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History of the Center |
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The Center for Innovation was founded in 1982 when the Division of Engineering Sciences approached Jerald Hage to return to the study of organizational innovation. With a new assistant professor, Frank Hull, and with the cooperation of the industrial psychology program and the management program in the R. H. Smith School of Business, the Center for founded to study innovation in industrial organizations, primarily in the US but also in Japan. One of the main foci of interest was the problem of the adoption of flexible manufacturing. For the next eight years, the Center produced several dissertations, a number of papers and a book from a conference it held on the Futures of Organizations. Starting in 1990 and for the next year eight years, the focus shifted to the study of the diversity of human capital and its consequences for economic growth. This line of research was at the nation state level and exploited a large data set that had been developed by Hage during the 1970s and 1980s on Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the period of 1870 through 1970. This research was conducted jointly with Maurice Garnier at the Indiana University. Again, a number of papers were published, dissertations defined and a major report on technical education was written for the Department of Education in the US. A technique for measuring the social efficiency of the education system by measuring the costs and benefits of investing in technical and scientific education was developed for the Ministry of Planning in France. At the conclusion of this eight year period and these macro studies, the Center again shifted focus back to research on organizational innovation with several important differences. First, an emphasis was placed on scientific innovation in a major comparative study of radical innovation in biomedicine in France, Germany, Britain, and the US, joint conducted with J. Rogers Hollingsworth. Second, the approach was multi-level, that is micro or the laboratory, meso or the research organization, and macro or the institutional arrangements of science. Since the beginning of the millennium, the Center has built upon these interests by holding conferences to develop a book on new research agendas in innovation, science, knowledge trajectories, and institutional change and their interrelationships. The Center has become concerned with expanding the theory of the determinants of scientific innovation beyond the organic model in the profiles model developed by Gretchen Jordan. To validate this model requires that one develop measurements of technical progress in research in real time so that one does not rely upon papers, patents, and citations, all of which occur long after the fact. The Center is actively engaged in this effort. Finally, the Center has become concerned with the development of multi-level performance management systems for research organizations and mission agencies. |
