Books on the topic 'Disruptive Innovation Theory'

This chapter explores innovation in the informal economy of small-town ‘mofussil’ India. Two-thirds of the urban population lives outside metropolitan cities in towns noted for their infrastructural backwardness. Ninety per cent of livelihoods and two-thirds of the economy, disproportionately in small-town India, are unregistered or unregulated and termed ‘informal’. It is the informal economy that drives growth and livelihoods. After reviewing innovation theories, a case study of the innovation activity of a small-town is developed through evidence from the presidents of the town’s many business associations. They supply an account of five types of innovation: invention, adaptive and adoptive innovation, incremental and disruptive innovation; innovation in products, process, services, contracts and information; and innovation by labour as well as capital. The chapter concludes that although innovations flourish, the intertwined and hybrid formal and informal institutions do not behave coherently enough to constitute an informal innovation system.

Innovation dilemmas come in myriad forms, arising from the human potential for discovery and invention. These innovations are attractive, and promise to be improvements. However, they are distilled from the endless unknown and are accompanied by considerable uncertainty, so their promise may be illusory. This chapter examines a range of innovation dilemmas, selected for their diversity; some are concrete and technological, others abstract and conceptual. We consider e-reading and its uncertain implications for young readers; military hardware and development of the Messerschmidt jet fighter plane; bipolar disorder and pregnancy; disruptive technology and the manager’s innovation dilemma; agricultural productivity and world hunger; military intelligence and foresight; and controlling an invasive biological pest that perhaps is neither invasive nor a pest. Finally, we discuss the habit of open-mindedness, which is both desirable but also sometimes an innovation dilemma.

Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. Innovations provide new and purportedly better opportunities, but—because of their newness—they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances, and many other discoveries and inventions. To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. Furthermore, the paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome optimization—“more is better, so most is best”—pervades decision-making in all domains, but this is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, online learning, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, and more.

Strong dynamics and multifaceted innovations characterise the Internet. In this rapidly evolving ecosystem, challenges but also questions concerning innovation, integration and sustainability arise. The Internet of things brings disruptive innovations which are no longer limited to communication applications, but rather spur the transition of traditional network industries into intelligent (smart) networks. Critical requirements are QoS differentiated All-IP bandwidth capacities combined with sensor networks, geopositioning services and big data. In this volume, leading international researchers present their latest findings on the dynamics of the Internet in the future, covering a variety of current and highly relevant issues related to the Internet of things, 5G, interconnection, Internet ecosystem innovation and network neutrality. With contributions by Günter Knieps, Volker Stocker, Bert Sadowski, Onder Nomaler, Jason Whalley, Thomas Fetzer, Johannes M. Bauer, William Lehr, Iris Henseler-Unger, Falk von Bornstaedt, Marlies Van der Wee, ­Frederic Vannieuwenborg, Sofie Verbrugge, Christopher S. Yoo, Jesse Lambert­

The rise of the gig economy is disrupting business models across the globe. Platforms’ digital work intermediation has had a profound impact on traditional conceptions of the employment relationship. The completion of ‘tasks’, ‘gigs’, or ‘rides’ in the (digital) crowd fundamentally challenges our understanding of work in modern labour markets: gone are the stable employment relationships between firms and workers, replaced by a world in which everybody can be ‘their own boss’ and enjoy the rewards—and face the risks—of independent businesses. Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of crowdsourced work? How can we protect consumers and workers without stifling innovation? Humans as a Service provides a detailed account of the growth and operation of gig-economy platforms, and develops a blueprint for solutions to the problems facing on-demand workers, platforms, and their customers. Following a brief introduction to the growth and operation of on-demand platforms across the world, the book scrutinizes competing narratives about ‘gig’ work. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, it explores how claims of ‘disruptive innovation’ and ‘micro-entrepreneurship’ often obscure the realities of precarious work under strict algorithmic surveillance, and the return to a business model that has existed for centuries. Humans as a Service shows how employment law can address many of these problems: gigs, tasks, and rides are work—and should be regulated as such. A concluding chapter demonstrates the broader benefits of a level playing field for consumers, taxpayers, and innovative entrepreneurs.

