Innovation Theory/Practice
This is an ongoing project to understand the complex, poorly articulated relationship between design and innovation. This looks at theoretical as well as practice perspectives and challenges the (often poorly) informed positions adopted by both innovation and designer academics. Seeking to draw from both design and innovation knowledge sets the overarching aim is to develop a new post-disciplinary understanding in this area.
Looking at rapid manufacturing and 3D printing this conference presentation explores the issues fro the design profession and draws comparisons with the aspirations of the Arts and Crafts movement, radical design groups such as Archigram and presents a set of conceptual tools to provoke further discussion
There are many people, even colleagues who talk about innovation without any relationship to design at all (literary examples of this include the 600 page Oxford Handbook of Innovation and the 500 page Diffusion of Innovation) in this world innovation is a function of business activity.
Like an elastic band, I keep returning to issues around innovation. I am in the process of writing a large bid (with many other academics) about the Digital Economy and we want to talk about innovation without repeating the rather stale, well-trampled ground of open innovation, user focused bah blah blah
Attached here is a slideshow of a presentation I gave at the very excellent (but quite niche) FISCAR: Activity Theory and Design conference in Helsinki 2010. I presented this paper looking at how impact, has affected innovation in Universities looking specifically at the contribution HighWire, our doctoral training centre looking at Innovation across the disciplines of Computing, Design and Management
Leon Cruickshank