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The emergence of Open Innovation means, among other things, that innovation management will become more collaborative and that business model innovation will become as important as technological innovation. This author, who coined the term Open Innovation and literally wrote the book on it, has excellent advice for readers.

innovation management will become more collaborative and that business model innovation will become as important as technological innovation. This author, who coined the term Open Innovation and literally wrote the book on it, has excellent advice for readers.

The command-and-control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.

One's colleagues can be situated in close physical proximity, yet seem quite distant. Conversely, one's colleagues can be quite far away in objective terms, yet seem quite close. In this paper, we explore this paradoxical phenomenon of feeling close to geographically distant colleagues and propose a model of perceived proximity (a dyadic and asymmetric construct which reflects one person's perception of how close or how far another person is). The model shows how communication and social identification processes, as well as certain individual and socio-organizational factors, affect feelings of proximity.

Innovation occurs along a continuum from maintaining and improving the already existing (incremental innovation) to entering novel regime in terms of technology, meaning or business model (radical innovation). Both ends of the continuum require particular capabilities and human characteristics in order to get accomplished properly. As innovation activities are often embedded in a portfolio approach across this continuum, innovation management depends on integrating and balancing opposite requirements.

Description: Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present a well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environments, ranging from highly immersive virtual reality systems to internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. The volume is a follow-up to a previous essay collection, The Social Life of Avatars, which explored general issues in this field. This collection goes further, examining uses of shared virtual environments in practical settings such as scientific collaboration, distributed meetings, building models together, and others.