Premised on the disruption and lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic, and in meticulous response to the impact of the pandemic on higher education – especially in South Africa – this collection of chapters spotlights the effects, consequences, and ramifications of an unprecedented pandemic in the areas of knowledge production, knowledge transfer and innovation. With the pandemic, the traditional way of teaching and learning was completely upended. It is within this context that this book presents interdisciplinary perspectives that focus on what the impact of Covid-19 implies for higher education institutions. Contributors have critically reflected from within their specific academic disciplines in their attempt to proffer solutions to the disruptions brought to the South African higher education space. Academics and education leaders have particularly responded to the objective of this book by focusing on how the academia could tackle the Covid-19 motivated disruption and resuscitate teaching, research, and innovation activities in South African higher education, and the whole of Africa by extension.

This chapter turns to linguistic matters. It explores how, despite their focus on commercial labour intermediation, platforms were originally cast in a different light, operating under the mantle of a ‘sharing economy’. Superficial as this may seem, language matters—not least as a driver of regulatory approaches. To understand the gig economy, it is crucial that we look behind the language of innovation and technology, of sharing and collaborative consumption, and of ‘gigs’ and ‘tasks’. This chapter first focuses on arguments that the gig economy should not be regulated at all, discerning multiple iterations of this approach, with varying degrees of sophistication. At its crudest, this is the story that the law stands in the way of innovation and should leave ‘disruptive’ businesses well alone. At a more sophisticated level, we then encounter different proposals for new forms of regulation.

Digital DNA identifies how the disruption of digital information and production technologies transforms how companies and national economies are innovating. Wisely guiding this transformation is an enormous challenge because innovation promotes global economic prosperity. Economic tensions and market surprises are inevitable. Part I reviews the challenges we face and argues that national and international policies require experimentation and flexibility to address them. The case studies in Part III probe issues tied to the rise of cloud computing and transborder data flows, international collaboration to reduce cybersecurity risks, and the consequences of different national standards of digital privacy protection. Significant diversity in individual national policies is inevitable, but an international baseline of policy fundamentals to facilitate “quasi-convergence” of national policies is needed. Moreover, expert multistakeholder organizations that facilitate the implementation of formal government policies hold promise but should operate across national boundaries because the implications of digital technologies are global. Parts II and IV propose a strategy for using international regulatory and trade agreements to revamp the international governance regime for digital technologies. Better measures to safeguard digital privacy and cybersecurity can improve both market access and the welfare of users. A “Digital Economy Agreement” that embraces “soft rules” requiring governments to achieve certain objectives without specifying how, can achieve sufficient quasi-convergence of national policies for innovation to flourish. The political legitimacy and flexibility of international governance regimes likely will be better if multistakeholder organizations are involved in their negotiation.

Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. This book explores why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs. Drawing analogies with how firms compete, the book demonstrates that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain. As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, the book shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.

Despite strong evidence over time of the clinical, psychological, and emotional benefits of strong doctor-patient relationships, these relationships are transforming quickly due to a “new normal” within health care delivery of de-emphasizing patient contact with the physician; using disruptive innovations that emphasize transactional speed and convenience in service delivery; and pressures exerted by external forces like the overuse of performance metrics. Strong doctor-patient relationships are characterized by dyadic interactions over time that feature high degrees of trust, empathy, listening, and emotional support. As the notion of “relationship” in health care moves from doctor-patient to organization-patient, it is important to gain insights about the present and future of relational care through the voices of doctors and patients describing their interactional experiences, and how these experiences shape their thinking and behavior with respect to each other.

This volume is a foundational resource on the study of networks in politics. It is grounded in the understanding that networks are omnipresent in the natural and social worlds, and they are at the heart of politics. The 43 essays in this volume offer instruction on network theory and methods at beginning and advanced levels; they also provide an assessment of the state-of-the-discipline on a variety of applied network topics in politics. Leading scholars in the field address key questions in political science such as: Why do people vote? How can governments foster innovations? How can countries build ties that promote peace? What are the most fruitful strategies for disrupting arms or terrorist networks? In answering these questions, the volume provides both a summary of the state of the field and a roadmap for moving forward.

Several key external forces are now impacting doctor-patient relationships in health care. These include a widespread focus on standardized quality measurement and reporting; the integration of physicians and their services into large, complex organizational forms; and the rise of disruptive innovations meant to deal with decreased patient access to needed health services. These forces, although intending in part to address various health care problems, promote excessive care standardization; a de-emphasis on relational care features such as trust; and redistribute power and influence to large health care organizations and away from both doctors and patients. The shift toward a tightly managed, corporately run health care delivery system undermines dyadic doctor-patient relationships, and creates opportunity for new philosophies such as retail thinking and “patients as consumers” to take hold.

