Wednesday, October 25, 2006

PR AND THE INNOVATION COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

Innovation Journalism Vol.3 No.5 Oct 25 2006

By David Nordfors.

Public relations in innovation companies can strengthen brand value by communicating innovation processes and add value to innovation by developing narratives for new products and services in parallel with technological and business development. The development of innovation communication and PR will benefit from the emergence of independent innovation journalism. Some new concepts are introduced: Communicators and journalists can be seen as “attention workers”, driving the “innovation communication system”, a subset of the innovation system, focusing on the flows of communication and attention. (This essay was written for the 10th SKOJ conference in Slovenia.)

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

INNOVATION JOURNALISM GETS ACADEMIC RESEARCH FUNDING

News Flash Oct 4 2006

How does journalism link innovation with the public interest? How do innovation ecosystems engage journalists? These questions are at the heart of a research initiative recently funded by VINNOVA, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems. The project will set the agenda for an international research workshop scheduled for February 2007 at Stanford University. The academic research study is led by Professor Marc Ventresca of Oxford University (PI, coordinator) and Dr. David Nordfors at Stanford University and VINNOVA (Program Director), with Dr. Turo Uskali from the University of Jyväskylä, visiting scholar in innovation journalism at Stanford, and Dr. Antti Ainamo at the Helsinki School of Business. The group of researchers standing behind the mission, which includes faculty and expert practitioners from leading U.S. and European universities, convened in April 2006 for a workshop hosted by the Innovation Journalism program run by Stanford and VINNOVA. They recently co-published an essay identifying ‘Innovation Journalism’ as a useful theme through which to explore the interplay of journalism in innovation ecosystems .