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Innovation
In this focus
What's both radical and incremental? Aimless and goal-oriented? Process and product? Innovation — now the subject of a monthly series of Nature Commentaries. Expert authors from business, economics, law, policy and research look to define innovation and explore how it arises and how it can be managed, encouraged and facilitated. The commentaries reveal that the idea of a single innovator or inventor is fading, and probe how innovation is increasingly the product of an entire ecology which includes both basic and applied research but also the venture capital system and external motivating forces coming together in the right mix.
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Commentaries
Editorial
A case for nurture
Innovation is a complex ecosystem that requires careful cultivation.
Nature 454, 918 (21 August 2008) doi:10.1038/454918a
Commentary
Three rules for technological fixes
Not all problems will yield to technology. Deciding which will and which won't should be central to setting innovation policy, say Daniel Sarewitz and Richard Nelson.
Nature 456, 871-872 (18/25 December 2008) doi:10.1038/456871a
Commentary
The innovative brain
'Hot' decision-making, involving the evaluation of reward and punishment, is essential to the entrepreneurial process and may be possible to teach, argue Barbara Sahakian and her coauthors.
Nature 456, 168 (13 November 2008) doi:10.1038/456168a
Commentary
The charge of technology
Science policies based on techno-nationalist thinking and fantasies about the past technological revolutions will get us nowhere fast, says David Edgerton.
Nature 455, 1030 (23 October 2008) doi:10.1038/4551030a
Commentary
A cat's cradle for policy
The OECD is developing a strategy for nations to measure and ultimately promote innovation. It requires knowledge of a complex system, say Fred Gault and Susanne Huttner.
Nature 455, 462 (25 September 2008) doi:10.1038/455462a
Commentary
Innovation policy: not just a jumbo shrimp
Policies that predict and direct innovative research might seem to be a practical impossibility, says David H. Guston, but social sciences point to a solution.
David H. Guston
Nature 454, 940 (21 August 2008) doi:10.1038/454940a
Commentary
China: The prizes and pitfalls of progress
Pushes to globalize science must not threaten local innovations in developing countries, argues Lan Xue.
Lan Xue
Nature 454, 398–401 (24 July 2008) doi:10.1038/454398a
Commentary
A new relationship
Fuelling innovation requires a different kind of collaboration between industrial and academic researchers, argues Bill Destler.
Bill Destler
Nature 453, 853–854 (12 June 2008) doi:10.1038/453853a
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Podcast
Podcast
Innovation policy for the next administration
David Goldston talks with experts about policies to implement innovation in this run up to the U.S. presidential election.
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