The anthology is interested in the relationship between technology and law. Transformative technologies not only displace competing technologies from the market, i.e., they do not only have a disruptive effect in an economic sense, but are also able to influence normative concepts. Thus, technical innovations such as digitization not only confront the law with new regulatory tasks, but also change it at the same time. Law is actively shaping the process of the digital transformation of society, but at the same time is becoming its passive object. The contributions to this anthology illuminate this dual character of digitization as a transformative technology from the perspectives of law, philosophy, and cultural and media studies. With contributions by Prof. Dr. Bijan Fateh-Moghadam, Prof. Dr. Herbert Zech; Prof. Burkhard Schafer; Lukas Brand; Prof. Dr. Peter Georg Picht, Gaspare Tazio Loderer; Prof. Dr. Roberto Simanowski; Stefan Huonder, Olivier Raemy; Tianyu Yuan and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem.

A man … is so in the way in the house!’ A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. Undaunted by poverty, but dismayed by changes brought by the railway and by new commercial practices, the ladies of Cranford respond to disruption with both suspicion and courage. Miss Matty and her sister Deborah uphold standards and survive personal tragedy and everyday dramas; innovation may bring loss, but it also brings growth, and welcome freedoms. Cranford suggests that representatives of different and apparently hostile social worlds, their minds opened by sympathy and suffering, can learn from each other. Its social comedy develops into a study of generous reconciliation, of a kind that will value the past as it actively shapes the future. This edition includes two related short pieces by Gaskell, ‘The Last Generation in England’ and ‘The Cage at Cranford’, as well as a selection from the diverse literary and social contexts in which the Cranford tales take their place.

Why do we need to communicate science? Is science, with its highly specialised language and its arcane methods, too distant to be understood by the public? Is it really possible for citizens to participate meaningfully in scientific research projects and debate? Should scientists be mandated to engage with the public to facilitate better understanding of science? How can they best communicate their special knowledge to be intelligible? These and a plethora of related questions are being raised by researchers and politicians alike as they have become convinced that science and society need to draw nearer to one another. Once the persuasion took hold that science should open up to the public and these questions were raised, it became clear that coming up with satisfactory answers would be a complex challenge. The inaccessibility of scientific language and methods, due to ever increasing specialisation, is at the base of its very success. Thus, translating specialised knowledge to become understandable, interesting and relevant to various publics creates particular perils. This is exacerbated by the ongoing disruption of the public discourse through the digitisation of communication platforms. For example, the availability of medical knowledge on the internet and the immense opportunities to inform oneself about health risks via social media are undermined by the manipulable nature of this technology that does not allow its users to distinguish between credible content and misinformation. In countries around the world, scientists, policy-makers and the public have high hopes for science communication: that it may elevate its populations educationally, that it may raise the level of sound decision-making for people in their daily lives, and that it may contribute to innovation and economic well-being. This collection of current reflections gives an insight into the issues that have to be addressed by research to reach these noble goals, for South Africa and by South Africans in particular.

American higher education is at a crossroads. Technological innovations and disruptive market forces are buffeting colleges and universities at the very time their financial structure grows increasingly fragile. Disinvestment by states has driven up tuition prices at public colleges, and student debt has reached a startling record-high of one trillion dollars. Cost-minded students and their families--and the public at large--are questioning the worth of a college education, even as study after study shows how important it is to economic and social mobility. And as elite institutions trim financial aid and change other business practices in search of more sustainable business models, racial and economic stratification in American higher education is only growing. In American Higher Education in Crisis?: What Everyone Needs to Know, Goldie Blumenstyk, who has been reporting on higher education trends for 25 years, guides readers through the forces and trends that have brought the education system to this point, and highlights some of the ways they will reshape America's colleges in the years to come. Blumenstyk hones in on debates over the value of post-secondary education, problems of affordability, and concerns about the growing economic divide. Fewer and fewer people can afford the constantly increasing tuition price of college, Blumenstyk shows, and yet college graduates in the United States now earn on average twice as much as those with only a high-school education. She also discusses faculty tenure and growing administrative bureaucracies on campuses; considers new demands for accountability such as those reflected in the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard; and questions how the money chase in big-time college athletics, revelations about colleges falsifying rankings data, and corporate-style presidential salaries have soured public perception. Higher education is facing a serious set of challenges, but solutions have also begun to emerge. Blumenstyk highlights how institutions are responding to the rise of alternative-educational opportunities and the new academic and business models that are appearing, and considers how the Obama administration and public organizations are working to address questions of affordability, diversity, and academic integrity. She addresses some of the advances in technology colleges are employing to attract and retain students; outlines emerging competency-based programs that are reshaping conceptions of a college degree, and offers readers a look at promising innovations that could alter the higher education landscape in the near future. An extremely timely and focused look at this embattled and evolving arena, this primer emphasizes how open-ended the conversation about higher education's future remains, and illuminates how big the stakes are for students, colleges, and the nation.

