological change are forcing firms to forge new alliances and to respond more efficiently to market changes. This process is leading some companies towards more strategically directed integration within external agencies. Some are also adopting a sophisticated electronic toolkit in their design and development activities. These leading edge innovators are beginning to take on elements of the fifth‐generation (5G) innovation process. Describes developments towards this process.

The handbook of industrial innovation

Part 1 the nature, sources and outcomes of industrial innovation. Part 2 Sectoral and industrial studies of innovation. Part 3 Key issues affecting innovation. Part 4 The strategic management of innovation. Part 5 Future challenges of innovation in a global perspective.

Tough customers: good designs

Abstract Good design and successful innovation have been shown repeatedly to be intimately linked to early and close consultations between design and representative customers. What has not been highlighted, and should be, is that the tougher and more demanding the customers are in their equirements, the better and more robust the designs will be, along with their probability of reinnovation and propensity for successful longterm commercial exploitation. To demonstrate this point the history of a number of innovations based on good (commercially successful) designs is examined in two rather diffent industrial sectors — aerospace and agricultural machinery.

Re‐innovation and robust designs: Producer and user benefits

New waves of technologies have been sweeping through all industrial sectors in the 1980s. Increasingly, corporate managers have begun to use technology strategies as a major competitive tool. Within these strategies, there are at least a dozen different patterns of redesign and re‐innovation. Overall, one of the most important philosophies has been development of robust design configurations. These robust designs have a product family of variants which meet changing market needs with benefits for both producers and users.

European Technology Policy Evolution - Convergence Towards Smes and Regional Technology-Transfer

Abstract The paper briefly maps trends in public policies towards stimulating industrial technological change, from the largely uncoordinated ‘science policies’ and ‘industrial policies’ of the 1960s; to the more integrated ‘innovation policies’ of the 1970s; to the collaborative, pre-competitive research-based ‘technology policies’ of the 1980s. These changes were accompanied by increasing collaboration between government departments involved in the formulation and implementation of S&T policies. More recently within Europe (and beyond), policy emphasis has been on the technological strengthening of the so-called development regions, largely through the enhancement and creation of regional technology transfer infrastructures, and on intensifying efforts to assist the innovatory endeavours of SMEs. National programmes within Europe have been paralleled by programmes of the European Commission in Brussels.

The role of communications in technological innovation

Abstract Technological innovation can be represented as a complex net of communication paths linking the various stages of the innovation process. This paper briefly reviews some of the more significant empirical works which have related innovative success to good communications, describes the sources of ideas leading to, and utilised during, innovation, considers the patterns of information flow found to occur during innovation and discusses the role of individuals in technology transfer.

Industrial innovation and government environmental regulation: Some lessons from the past

Abstract While government regulatory activity of all kinds was at historically high levels between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the following decade saw a strong trend towards deregulation. Since the mid-1980s. with the increasingly obvious detrimental impact of environmental pollution and growing fears over ozone layer depletion and global warming, there have been strong pressures for more stringent environmental regulations. During the earlier period of intense regulatory activity, government regulations frequently had unnecessarily large negative impacts on regulated firms. This paper addresses a number of these impacts and their underlying causes and suggests how the negative effects of environmental regulations can be minimized while at the same time offering adequate protection to the environment.

Smfs inter firm relationships and technological change

Industrial production and industrial technological change are characterised by complex flows of technological know-how and finished innovations. There is a variety of inter-firm relationships of varying intensity and duration involving large firm-large firm, large firm-small firm and small firm-small firm interchanges. Certain large firm-small firm relationships electively combine the advantages of large and small firms in technological innovation.

The ‘Hungarian sappho’: some comments and comparisons

Abstract A brief and constructive criticism is offered of the recent study (see preceding paper) which successfully adopted and adapted the Sussex SAPPHO ‘pair comparison’ technique to the investigation of twelve success-failure pairs in the Hungarian electronics industry. Despite some differences in methodology and differences in the industrial and political environments in which the two studies were made, the results of the Hungarian SAPPHO and the Sussex SAPPHO are remarkably similar.

Innovation and re‐innovation: A role for the user

Various models of the innovation process, from the “traditional” to the more recent, are examined in this paper which focuses on the implications for the role of the user in the innovation process. The author points out the need for greater recognition of the importance of users as active participants in the innovation process. In many industrial sectors user‐need specification and product development involve more than simply a passive role for the user and innovatory success is associated with active user involvement in product specification, design and development.