Innovation is a key factor not just in the research & design process, but in policy, institutions, & society. This handbook is unique in examining research findings & new theoretical models relating to innovation at a number of analytic levels: projects, organizations, industrial sectors, & society.

As we grapple with how to respond to some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as inequality, poverty and climate change, there is growing global interest in ‘social innovation’ as a potential solution. But what exactly is ‘social innovation’? This book describes three ways to theorise social innovation when seeking to manage and organize for both social and economic progress.

‘Institutional Change and Economic Development’ discusses not just theoretical issues but a diverse range of real-life institutions – political, bureaucratic, fiscal, financial, corporate, legal, social and industrial – in the context of dozens of countries across time and space, spanning Britain, Switzerland and the USA in the past to Botswana, Brazil, and China today.

The systems of innovation approach is considered by many to be a useful analytical approach for better understanding innovation processes as well as the production and distribution of knowledge in the economy. It is an appropriate framework for the empirical study of innovations in their contexts and is relevant for policy makers. This text is the result of the work within an international inter-disciplinary network or "working seminar" with the task of building a more solid and sophisticated conceptual and theoretical foundation for the continued study of innovations in a systemic context. The book has three parts. The first presents an overview and tries to work out some conceptual problems. In the second, the systems of innovation approach is related to innovation theory. Part three is devoted to increasing understanding of the functioning and dynamics of systems of innovation. There is also an introduction where the genesis and anatomy of different systems of innovation approaches are discussed and where the systems of innovation approach is characterized in nine dimensions.

The first part of this book deals with the transformation of universities as strategic organisational actors - in some cases creating them as such - while the second shows how governance and authority shifts are affecting the kinds of research goals being pursued by academics in different public science systems.

This book is about some of the most important problems confronting social scientists who study institutions and institutional change. It is also about globalization, particularly the frequent claim that globalization is transforming national political and economic institutions as never before.

The changes in the US healthcare system since World War II are documented here, from new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, to financing mechanisms and underlying sets of organizing principles. The authors illustrate the work with five types of healthcare organizations.

This book presents a model for examining problems of institutional change and applies it to American economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors develop their model of institutional change. They argue that if external economic factors make an increase in income possible but not attainable within the existing institutional structure, new organizations must be developed to achieve the potential in income. Their model is designed to explain the type and timing of these necessary changes in institutional organization. Individual, voluntary cooperative, and governmental arrangements are included in the discussion, although the latter differs considerably from the first two.

Phillip Y. Lipscy explains how countries renegotiate international institutions when rising powers such as Japan and China challenge the existing order. This book is particularly relevant for those interested in topics such as international organizations, such as United Nations, IMF, and World Bank, political economy, international security, US diplomacy, Chinese diplomacy, and Japanese diplomacy.

"The central premise of this book is that the demand for social science knowledge is derived from the demand for institutional change." --pref.