Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (15) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (14)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (15)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (15)
Keywords
- innovation (15) (remove)
Powered by blockchain
(2020)
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to formulate the most probable future scenario for the use of blockchain technology within the next 5–10 years in the electricity sector based on today’s experts’ views.
Design/methodology/approach: An international, two-stage Delphi study with 20 projections is used.
Findings: According to the experts, blockchain applications will be primarily based on permissioned or consortium blockchains. Blockchain-based applications will integrate Internet of Things devices in the power grid, manage the e-mobility infrastructure, automate billing and direct payment and issue certificates regarding the origin of electricity. Blockchain solutions are expected to play an important big role in fostering peer-to-peer trading in microgrids, further democratizing and decentralizing the energy sector. New regulatory frameworks become necessary.
Research limitations/implications: The Delphi study’s scope is rather broad than narrow and detailed. Further studies should focus on partial scenarios.
Practical implications: Electricity market participants should build blockchain-based competences and collaborate in current pilot projects.
Social implications: Blockchain technology will further decentralize the energy sector and probably reduce transaction costs. Originality/value: Despite the assumed importance of blockchain technology, no coherent foresight study on its use and implications exists yet. This study closes this research gap.
City mice and country mice
(2021)
The ability to produce innovative behaviour is a key determinant in the successful coping with environmental challenges and changes. The expansion of human-altered environments presents wildlife with multiple novel situations in which innovativeness could be beneficial. A better understanding of the drivers of within-species variation in innovation propensity and its consequences will provide insights into the traits enabling animals to thrive in the face of human-induced rapid environmental change. We compared problem-solving performance of 31 striped field mice, Apodemus agrarius, originating from rural or urban environments in a battery of eight foraging extraction tasks. We tested whether differences in problem-solving performance were mediated by the extent and duration of the animal's exploration of the experimental set-ups, the time required to solve the tasks, and their persistence. In addition, we tested the influence of the diversity of motor responses, as well as of behavioural traits boldness and activity on problem-solving performance. Urban individuals were better problem solvers despite rural individuals approaching faster and interacting longer with the test set-ups. Participation rates and time required to solve a task did not differ between rural and urban individuals. However, in case of failure to solve a task, rural mice were more persistent. The best predictors of solving success, aside from the area of origin, were the time spent exploring the set-ups and boldness, while activity and diversity of motor responses did not explain it. Problem-solving ability could thus be a contributing factor to the successful coping with the rapid and recent expansion of human-altered environments.
How Will We Dine?
(2020)
Haute cuisine, the cooking style for fine dining at gourmet restaurants, has changed over the last decades and can be expected to evolve in the upcoming years. To engage in foresight, the purpose of this study is to identify a plausible future trend scenario for the haute cuisine sector within the next five to ten years, based on today’s chefs’ views. To achieve this goal, an international, two-stage Delphi study was conducted. The derived scenario suggests that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will lead to significant restaurant bankruptcies and will raise creativity and innovation among the remaining ones. It is expected that haute cuisine tourism will grow and that menu prices will differ for customer segments. More haute cuisine restaurants will open in Asia and America. Local food will remain a major trend and will be complemented by insect as well as plant-based proteins and sophisticated nonalcoholic food pairings. Restaurant design and the use of scents will become more relevant. Also, private dining and fine dining at home will become more important. The scenario also includes negative projections. These findings can serve as a research agenda for future research in haute cuisine, including the extension of the innovation lens towards the restaurant and the business model. Practical implications include the necessity for haute cuisine restaurants to innovate to cope with increasing competition in several regions. Customers should be seen as co-creators of the value of haute cuisine.
Design thinking is a well-established practical and educational approach to fostering high-level creativity and innovation, which has been refined since the 1950s with the participation of experts like Joy Paul Guilford and Abraham Maslow. Through real-world projects, trainees learn to optimize their creative outcomes by developing and practicing creative cognition and metacognition. This paper provides a holistic perspective on creativity, enabling the formulation of a comprehensive theoretical framework of creative metacognition. It focuses on the design thinking approach to creativity and explores the role of metacognition in four areas of creativity expertise: Products, Processes, People, and Places. The analysis includes task-outcome relationships (product metacognition), the monitoring of strategy effectiveness (process metacognition), an understanding of individual or group strengths and weaknesses (people metacognition), and an examination of the mutual impact between environments and creativity (place metacognition). It also reviews measures taken in design thinking education, including a distribution of cognition and metacognition, to support students in their development of creative mastery. On these grounds, we propose extended methods for measuring creative metacognition with the goal of enhancing comprehensive assessments of the phenomenon. Proposed methodological advancements include accuracy sub-scales, experimental tasks where examinees explore problem and solution spaces, combinations of naturalistic observations with capability testing, as well as physiological assessments as indirect measures of creative metacognition.
Workplace innovations often take the form of making suggestions about small-range improvements, for example, of processes and work procedures. Research on innovation suggests that people holding a novel idea will often consult their peers first in order to gauge their potential approval and support before proposing the idea to formal decision makers. We argue that peer evaluators’ intentions to support an innovative idea depend on the idea’s capacity to satisfy or threaten the evaluator’s achievement motive. Support intentions will be higher if the idea satisfies the evaluators’ achievement motive (idea-motive congruence), and lower if it threatens their achievement motive (idea-motive incongruence); evaluators’ affective response is proposed to mediate this effect. Moreover, the intentions attributed to the idea presenter are proposed to affect peers’ support intentions. The results of two scenario-based experiments (N = 153 and 123) confirm that motive-incongruent implications of an innovative idea, in particular regarding their fear of failure, reduce the likelihood for peers’ support intentions. Results on affective responses were inconsistent across studies, whereas perceiving the idea presenter to hold prosocial intentions was positively related to idea support. Implications for the evaluation of ideas are discussed.