What comes after research? Exploring how innovation outcomes can generate real impact for practice, market and society

Introduction

In a changing and disruptive social and economic scenario, scholars should constantly face the need to generate and effectively demonstrate the creation of relevant research outcomes that can become actionable knowledge with a real impact for multiple groups of stakeholders (business, government, third sector, community).

This challenging demand implies that scientific articles should achieve significant findings that can foster the development of innovation and produce, in turn, real changes after the end of a research process and after the actual implementation of the novelties introduced.

Innovation is all about impact. The development of innovative insights and solutions can present a multi-sided impact on various dimensions: i) managerial (improvement and introduction of new products/services and processes, company’s culture, strategies, business models); ii) economic (productivity, economic growth, development of employment and job market, high skilled workforce); iii) social and societal (well-being, sustainability, resilience); iv) cultural (access to knowledge, improvement of skills, transformative educational mind-set and new learning models).

Real multi-sided impact of research on innovation management can arise when research identifies the different shapes of economic societal, health, and cultural benefits besides academic knowledge while advancing transformative and innovative outcomes for the development of insights, new solutions and best practices that can concretely support companies in undertaking evidence-based and more effective and prompt decisions starting from qualitative and quantitative data. The impact deriving from the multifaceted application of innovation (from managerial and organizational sphere to social and cultural system) should be evaluated and demonstrated to bridge the gap between: i) academic system (scholars, researchers and higher education ecosystem) and the real world of companies; ii) results’ producers, appliers, utilizers and recipients.

Therefore, to stimulate the proposal of real impact articles on innovation management, the European Journal of Innovation Management encourages the submission of a new type of papers (https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ejim/ejim-introduces-real-impact-articles) that address the following question: How do research findings improve the state-of-the-art innovation management practice?

The goal of this Special Issue is to promote the awareness in the academic and business community of this new article type by attracting empirical qualitative and quantitative contributions that effectively communicate, share, and assess the impact produced by research results on business practice. Besides the Special Issue aims at collecting articles that focus on the exploration of the cross-disciplinarity effect of innovation as a process, as an outcome, as a series of strategies and tools that can exert an actual impact on the proactiveness of industrial, local, and national system.

For the development of real impact articles, the collaboration between scholars and practitioners is recommended.

List of topic areas

• Definition and assessment of the different outputs and outcomes of innovation for the conceptualization and identification of new innovation types;
• Identification of innovation sources and enabling factors for managing the impact of innovation;
• Theoretical and practical advancements for the measurement of the multi-sided effects of innovation process, management strategies and practices on organizations (business, government, third sector, community);
• Investigation of the effect of the engagement of different stakeholders in the phases of innovation creation process (generation, development, test, launch, etc.);
• Definition of new forms of inter-sectoral collaborations and open innovation based on the synergy between academic system, research system, young innovative companies (YICs) for cross-fertile innovation that combines theoretical, academic and practical knowledge;
• Exploration of the changes created after the introduction of innovation and throughout the process of innovation development for the definition of transformational innovation (new routines, strategies, practices for innovation management in businesses, institutions, organizations, universities);
• Identification and measurement of the multi-dimensional areas of impact of the innovation process, e.g., economic, managerial, technological, academic, societal, strategical, etc.;
• Definition and measurement of the impact of the innovation generated from research results on different business domains: supply chain, products/service delivery, process, business models, human resources management, managerial and entrepreneurial attitude and behaviour, technology and information management, decision-making, policy-making, relational strategies etc.;
• What's Next: exploring, defining and assessing the last steps of innovation research process, e.g., the effective application of results and the actual implementation of the novelties introduced that can potentially produce real changes.

Submissions information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

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Author Guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.