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This paper aims to advance the state of knowledge related to innovation and philanthropy, by exploring the emerging field of 'participatory grantmaking' (PGM) through the lens of innovation literature. While there are increasing amounts of European and global grantmakers utilizing more participatory methodologies in their grantmaking as a means to move power and increase the collective ability to create social good, there is yet to be any literature specifically exploring the links between these two fields. This conceptual paper, therefore, uses a broad reading of innovation literature to argue that it is most fruitful to consider PGM as innovation within four modalities: as a form of social innovation, process innovation, both radical and incremental innovation, and user-driven innovation. The paper ultimately finds that user-driven innovation (and in particular co-creation / co-production as a strategy to user-driven innovation) may provide the best examples of theory and practical relevance for those utilizing PGM as a means to democratize philanthropy in Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a cross analysis of European countries studying knowledge variables related to investment and performance. The findings of the factor analysis reflects the existence of four key factors (Push&Pull effect; what we are like; education domino effect; and knowledge employment) which should be taken into account for managing governmental strategies within the European market. According to these factors, four clusters of countries have been identified focusing the case of the first cluster, comprised of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and Austria, which has been called 'knowledge countries'. This paper presents interesting findings about how European countries manage their knowledge and in consequence, how they establish their growth strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the specific role of mid-range universities in knowledge transfer and explores the knowledge flows from these mid-range universities which face a number of additional constraints in transitional Central Eastern European (CEE) regions. The first part focuses on the theoretical framework of knowledge transfers and on the types of university–industry linkages involving knowledge transfer in the case of mid-range universities. The next section examines the development path and specific trajectories of universities in post-communist countries. The following sections draw on the findings of the ERAWATCH research and focus on cases from the non-metropolitan regions of Hungary and the Czech Republic in order to examine the specific barriers to knowledge transfer and explain the reasons behind the traditionally weaker role of mid-range universities. The paper argues that ambitious university-based developmental models have to be revised in CEE regions and the future development role of universities has to be reconsidered from a more realistic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After introducing the challenges and failures of first generation e-government (identified as e-Gov 1.0), and the rhetoric of the next generation of e-government efforts (identified as e-Gov 2.0), this paper presents an analysis of the promises of m-government, a relatively new phenomenon whose potential is largely unknown and unexplored but is already considered by many to be the most important subset of future e-government services. Discussing some cases of m-government technologies and applications worldwide, the paper identifies a number of risks and research questions to be further elaborated. In practice, are we about to go through a major adapting societal move, partly due to information and communication technologies (ICTs) but also to other co-factors likely to influence our near future (socio-political-economic and environmental trends), or are we just passing through a natural evolution (eventually faster than others occurred in the past)? Within this particular dynamic, the paper further addresses the importance of looking at what the various emerging scenarios may be, and which ones have to be considered and eventually deployed in terms of policy-relevant and favourable cost-benefit perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's transportation infrastructure including bridges requires optimised maintenance plans and adequate monitoring throughout its life cycle to ensure safety and serviceability. The deployment of new technologies can help this goal, providing numerous advantages compared to existing and established inspection and monitoring methods. This deployment can be facilitated by adequate policies and focused research and innovation, taking also into account the European ambitions for safe, secure, and future-proof transportation infrastructure. Considering the above, the objective of this study is threefold. First, it provides an overview of recent policy initiatives in Europe that facilitate the adoption of new and emerging technologies in bridge inspection and monitoring, as well as maintenance in general. Second, it identifies and reviews R&I projects relevant to bridges, including the budgetary expenditure, from the Horizon 2020 European Research Framework Programme which was recently concluded. Finally, it systematically reviews technologies and solutions developed by the identified projects, assessing also their technology readiness. What emerges is substantial research, which includes solutions and technologies (e.g., use of air or ground drones, artificial intelligence, digital twins) that have the potential to reshape the bridge inspection and monitoring state of play in Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Twenty years ago, historians complained that the art of excerpting was still a marginal topic. Ten years later, Ann Blair said that the history of note-taking had only just begun to be written. Indeed, historians spent nearly 25 years investigating how note-taking and excerpting systems developed in early modern Europe, and how great an influence they had on knowledge management and production in a society that gradually adapted to the mentality of printing. In the absence of an interdisciplinary book combining historical evidence with theoretical reasoning, this article aims at sketching out how early modern Italian culture took part in the debate on what we call the art of excerpting and note-taking (trascegliere e notare). The main hypothesis is that, within a century of the invention of the printing press, the notebook lost its function of memory aid and became a secondary memory. This functional change implied a loosening of the rhetorical structure of learning and experimentation with a new form of knowledge production, based on recombination. As a result, scholars discarded the culture of repetition and began to look for novelty. This produced a type of hypertrophy of variety: note-taking and excerpting techniques were understood as a way not only to avoid an excess of variety but also to produce substantially more variety than before. Knowledge was thus stored as a kind of "fine Capital" (Muratori) in view of an open future. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, scholars regarded such capitalisation as a question of "good taste". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the special issue on topics including value, practice and meaning in social work research, application of research to inform practice, and developing the practice of social work research.

