John Bessant

University of Exeter | UoE

Innovative firms outperform, in both employment and sales, firms that fail to innovate. We know that those organizations that are consistently successful at managing innovation outperform their peers in terms of growth, financial performance and employment and that the broader social benefits of innovation are even greater . However, managing innov...

Innovation studies have shown a growing interest in collaborative approaches, particularly user co-creation within innovation spaces. This qualitative study delves into the intricate dynamics of user involvement in fostering user-centric innovation within living labs. Through interviews with 22 informants across 14 countries from 2021 to 2022, this...

This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...

This book has been developed specifically for students of Business and Management Studies, and for Science and Engineering students studying courses on innovation and/or entrepreneurship. In this fourth edition, we were inspired by the pioneering scholars of entrepreneurship and innovation, such as Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker, to attempt to...

The potential contribution which users can make to innovation is well-documented and there is growing recognition of the important role user innovations play at the front end of innovation. Their contribution is not only in generating new insights and ideas at this early stage but also in enabling smoother and wider diffusion since user-led innovat...

Purpose The view that supply chain learning (SCL) has become a fundamental capability that supply chains must employ to innovate and improve their financial, technological, operational, environmental and social performance is widely accepted. However, the SCL phenomenon is still understudied and not fully understood by scholars, decision-makers and...

Although values in business have a long history, only recently has their pivotal role in innovation and its management become a topic attracting growing attention from both researchers and practitioners. Values-based innovation management is developing into a vibrant field of studies and practice with increasing relevance for innovation managers an...

Recent research suggests that sustainability-oriented innovation may require different circumstances within organizations than traditional innovation research has revealed. More specifically, nature-inspired innovation (NII) has become increasingly common in recent years, and yet it is not fully understood how it is perceived within adopting organi...

In this SI we invite theoretical and especially empirical contributions that focus on themes including: - The usefulness of the responsible innovation concept - How firms organize their entrepreneurial and innovation process to ensure responsible outcomes - Responsible commercialization/ implementation of innovation - How to incorporate responsibi...

Background: Food insecurity is a global public health challenge, affecting predominately the most vulnerable people in society, including older adults. For this population, eHealth interventions represent an opportunity for promoting healthy lifestyle habits, thus mitigating the consequences of food insecurity. However, before their widespread diss...

There is a pressing need for innovation in the humanitarian sector, faced as it is with ever-growing demands for it to respond to the plight of people affected by both human and natural disasters. These are arguably growing in scale, scope, and complexity, and look likely to continue to do so. However, despite being referred to more explicitly in t...

Sustainable development, and along with it, concepts such as corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, creating shared value and the like, has become a buzzword. The same holds true for terms like innovation and sustainable innovation, which have also become trendy terms on their own. In the traditional or conventional economic vie...

Innovation involves creating value from ideas, but this raises the question of for whom is the value created [...]

Sustainable development, and along with it, concepts such as corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, creating shared value and the like, has become a buzzword. The same holds true for terms like innovation and sustainable innovation, which have also become trendy terms on their own. In the traditional or conventional economic vie...

Despite the recognition of the importance of stakeholder inclusion into decisions about new solutions offered to society, responsible innovation (RI) has stalled at the point of articulating a process of governance with a strongly normative loading, without clear practical guidelines toward implementation practices. The principles of RI direct us t...

In this seventh edition, we continue our tradition of differentiating our work from that of others by developing its unique characteristics: • Strong evidence-based approach to the understanding and practice of managing innovation, drawing upon thousands of research projects, and “Research Notes” on the very latest research findings. Managing Innov...

Objective: there is an ongoing need for businesses to strive to maintain ideals within environmental, economic, and social values - commonly known as the triple bottom line. Manufacturing as a sector has advanced drastically and the literature on sustainable business models in this sector has emerged. The purpose of this paper is to analyze sustain...

BACKGROUND Food insecurity is a global public health problem. It has been anticipated that the economic recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic will promote an unparalleled crisis of food insecurity, affecting mainly the most vulnerable people in society, such as the elderly population. For this population, health-related behavior change is a...

Background Food insecurity is a global public health challenge, affecting predominately the most vulnerable people in society, including older adults. For this population, eHealth interventions represent an opportunity for promoting healthy lifestyle habits, thus mitigating the consequences of food insecurity. However, before their widespread disse...

Despite the recognition of the importance of stakeholder inclusion into decisions about new solutions offered to society, responsible innovation (RI) has stalled at the point of articulating a process of governance with a strongly normative loading, without clear practical guidelines toward implementation practices. The principles of RI direct us t...

