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[Science Sketch-STEPI Interview #6] Understanding Innovation Studies (English Subtitle)

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자막	Dear viewers, I am Kim Seok-kwan from STEPI. The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word “innovation is that it renews things. If we are to explain innovation in areas of technology,it can be understood as crafting something technologically novel, or improving existing technologies. Synonyms for technological innovation may include technological development or invention. However, in the standard technology management textbooks, there is a clear distinction between technological innovation and development, or technological innovation and invention. The distinction lies in the commercializability of the technology. Developing an objective technology, or inventing an objective technology, cannot stop there; it must move on to the stage of marketing and selling, so that the innovation is understood as completed. Why does innovation prioritize commercialization and market? It is because this term, innovation, was first proposed as an economic concept by an economist. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian American economist, published The Theory of Economic Development in 1911. The main objective of this book is to identify what is needed for a balanced economy to grow According to Schumpeter, a combination of traditional production elements creates a new form of combination, which ultimately promotes economic development. And to Schumpeter, the authors of such new combinations were the ‘entrepreneurs’, a special group consisted of a handful of people. Innovation, for Schumpeter, was thought to be something that this special group we call entrepreneurs creates as a momentum for economic growth. Therefore, innovation was a concept with market and economic development in mind from the beginning. Research and development (R&D) is something that almost always accompanies innovation. In contemporary industry, it is true that most innovations take place through R&D. However, some industries do experience innovation without the R&D process. Take, for example, the machinery industry. Sometimes a highly skilled craftsperson leads the innovation at the stage of production themselves. In such cases, R&D is not necessary. So, for example, in Germany, where machinery industry is developed, we see a very small R&D investment, especially considering the size of their economy. It is almost as if they forgot to add some numbers, that’s how small the investment seems. And that is because Germany sees a lot of non-R&D innovations. Technology takes up a big proportion of economy and society in modernity. Therefore, it is inevitable that we research technology one way or another. This thing called technology has been studied in many different social science disciplines. Ranging from economics, management, public administration and sociology, many academic disciplines started studying the concept of technology. And these researchers decided to conjoin their research for a better access to knowledge; and that field is called “Innovation Studies”. In Korean, we can perhaps translate it to ‘innovation research’ or ‘innovation studies. This field, however, is not an academic discipline yet. Discipline as in an established academic field. I believe we could see innovation studies as currently in the stage of making, a stage of so-called ‘research field’, where various issues related to technology are studied in a joint and interdisciplinary manner. From the school system’s perspective, it is not a department, yet, but a program, more or less, where things are just being discussed. Well, that is for now. But given the importance of technological innovation, the research topics are broadening, and the number of researchers is increasing too. We could say that the research on innovation studies really started to flourish from the 1960s. Fagerberg, a Norwegian economist, submitted a journal article in 2012 with his analysis of the past 50 years of the innovation studies. According to Fagerberg, three branches of innovation studies were identified. First, there is research in the tradition of evolutionary economics, following the tradition of Schumpeter; Second, research from the perspective of management and organization studies; Third, ‘Innovation Systems’ studies, as a bridge between these two. Innovation Studies, like I said earlier, involves people from various majors and academic backgrounds, asking different questions with multiple methodologies. So, it can be said to be very diverse as an academic field. I would like to introduce four early research accomplishments that laid the foundation for early innovation theories. First is the taxonomy of innovation. Classification is the first thing that we do to understand the essence of the phenomenon when we face one. Suppose there are 100 phenomena; and suppose we detail each and every phenomenon. It will be, indeed, objective and accurate. However, the complexity and volume will be such that we won’t have an easy access to them. If we are to, for example, classify those 100 phenomena into two or four categories, it will make it easier for us to understand what belongs to what in the bigger picture. Likewise, innovation studies, too, saw a lot of taxonomical effort in the beginning. For example, classifying product innovation and process innovation. Or other classifications include radical & incremental, architectural & modular, sustaining & disruptive, etc. Such diverse forms of classifications emerged, and from this taxonomy surfaced novel types of innovation that we haven’t thought of, and these eventually contributed to a deeper understanding of innovation. Second, we have found that technological innovation, too, has some form of periodicity with highly consistent rules. This is actually staggering. A prime example would be James Utterback’s dynamic model of technological innovation. When one category of product emerges, many enterprises, with different innovations, compete to establish some market dominance. And when an enterprise is finally victorious, their product becomes “the dominant design”. Concurrently, the industry will see little product innovation, and see more ‘process innovation’ where the manufacturers use the dominant design and work on minimizing the manufacturing cost instead. This persists until a technological change occurs, where a competition for “dominant design” recurs. Before Utterback, technological innovation was a study of extreme disarray, but his research has brought some regularity to the study, which is why his study is of such significance. If the second early research was a ‘diachronic’ approach to innovation with dynamic patterns per time, the third early research can be understood as ‘synchronic’ where they compared all industries at one point of time. Third research tells us that after comparing the industries, each and every one seems to exhibit unique characteristics in their industry when it comes to technological innovations. Therefore, while we do need a universal policy that applies to all industries, but customized policies per industries are also necessary, to an extent. Final early research that I would like to discuss concerns the systematic property of innovation. It argues that the enterprise alone cannot lead innovation; only when the enterprise, university and research institutes cooperate and interact can innovation be maximized. And furthermore, a policy or system of a country must be designed to promote such interactions so as to maximize innovation. Aforementioned four researches, the taxonomy of innovation, the periodicity of technological innovation, the differences in the innovation patterns per industries and the systematic characteristic of the innovation: these four researches can be understood as universal traits, or, in other words, minimum requirements of some such technological innovation, notwithstanding what individual stances or academic backgrounds you bring to the innovation studies.
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설명	You've probably heard the word 'innovation' a lot. Maybe too much! But do you know exactly what innovation is? STEPI release a video about innovation and innovation studies. A new episode of our 'Science Sketch: STEPI Interview #6' is available on STEPI TV! ？ 00:17 Part1. What is Innovation? 02:45 Part2. Innovation Studies? 04:16 Part3. Representative research in innovation studies 07:41 Part4. Innovation studies is XX?