In this paper we contribute to the longstanding discussion on the role of knowledge to economic growth in a spatial context. We observe that in adopting the European policy strategy towards a competitive knowledge economy, the Netherlands is—as most European countries—mainly oriented towards industrial, technological factors. The policy focus is on R&D specialized regions in their spatial economic strategies. We place the knowledge economy in a broader perspective. Based on the knowledge economy literature, we value complementary indicators: the successful introduction of new products and services to the market (“innovation”) and indicators of skills of employees (“knowledge workers”). Using econometric analysis, we relate the three factors “R&D”, “innovation” and “knowledge workers” to regional economic growth. We conclude that the factors “innovation” and “knowledge workers” are more profoundly related to urban employment and productivity growth than the R&D-factor. Preferably, urban research and policy-makers should therefore take all three knowledge factors into account when determining economic potentials of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competitive advantage of cities in the developed world is increasingly thought to lie in their superior access to the knowledge-base. The generation of new knowledge through investment in research and development leads to new products, services and processes which form the basis of the new economy. Attempts to correlate knowledge creation with economic growth have therefore tended to use R&D measures such as the numbers of research establishments in a rather narrow sense. This paper develops a much wider measure of the knowledge-base comprising tacit knowledge, codified knowledge and knowledge infrastructure for 19 European cities. With the exception of the two world cities, London and Paris, which significantly underperform, there is a broad relationship between the quality of the knowledge-base and economic change as measured by the competitive shift-share residual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the shift of personnel management towards human resource management in Europe after 1992. The initiative to abolish the maze of non-tariff barriers that impede the flow of goods, services, capital and people among members of the European Community (EC) emerged out of economic necessity. The White Paper and the European Single Act have accomplished something that was considered impossible years ago: the belief in the possibility to create a single market of 324 million consumers by the end of 1992 through administrative elimination of all technical, physical and fiscal barriers. The effects of deregulation and standardization on achieving economic unity in Europe, without political unity however, are discussed.

Copyright of Spatial Economic Analysis is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Is the knowledge creation process linear or characterized by feedback relations among actors involved in the regional innovation system? How can the innovation process of ‘lagging’ regions be strengthened? What is the role and extent of inter-regional knowledge spillovers? The paper aims at providing satisfactory answers in investigating a knowledge production function framework adapted to the specific questions and which is tested on an extended sample of European regions. On the basis of the results, concrete policy measures are derived aiming at upgrading the knowledge creation capacity of European regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While discussions about management knowledge transfer to the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) seem to be popular, they often suffer from serious shortcomings with respect to their basic assumptions. Starting with a critical evaluation of prevailing frameworks, the authors introduce institutional theory as an alternative approach to this topic. Based on these theoretical foundations, they develop some propositions that support a deeper understanding of how the transfer of management knowledge into this highly complex region works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the different theories of teacher education shared by the researchers in Europe and its impact on the real-life teaching education. He mentions on the comparativeness of the study conducted by Grangeat and Gray on the concepts drawn from industrial studies. On the research by Soares, Lock, and Foster, he commented that there is an erosion of time intended to be spent on induction activities. He also cited the efficacy of the studies on developing the teacher as researcher.

An instruction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including one on the comparison regarding immigrants and native-born Latinos in Spain and the U.S., one on the importance of recognition in the success of social work interventions, and one regarding the concept of tradition in community development related work.

The author discusses the essay by Raewyn Connell on the discourse of decoloniality in higher education and Southern theory, which raises critical concerns over the Euro-American university and its influence on post-colonial global-Southern educational settings. Topics include the focus of Connell on the change in the colonial curriculum in post-colonial Afica, the history of knowledge production, and the imposition of foreign governance in higher education system in Africa.

