Enabling innovation : a practical guide to understanding and fostering technological change / Boru Douthwaite.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Douthwaite, M. B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technological innovations.

Physical Description:

xvi, 266 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Zed Books ; Canberra : In association with Cambia ; New York : Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave, 2002.

Summary:

Enabling Innovation is an engrossing look at some of the disaster -- and success -- stories surrounding technological development and diffusion in industrialized and developing countries. The book tells the story of widely divergent technologies -- agricultural appliances, wind turbines, Green Revolution high yielding seeds, the Linux computer operating system, and Local Economic Trading Systems. Boru Douthwaite has constructed a "how to do it" guide to innovation management that runs counter to so many current "top-down," "big is good," and "private sector is best" assumptions.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Why innovation approaches matter 1

2 The palaeontology of innovation: Lessons on success and failure from the paddy fields of Asia 14

The flash dryer in the Philippines 20

The flatbed dryer in Vietnam 29

What happens when a technology is first adopted 36

3 Seeing inside the black box: Modelling early adoption (with Darwin's help) 44

Searching for a good mental map 44

Learning selection

analogue to natural selection 47

Opening up the black box 48

4 Blowing in the wind: How 'bottom-up' beat 'top-down' for the billion-dollar wind turbine industry 67

Early history 70

The Danish experience 71

The American experience 92

5 Open and closed: Linux versus Windows 105

Linux: open-source innovation 106

Windows NT: closed-source innovation 119

6 Uncreative accounting: Local Exchange Trading Systems 130

A brief history of money 131

Alternative currencies 136

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) 140

7 Food for thought: Aftermath of the Green Revolution 164

The Green Revolution: buying time 166

Biotechnology: Big Science's technical fix? 190

Participatory plant breeding: a sustainable solution? 204

8 How to catalyse innovation: A practical guide to learning selection 217

The learning selection approach to understanding and catalysing technological change 218

Advantages of the learning selection approach 220

To the users 223

When does the learning selection approach work? 226

The scope of learning selection 227

How to launch a learning selection innovation process 228

Intellectual property rights and learning selection 233.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [247]-256) and index.

ISBN:

1856499715

1856499723

OCLC:

47254298