Urenio Watch Watch: Innovation

Convergence innovation in the digital age and in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis

This paper presents Convergence Innovation (CI) as a new sustainable core competence of organizations. It explores how CI can be a catalyst for managing the current COVID-19 pandemic and charting the path to post crisis. According to the authors, the study makes contributions to both innovation literature and to practicing managers with new insights on sustainable innovation strategies for organizational performance and beyond.

How Industries Can Better Support Workers in a Post-Covid World

We are not yet in a post-covid world. We will get there. But it will take some time. Things are moving in the right direction. Deaths and hospitalizations are starting to decline. But new variants are more contagious than the original. One vaccine company had to stop trials in South Africa because it was not effective against that strain of the virus. The vaccines we do have are slowly finding their way into arms. However, in the U.S., that process is chaotic.

The Benefits of Using Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services

Banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies are digitally transforming to meet client needs better. To optimize operations and improve processes means you need to do more than upgrading systems or outsourcing processes. You need to innovate. One way to achieve this is by using robotic process automation to improve your financial services’ speed and accuracy.

Application Programming Interfaces in Governments: Why, what and how

This report presents the results of the European Commission application programming interfaces (APIs) for digital government (APIs4DGov) study, which aims to analyse the role of APIs in the public sector and, specifically, the motivations for their use and the way governments should implement them.  This document provides a concrete tool for governments to determine the status of their API strategies and, eventually, how these strategies should be designed or adopted.

New book: Quantitative Methods for Place-Based Innovation Policy_ Measuring the Growth Potential of Regions

Building on the experience of more than one hundred innovation strategies for smart specialisation, this book uncovers insights into their recent implementation by regional and national governments in the European Union. The authors provide new reflections on the conceptual approaches for the identification of innovation priorities, the data required, the methods with which to turn data into useful information, and the mapping of the information available. Although designed to boost the competitiveness of Europe and its regions, chapters analyse why the implementation of this policy model was much more complicated than expected.

New paper: COVID, CITIES and CLIMATE: Historical Precedents and Potential Transitions for the New Economy

According to the author, the 2020 collapse of the global economy due to Covid-19 pandemic has enabled us to think about long term trends and what the future could hold for our cities and regions, especially due to the climate agenda. Having as a starting point the current pandemic, this paper sets out the historical precedents for economic transitions after collapses that unleash new technologically based innovation waves.  These are shown to be associated with different energy and infrastructure priorities and their transport and resulting urban forms.