UEF Business Scholl

This research focuses on customer-oriented lean innovation and introduces the innovation empathy framework that has been developed for the early phases of innovation processes. The framework is based on the idea that increased empathy towards customers helps innovators gain a better understanding of customers' problems and needs, and increases the possibilities to generate more value to the customers. The analysis of the test use of the framework with business managers illustrates how empathising, i.e., putting oneself in the role of the customer, can be rehearsed through empathising exercises and, more importantly, through empathetic facilitation.

This paper focuses on empathy as a central but little researched aspect of the innovation process. We extend the discussion on innovators' empathy towards customers by adding a new angle: facilitators' empathy towards innovators. We elaborate on this new angle through the concept of 'empathic facilitation', which draws on a combination of diagnostic and dialogic organisation development and facilitation practice. Through an intensive case study, we show that empathic facilitation is a key element in the innovation process when using empathy as a vehicle for rapid, customer-oriented innovation. The findings indicate that while dialogic practice is a cost-effective way to strengthen and maintain customer perspective in the innovation process, diagnostic practice is required to increase the speed of the innovation process.

The paper explores how a 'privileged witness' (Wright et al., 2007), that is, a business advisor hired by a university, assists scientists in commercialising their research through research-based spin-offs (RBSOs). Prior research on the key actors of RBSOs has focused on what kind of scientists engage in this activity, what motivates them, and how they learn over time. Less research has been done on the micro-level interaction between scientists and those who assist them in spin-off creation. Our study fills this gap in the literature by studying real-life interaction between scientists and a business advisor hired by a university. The primary data for the study consists of tape-recorded discussions. The micro-ethnographic study shows how the business advisor communicates his preferred meanings concerning the RBSO to the scientists, who try to make sense of what an RBSO means and requires from them.

The paper focuses on incubation managers' work in the context of collaborative innovation (co-innovation). While incubation managers are a key human resource in incubation processes, including co-innovation projects, there is a lack of research on their work roles. This paper contributed to this gap by drawing from the business and organisation development literatures and analysing the roles incubation managers' play in real-life practice. Our empirical study shows that while incubation managers' have many roles; their integration is a key issue. In our case study, incubation managers needed to work as business consultants and coaches simultaneously, seamlessly integrating key activities attached to both roles. Therefore, our study confirms the relevance of investigating how a multiplicity of roles are fused together rather than kept separated.

This article explores the early phases of the incubation process, in which small and medium-sized companies are evaluated for a project that aims to accelerate their growth. Guided by the justification theory approach, the objective was to analyse how different orders of worth (inspired, domestic, fame, civic, market and industrial) guided evaluation, selection and justifications thereof in a face-to-face meeting between project staff and business experts. Findings indicate that justifications for the companies having most potential for incubation were informed by the domestic order of worth in particular, emphasising evaluators' common history, mutual familiarity and personal relationships with the people and teams of the prospective companies. Concerning the industrial order of worth, professionalism, efficiency and a limited number of internal growth factors related to people were addressed.

The purpose of this study is to examine how different logics of commercialisation are part of sustainable value creation in an emerging area of healthcare. This paper presents an inductive interpretative case study to examine the emerging field of personalised medicine from the perspective of a biobank seeking to create value on its depository of tissue samples, patient records, and digitised data. This study increases our understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by a company when developing innovations in healthcare. It contributes to the literature on the commercialisation of innovation by exploring how sustainable value creation in an emerging industry builds on both planned and emergent commercialisation activities and how different logics of commercialisation are a part of sustainable value creation in personalised medicine.

This study utilised Weick's sensemaking framework to understand academic entrepreneurship as a social process. This paper presents an analysis of the sensemaking process of a group of scientists, assisted by a university business advisor, who aimed to establish a university spin-off company. The case study shows how the scientists failed to construct a new sense of commercialisation in their business development project. Analysing personal interviews with the scientists, this study investigated problematic sensemaking concerning commercialisation activities and academic entrepreneurship. In addition to showing how problems in sensemaking produced hesitation rather than action in business development, the findings emphasise the centrality of identities, enactments, salient cues and social contexts in organising commercialisation activities at universities.