The tragic failure of the global supply chain in the face of the current coronavirus outbreak has caused acute shortages of essential frontline medical devices and personal protective equipment, crushing fear among frontline health workers and causing fundamental concerns about the sustainability of the health system. Much more coordination, integration, and management of global supply chains will be needed to mitigate the impact of the pandemics. This article describes the pressing need to revisit the governance and resilience of the supply chains that amplified the crisis at pandemic scale. We propose a model that profiles critical stockpiles and improves production efficiency through new technologies such as advanced analytics and blockchain. A new governance system that supports intervention by public-health authorities during critical emergencies is central to our recommendation, both in the face of the current crisis and to be better prepared for potential future crises. These reinforcements offer the potential to minimize the compromise of our healthcare workers and health systems due to infection exposure and build capacity toward preparedness and action for a future outbreak.
Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges—as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference.
Recent EU initiatives and legislation considerably increases public access to clinical trials data (CTD). These are generally much welcomed developments for the enhancement of science, trust and open innovation. However, they also raise many questions and concerns. Many of these emerge at the interface of CTD transparency with other areas of evolving EU law concerning the protection of trades secrets, IPRs, and privacy. This paper focuses on the privacy issues by analyzing the interrelation between the transparency developments and the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR). More specifically, this paper examines (1) the genesis of the EU transparency regulations, including the incidents, developments and policy concerns that have shaped them; (2) the features and implications of the GDPR in the context of clinical trials; and (3) the practical difficulties and risks for tensions between the GDPR and the policy goals of CTD transparency and open innovation. Ultimately, we stress that such factors must be carefully considered and addressed to reap the full benefits of CTD transparency.
Firms' innovation performance and productivity depend on engaging the entire organisation in the innovation process. Going beyond the typical focus on R&D, the focus of this article is on engaging those employees who are active in 'productive' activities in innovation. This article explores how a firm can create an environment in which those employees can build on their local needs and knowledge to learn and innovate through a process of experimentation and problem solving during 'on-the-job' activities. I draw on innovation, creativity and organisational climate research to explore the determinants and effects of such innovative behaviour. I develop a theoretical framework of how organisational practices affect employees' willingness and ability to experiment - a behavioural integral to innovation. I furthermore argue that the relationship between such 'climate for innovation' and the ultimate performance is inverse U-shaped. The framework implies that managers can turn the entire organisation into an innovation lab but they need to balance the tension between productive and innovative practices.
In this paper, we address the link between finite natural resource constraints, technological capability building, and innovation. Our research focuses on the upstream oil industry, where companies compete largely based on their ability to explore, exploit, and deliver oil and gas to market. Although there is limited natural availability of oil and gas, this is not the only factor that affects resource endowments of companies. Natural resource constraints can have very different origins?such as geophysical conditions?or they can be related to an unfavorable business environment in which political activities have negative consequences on business and investments of companies. These different origins of resource constraints create different forms of uncertainties ? technical and in-put cost uncertainties ? that influence organizational
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