Enabling Innovation: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Fostering Technological Change - Softcover

Douthwaite, Boru

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856499723 ISBN 13: 9781856499729

Verlag: Zed Books Ltd, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

We live in an age of increasingly rapid technological innovation and diffusion. Yet little is known about the social and human processes involved. Why do some technologies successfully spread while others do not? What are the consequences of top-down diffusion strategies? What is the effect of the private sector? Should the public sector not play a significant role? What are the disadvantages of instant patents and corporate-controlled intellectual property rights? And if users are democratically involved in technological adaptation and adoption, will the result often be both better technologies and their more rapid adoption? This book is an engrossing account of some of the disaster, and success, stories around technological development and diffusion from both industrial and developing countries. It tells the story of widely divergent technologies - agricultural appliances, wind turbines, Green Revolution high yielding seeds, the Linux computer operating system, and Local Economic Trading Systems. Douthwaite constructs a highly significant ‘how to do it’ guide to innovation management that runs counter to many of the top-down, ‘big is good’, ‘private sector is best’ assumptions of our age.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Boru Douthwaite did his first degree in engineering design and appropriate technology at the University of Warwick in the UK before being employed by the Department for International Development (DfID). DfID sponsored his Masters in agricultural engineering before placing him at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, where he was subsequently employed. During the nine years he spent at IRRI he contributed, in particular, the main intellectual and design input into a project which developed and fostered the adoption of a small-farm stripper harvester aimed at meeting farmers' needs for appropriate labour-saving technology. During this period he became interested in technology adoption processes and enrolled for a PhD in the subject at the University of Reading in 1995. He now works for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, as an adoption and impact specialist.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1856499723
• ISBN 13: 9781856499729
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar