EU offers innovation by the book

18 Jun 2006 | News | Update from University of Warwick
These updates are republished press releases and communications from members of the Science|Business Network
It may not be possible to write a rulebook on how to innovate, but there is no harm in reading attempts to do so.

We are always sceptical about anything that purports to pin down something as nebulous as how innovation works. But this does not mean that it isn't worth reading attempts to do so. They might offer a few clues, pointing to questions that an innovator had not thought about. So we pass on the article PAXIS: lessons in innovation excellence from the EU's CORDIS series of Articles on Innovation.

The article describes something called "PAXIS: lessons in innovation excellence". There is also a description of this in the latest issue of Euroabstracts, another of the EU's raft of magazines that deal with aspects of R&D and innovation.

The article there tell us that "PAXIS was an incubator for innovation policies. It set out to
learn from the best. Many of those involved in incubation programmes before PAXIS did not believe they could learn from others – either because they thought they knew it all, or they feared it would hurt their competitiveness."

The guts of the venture appear in something called The PAXIS manual for innovation policy makers and practitioners: Analysis and transfer of innovation tools, methodologies and policy. This is a 404 pp manual that you can download (ftp link) for nothing.

Maybe we will have time to read this tome and report back. In the meantime, we leave it to you to decide if the lessons embedded in the document can teach you anything.

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