Dynamics of Industry and Innovation, The

Industry and Innovation, Feb 2007 by Lorenzen, Mark

From this fourteenth volume, Industry and Innovation increases its output to five annual issues. The steady growth of Industry and Innovation is a natural consequence of developments within academia as well as the journal itself. Let us dwell upon these developments for a moment.

During the last years, Industry and Innovation has not only celebrated its 10-year anniversary, the journal has also witnessed the accelerating growth of the research community it seeks to give voice. The heritage of Joseph Schumpeter and other early inquirers into the nature and causes of innovation, such as Austrian economists and "old" institutionalists, has begun to seep into management as well as into economics. Today, the study of innovation is undertaken not only in business schools and at strategy departments, it is also becoming an increasingly central subject matter even in mainstream economics departments worldwide. In spite of this promising academic development, Industry and Innovation is still relatively unchallenged in its field. While there is an abundance of scientific journals bent upon mapping the technical aspects of innovation or illustrating their societal impact of various sorts, Industry and Innovation is one of the few journals seeking to promote insights into the dynamics of innovation-at the industry level, but also at the levels of the organizational forms and the social institutions that facilitate innovation.

There are good reasons that only few journals have chosen to focus upon this field. Resting upon combined insights into technology, organizations and institutions, the dynamics of innovation are not easily studied within the confines of the normal science of mainstream economics-or, for that matter, engineering, sociology or psychology. Understanding the dynamics of innovation often necessitates the combination of disciplines and taking advantage of recent developments outside of mainstream economics, such as transaction cost economics and resource-based or knowledge-based perspectives on economic organization. No single research paper can hope to do all that-and it remains a huge challenge for a scientific journal to present papers that, alone and combined, will add to this research agenda while building on two or more disciplines.

Industry and Innovation has taken up this challenge with gusto. Since 2005, it has been associated with DRUID (The Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics). Initially under the leadership of Bengt-Ake Lundvall, and now under the direction of Peter Masked, DRUID is, after 12 years, a leading international research community, with two major annual conferences and a working paper series with more than 190 articles and well over 100,000 downloads. Over the last 2 years, the editors of Industry and Innovation have dedicated great effort to taking advantage of the unique resource constituted by the open and inclusive research community of DRUID. The international editorial board of Industry and Innovation has been expanded and carefully tailored to provide inspiration for the future development of the journal, and now encompasses more than 30 scholars from North America, Europe, Taiwan, Japan and India-all with distinguished top profiles within their areas, and already an inspiration for a generation of young scholars within the field of industrial dynamics.

Over the last 2 years, Industry and Innovation has also dramatically altered its review process. Now, with more than 650 reviewers from all over the world who have been carefully screened (in most cases, by several DRUID scholars) before entering into the reviewer community, Industry and Innovation is able to use combinations of senior protagonists and young and rising scholars for the review of submitted papers within a range of fields related to industrial dynamics. The challenges of keeping review times at a minimum while using a varied number of reviewers for each paper have been met by a recent upgrade of the online submission system of the journal.

These developments have served to increase the global impact of Industry and Innovation. From its outset 14 years ago, the journal has aimed at a global, rather than merely North American or European, presence, and has published important work on industrial dynamics in not only OECD countries but also, for example, Taiwan, China and India. The journal continues to source globally, taking advantage of a truly global editorial board and reviewer community.

Industry and Innovation publishes both conceptual papers presenting novel views of how industries and technologies evolve, as well as empirical papers dedicated to testing or contributing to theories on industrial dynamics. In the first category, the journal still carries the torch of Schumpeter, for example, in the 2002 special issue on "Schumpeter's lost' Seventh Chapter", or in the exchanges on his Business Cycles published in the Fundamentals and Debate section in Vol. 13, No. 1, 2006. The journal also continues to add to the theoretical perspective of "National Innovation Systems". In the Fundamentals and Debate section of the current issue, the main proponent of this perspective takes stock of its influence on the industrial dynamics debate, hence following up the 2000 special issue of Industry and Innovation on "Industrial Dynamics and National Systems of Innovation". An increasing range of conceptual papers debating in more detail particular institutional preconditions of innovation has also surfaced in the journal. While a 2001 special issue was devoted to discussing "Industrial Dynamics and Knowledge Institutions", later papers have treated governance and organization of knowledge, property rights issues, as well as the alleged rise of an "open" innovation regime.