FINDER · Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era

Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era

FINDER sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era in a European Industrial Doctorate partnership of 4 years between Radboud University and Atos to prepare a new generation of business and entrepreneurship researchers contributing to the development of innovative ecosystems in a digital era, providing sophisticated understanding of the context in which business is done, the effect of technology in driving these collaborative processes and of the stakeholders involved and prepared students to drive change at the vanguard of business and technology by challenging them to consider multiple perspectives and to create innovative solutions to problems in such a way that they are not only profitable to business but also relevant and responsible towards society at large. This project has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813095. Track 1’s research on collaborative innovation management addresses gaps in organizational sciences literature concerning the sociopolitical forces behind technological innovation as it occurs between firms and other firms, between firms and regulators, and between firms and society. There are no clear indications that businesses engaged in high-tech ecosystems will divert away from collaborative innovation approaches, which makes this research and the tools it produces timely and useful in elucidating the challenges that practitioners presently face and will face in the future. Track 3’s research focuses on the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems, in particular FinTechs. It expands knowledge on how companies can sustainably adapt to structural changes of digital transformation. As the world is rocked by economic, pathologic, and climate-related disasters. It provides understanding of how companies survive and adapt to major turbulence - crucial for strategic management scholarship’s understanding, rephrased: how does uncertainty in times of crisis trigger organizational transformation. Track 4’s deals with the social forces at play in interfirm decision-making. The role of positional icons such as CEOs is significant in events e.g. mergers and acquisitions. This research uses novel methods to examine the signals that CEOs advertently and inadvertently cast when announcing their M&A decisions, broadening managerial sciences’ scope on applicability of investigative machine learning. Track 5’s focus on venture capital (VC) as a fuel for the entrepreneurship of technological innovation provides a different lens on the social aspect of interorganizational relationships. Quantitative research methods allowed this track to investigate how VCs’ reputation interplays with their funding targets’ performance. Practical applications will largely be for the parties engaged in this dialogue, but as investing overall becomes more democratized, insights therefrom become more widely applicable as they age.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union