Organisations, Innovation and Complexity: New Perspectives on the Knowledge Economy

University of Manchester
9-10th September 2004

Conference Aims | Paper Abstracts | Programme | Further Information

The conference was organised jointly by the ESRC NEXSUS Network, Cranfield University and the ESRC Centre for Research in Innovation and Competition, University of Manchester. It was held at the University of Manchester.

Conference Aims

The Purpose of the conference was to explore the concept of the knowledge economy from a complexity perspective, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of innovation and the self-organisation and self-transformation of economic systems. The broad themes included Conceptual thinking; Modelling/Simulation and Empirical/Case Studies.

The ideas that came from Complexity and Complex Systems Science provided a new basis for our understanding of how innovations occur and the strong relation with the mechanisms that can create knowledge in new dimensions and lead to economic transformation. These new ideas clearly underlie recent developments in Evolutionary Economics, and the notion of “Restless Capitalism” whereby business conjectures are constantly generated and either fail and disappear or invade and change the system. The questions of how business conjectures are generated, and how organisational forms can either help or hinder the process are of great practical importance, and during the meeting practical examples and case studies were presented. Equally important are the market and non-market institutions of capitalism that shape and stimulate the emergence of novelty. Essentially, there is an important link between the internal diversity and richness of the internal worlds of people in such systems and their ability to generate novel and innovative ideas. Systems that deny the freedom to be enterprising may attain high efficiencies at a point in time yet loose out in the longer term to more creative systems. Conversely systems that are too weakly ordered deny the possibility of effective experimentation. To some degree there must be a “denial” of, or freedom from, current knowledge in order to step onto a new path, and so people and organisations in which such events occur are very important. This focused us on the issue of the generative capacities of encounters between diverse individuals, whether in firms or markets or other contexts, and of innovation occurring “at the interfaces” of organisations, and on inter-organisational innovation. These are all key domains that are illuminated by the ideas coming from complexity.

Some of the questions that focus on this set of issues were:

1. How do new ideas emerging from individuals within the firm and outside the firm become translated into a change of understanding? What is the generating process and what is the selection process that winnows across ideas within organisations and across organisations?
2. How do these generation and winnowing processes vary for different kinds of knowledge in relation to a) products b) the organisation of production and distribution and c) customers?
3. How does the firm execute its combinatorial function of combining together knowledge from different sources?
4. How does performance in the market feedback to stimulate the search for different understandings within the firm?
5. How does the context of particular history and organisational forms constrain or empower the production and use of knowledge?

Top

Paper Abstracts & Deadlines

Paper abstracts are available.

Further Information

For more information contact:
Rosemary Cockfield, rosemary.cockfield@cranfield.ac.uk
Complex Systems Research Centre,
Cranfield University,
Bedford, MK43 OAL,
UK
Tel: +44 1234 754801

Top