Innovation

Technology and innovation in the knowledge economy

Changes in the way people engage with technology have created a complete shift in business models, modes of working and communication across all industry sectors.

Current trends in social media, collaborative and open technology and user-generated content offer many opportunities to support innovation. For large organisations with hundreds of staff, embedded processes and a tradition of doing things in a certain way for decades, new developments can be a significant challenge.

Added to the mix for public sector organisations, there is increasing pressure to be transparent, accountable and customer-centric, as well as innovative and sustainable.

Some examples of the impact of technology and innovation trends:

Commercial businesses

Typical start-up businesses tend by their very nature to be inventive and flexible in the way that they work. For larger organisations, encouraging a culture of innovation requires support from the top down, embedding and encouraging innovation across the organisation through process and service design and cultural change. New technology can play an invaluable role in supporting this by enabling collaboration, facilitating research and development, storing, managing and sharing knowledge.

Education

Use of new technology to create, manage, impart and share knowledge through VLE (virtual learning environments) and VRE (virtual research environments). Current technologies and tools go some way towards the functional need but struggle to meet the expectation of users, in particular younger generations that are tech-savvy and used to sophisticated digital visualisation from their experiences of game consoles, the internet and CGI in movies.

Health & social services

Move toward the service user as customer, through personalised services and handing over of control and choice. Whilst the technology to enable this develops, there are complex challenges being addressed in terms of providing freedom of information and choice whilst protecting fundamental human rights and the most vulnerable people in our society.

Government

We are in a period of change, as new modes of social democracy are developed and the individual uses technology to interact with Government at local and national levels. Increased involvement with virtual communities supports the development of political opinion as well as facilitating collective action - for example the 10:10 climate change group.

Coming soon:

• What’s hot and what’s new in knowledge marketing
• How can social media support the learning process?