Reflecting CIMR’s international profile, the Centre was invited to organise a workshop on innovation for a party of senior academics and managers from a group of Chongqing universities. The party included senior university managers including Vice-principals, Deans and Vice-Deans.
CIMR’s extensive research, teaching and outreach activities were first introduced by Helen Lawton Smith, Director, CIMR.
Next three presentations were given by CIMR academic staff:
Professor Helen Lawton Smith, ‘Innovation as an Interactive Process: Why firms collaborate on technology and innovation’
Dr Federica Rossi, ‘Leveraging public research for innovation and growth: Lessons from a comparative study of high and middle income countries’
Dr Muthu De Silva, ‘Co-creation as a mechanism for simultaneous generation of business and social value: challenges and benefits’
Helen focused on what type of collaboration might be appropriate under what circumstances and how to ensure that inter-organisational relationships run smoothly. Her talk was illustrated with examples from around the world including China.
Muthu, using examples from the UK context, discussed four different types of co-creation initiatives that simultaneously generated business and social value and presented ways in which some of the challenges associated with co-creation could be overcome. During this interactive session Chinese delegates also shared their experiences in relation to co-creation which provided a good platform to compare and learn from the two contexts.
Federica’s talk focused on comparing the knowledge transfer policies of several high and middle income countries and on distilling lessons from the experience of what has worked so far in these converging but still different approaches.
The Chinese delegation were particularly interested in applications of the research presented to their own experiences. For example, the applicability of established models of collaboration for innovation in the contemporary Chinese economy; the experiences with knowledge transfer management of UK universities in general and Birkbeck in particular; and the potential of different co-creation practices in the Chinese context. As a follow-up, the delegation are looking to develop a collaboration with CIMR.
The workshop was organised by Dr Federica Rossi.