Nature‐inspired innovation (NII) is an increasingly common innovation strategy, yet little is known about its implementation within corporate innovation settings. This paper asks what factors influence the application of NII in corporate contexts. It combines theoretical perspectives from innovation adoption and sustainability‐oriented innovation t...

The search for responsible innovation establishes the management of (external) stakeholders' interests as a way to minimize uncertainty and maintain or develop a competitive advantage. For inclusion to be leverage, dynamic capabilities are required. This paper analyzed how dynamic capabilities leverage the inclusion of stakeholders in the innovatio...

As more people strive to live longer, healthier and more active lifestyles, healthcare concerns increase and so does the costs. Research reveals that healthcare costs and spending often rise at rates exceeding inflation, and they are expected to increase in the future. Keehan et al. (2017) estimates that aggregate health care spending in the United...

Strategic Operations Management, 4th Edition, shows how vital it is to have world-class operations management in any organisation. In the past, where organisations tended to be more hierarchical than today, the words, "strategy" and "operations" were almost mutually exclusive. In today's highly competitive environment, though, strategic operations...

Managing Innovation is the bestselling text for graduate and undergraduate students and a classic in the field. Emphasizing practical, evidence based tools and resources, this title provides students with the knowledge base to successfully manage innovation, technology, and new product development. The holistic approach addresses the interplay betw...

New ventures that innovate are much more likely to create value, both private and social, but few new ventures are successful, and fewer manage to grow and prosper. Part of the challenge lies in the way we bridge the gap between a great idea and realizing its value, whether commercial or social. We now have a great deal of research understanding ab...

Innovation management is inherently inter-disciplinary, but it is much more than simply applying business and management disciplines to innovation, and over time the field has developed a distinct body of knowledge. However, in this paper, we argue that the field of innovation management has failed to fully benefit from the proliferation of relevan...

The elephant is in the room—a metaphorical idiom for an obvious problem or risk that nobody wants to discuss. This abstract is not intended to be a summary, to reveal major findings, or unveil conclusions. On the contrary, it is aimed to provoke curiosity as to the question of corporate survival. Is there any recipe to be followed for companies to...

Ein Wort der Warnung gleich zu Beginn: Dieses Abstract stellt keine Zusammenfassung bahnbrechender Erkenntnisse oder Schlussfolgerungen dar. Ganz im Gegenteil. Es möchte lediglich die Neugier dafür wecken, was unternehmerisches Überleben eigentlich bedeutet. Gibt es ein Geheimrezept, das Unternehmen befolgen könnten, um zu überleben? Die Antworten...

The paper explores the application of responsible innovation (RI) principles in the design and implementation of innovation in the context of digitally-enabled healthcare. In particular, we are interested in the scope for bringing in RI considerations at various stages in the innovation process and in the relevant tools and frameworks which might f...

Idea competitions are becoming increasingly used as a resource for supporting the front end and downstream acceleration of innovation. But unethical behaviour of participants in such competitions can be detrimental, both for the organiser and for the motivation of the participating community. We assume that unethical behaviour can be explained by e...

Purpose Purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to understand recombinant innovation as a potentially significant part of an open innovation strategy. Next, we suggest key routines which would underpin a capability for recombinant innovation, locating these within the context of enhanced absorptive capacity. Finally we consider how such r...

Innovation is often presented as a survival issue and this provides a powerful metaphor to focus attention on the need to manage it effectively. But in the humanitarian context it takes on a very literal meaning. Crises, whether natural or man-made, require rapid problem solving if agencies and aid workers are to avoid the huge negative impacts of...

UK research and technology organizations (RTOs) compete globally by offering engineering, technology and innovation services. Although associated historically with specific industries, UK RTOs have expanded into nontraditional markets and sectors. This article profiles 15 UK RTOs and we suggest that UK RTOs have unique technology and innovation cap...

We examine trust mechanisms in innovation within a number of inter- and intraorganizational contexts and outline the challenges posed by open innovation to those mechanisms. The organizational contexts that we have chosen for examination are supply chain development, clusters, and employee involvement. We argue, through an in-depth literature revie...

Radical innovation is an engine of growth, but identifying likely opportunities can be challenging. Building on previous work, this paper explores the use and importance of nine strategies for selecting early-stage opportunities in a sample of 94 firms. Four strategies-building alternative visions, prototyping, using probe-and-learn methods, and mo...

The ability of an organisation to recognise and evaluate technologically relevant information can be impeded by outdated processes, structures and knowledge. Organisations need therefore a capacity for “intended memory loss”, which has been labelled as unlearning. Although a number of scholars have examined unlearning, research is still only beginn...