This GSoD In Focus Special Brief provides an overview of the state of democracy in Asia and the Pacific at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy in the region in 2020. Key fact and findings include: • Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across Asia and the Pacific faced a range of democratic challenges. Chief among these were continuing political fragility, violent conflict, recurrent military interference in the political sphere, enduring hybridity, deepening autocratization, creeping ethnonationalism, advancing populist leadership, democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space, the spread of disinformation, and weakened checks and balances. The crisis conditions engendered by the pandemic risk further entrenching and/or intensifying the negative democratic trends observable in the region prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. • Across the region, governments have been using the conditions created by the pandemic to expand executive power and restrict individual rights. Aspects of democratic practice that have been significantly impacted by anti-pandemic measures include the exercise of fundamental rights (notably freedom of assembly and free speech). Some countries have also seen deepened religious polarization and discrimination. Women, vulnerable groups, and ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and discriminated against in the enforcement of lockdowns. There have been disruptions of electoral processes, increased state surveillance in some countries, and increased influence of the military. This is particularly concerning in new, fragile or backsliding democracies, which risk further eroding their already fragile democratic bases. • As in other regions, however, the pandemic has also led to a range of innovations and changes in the way democratic actors, such as parliaments, political parties, electoral commissions, civil society organizations and courts, conduct their work. In a number of countries, for example, government ministries, electoral commissions, legislators, health officials and civil society have developed innovative new online tools for keeping the public informed about national efforts to combat the pandemic. And some legislatures are figuring out new ways to hold government to account in the absence of real-time parliamentary meetings. • The consideration of political regime type in debates around ways of containing the pandemic also assumes particular relevance in Asia and the Pacific, a region that houses high-performing democracies, such as New Zealand and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), a mid-range performer (Taiwan), and also non-democratic regimes, such as China, Singapore and Viet Nam—all of which have, as of December 2020, among the lowest per capita deaths from COVID-19 in the world. While these countries have all so far managed to contain the virus with fewer fatalities than in the rest of the world, the authoritarian regimes have done so at a high human rights cost, whereas the democracies have done so while adhering to democratic principles, proving that the pandemic can effectively be fought through democratic means and does not necessarily require a trade off between public health and democracy. • The massive disruption induced by the pandemic can be an unparalleled opportunity for democratic learning, change and renovation in the region. Strengthening democratic institutions and processes across the region needs to go hand in hand with curbing the pandemic. Rebuilding societies and economic structures in its aftermath will likewise require strong, sustainable and healthy democracies, capable of tackling the gargantuan challenges ahead. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.

When we think of "climate change," we think of man-made global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But natural climate change has occurred throughout human history, and populations have had to adapt to the climate's vicissitudes. Anthony J. McMichael, a renowned epidemiologist and a pioneer in the field of how human health relates to climate change, is the ideal person to tell this story. Climate Change and the Health of Nations shows how the natural environment has vast direct and indirect repercussions for human health and welfare. McMichael takes us on a tour of human history through the lens of major transformations in climate. From the very beginning of our species some five million years ago, human biology has evolved in response to cooling temperatures, new food sources, and changing geography. As societies began to form, they too adapted in relation to their environments, most notably with the development of agriculture eleven thousand years ago. Agricultural civilization was a Faustian bargain, however: the prosperity and comfort that an agrarian society provides relies on the assumption that the environment will largely remain stable. Indeed, for agriculture to succeed, environmental conditions must be just right, which McMichael refers to as the "Goldilocks phenomenon." Global warming is disrupting this balance, just as other climate-related upheavals have tested human societies throughout history. As McMichael shows, the break-up of the Roman Empire, the bubonic Plague of Justinian, and the mysterious collapse of Mayan civilization all have roots in climate change. Why devote so much analysis to the past, when the daunting future of climate change is already here? Because the story of mankindâs previous survival in the face of an unpredictable and unstable climate, and of the terrible toll that climate change can take, could not be more important as we face the realities of a warming planet. This sweeping magnum opus is not only a rigorous, innovative, and fascinating exploration of how the climate affects the human condition, but also an urgent call to recognize our species' utter reliance on the earth as it is.