There is a shortage of empirical human resource management (HRM) literature in respect to identifying new patterns of multinational company (MNC) involvement in the Central and Eastern Europe region and the impact of ongoing MNC operations on the patterns of the HRM behavior of these companies. To counter this lack of understanding within the field, our broadly based, international survey asked 279 subsidiaries located in Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia and was conducted in 2010. It aimed to describe the relationships within the companies involved—between the influencing factors and the HR solutions applied—in a statistically valid way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key question addressed in this research is ‘how can we effectively manage and mobilise knowledge in the extended enterprise?’. We explore how knowledge sharing and transfer occur when developing new products, with special reference to the telecommunications industry. The benefits of implementing knowledge management strategies have been proven but research has largely focused on technology as a solution. Working together with European-based telecommunication companies, we focus instead on the softer, human issues. The main human barriers identified include international differences, accuracy and protection of knowledge, maintenance of communication channels, lack of time, fear of penalties and market position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the replacement of bureacratic systems of command and control by networks based on technologies, where co-operation and co-ordination are constantly negotiated and regulated in different ways, and where policy-makers negotiate new power relations with new actors. The comparison between England and Scotland highlights the fact that information and data cannot be transformed immediately into efficient initiatives, and that it requires a constant effort to find a consensus and to preserve it. In the centralised system of England, it is left to technocrats to make this conversion effective. In Scotland, the strategy of self-evaluation is adapted to a discourse of autonomy and progress for all. In both cases, the analysis of the available political tools, as well as the use of information and the role of the school inspectorates enable us to understand the conception of governance for nation-states in a framework of international and European developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Ian Shaw on the historical background of social work research, one by Dirk Geldof on the challenging evolutions for social work in European cities, and one by Hans van Ewijk on collaboration issues in social work research.

Knowledge management is one of the results of combination of management science and information science. Knowledge management has already established its own theoretical system, and has caught the attention of both theorists and practitioners alike. Organisational knowledge management study has made tremendous progress while regional knowledge management study is still in the initial stage, further research on regional knowledge management has become urgent and necessary. This study discusses regional knowledge management from the perspective of management theory, analyses the functions of regional knowledge management in terms of planning, organising, controlling and leadership, and presents a framework of regional knowledge management based on management theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy interest in doctoral education has burgeoned in Europe and the UK with a realisation of its importance for producing highly skilled knowledge workers to sustain the knowledge economy. In the UK, doctoral education is increasingly constructed as a training ground for professional researchers, rather than as an entry to an academic career. With the aim of producing a cadre of knowledge workers primed to seek employment across different work sectors, a stream of UK government funding has targeted the skills development of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, recently redefined as 'early career' or 'early stage' researchers. These emergent concepts reflect a new area of social enquiry where there is a paucity of data. This article reports on a small-scale, exploratory, mixed-method study that was positioned in this gap and which was conceptualised through post-positivist theories of learning and identity. Drawing upon an online survey followed by semi-structured interviews with 15 respondents, it explored the career trajectories of newly qualified researchers who had graduated with doctorates between 2006 and 2008. Although policy discourses before and in response to the recent economic crisis seem to reflect a rather restricted and instrumental view of research and education, the data suggest that newly qualified researchers maintain wider visions. Although recognised as a small-scale, exploratory study, the data also illuminate gender and social class inequities in the transition from the doctorate into employment, as well as equity issues within higher education employment structures, where it is suggested that the appeal of more traditional visions of higher education in society as an autonomous or 'not for profit space' is still powerful, but at the same time the appeal and commitment to such visions may paradoxically contribute to a perpetration of inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) was conceived in Canada and the United States in the early 1990s, and has since then traveled to Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In this article, the concept of SDI is understood as a myth, a mobilizing and at the same time seductive tale that inspires actors to enact reality. This article first shows what myths underlie the notion of SDI in the American discourse, and then examines how the notion of SDI was reinterpreted and domesticated in the African SDI discourse. Thereafter it reflects on domestication of SDI in Africa using Rottenburg's theory of iterating processes of consensus and knowledge differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quintessentially a US phenomenon, the information and knowledge economy (IKE) combines regional clusters of innovation with new and sophisticated forms of intellectual and finance capital. For those European economies struggling to adjust to global competition, the IKE is seen as the panacea. It is regarded as a proven recipe for all places and sectors, with the potential to remedy structural weaknesses that have become ever more apparent in a world subject to globalisation, increased international competition, and technological change. We suggest an agent-centred perspective for understanding economic systems and behaviour that stresses the significance of cognition and learning for innovation while making the connection between organizations and their environments. We argue that the IKE, as represented by regions such as Silicon Valley and Route 128/495 Boston, is complex and multi-faceted and cannot be transposed easily between cultures. Finally, we draw together the implications of our approach for European regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]