Innovation journalism

From Free net encyclopedia

Innovation Journalism is journalism covering innovation. It covers the process of innovation and the innovation systems.

1 The Beat
2 Journalism's Role in Innovation Systems
3 IJ's History
4 Calendar
5 External links

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The Beat

Traditional beats - business, technology, science and political journalism - only cover specific aspects of innovation. Innovation cuts across all the traditional beats. Innovation Journalism needs to cover technical, business, legal and political aspects of innovation and how they interact and affect each other.

IJ identifies and reports on key issues in the innovation systems, on the main actors, their agendas, and their interactions with each other. Common themes: science and technology trends, science and R&D policies, intellectual property, investments, standardization, industrial production processes, marketing of new technologies, business models, and politics.

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Journalism's Role in Innovation Systems

Innovation is a main driving force for economic growth, and is the core activity of many leading industries. An innovation system is an ecology of people and organizations that imagine new products or ways of doing things, and turns those ideas into goods and services. IJ brings news of technology commercialization to:

competitor organizations, so they can adjust their own product and marketing strategies
potential investors, to direct capital with better information
channels of distribution, to anticipate changes in technology and to influence the way those changes come to market
researchers, who often work in secret

By covering an innovation journalism beat, reporters and editors change the innovation system. This happens on three levels.

IJ covers innovations. So IJ is a vector for diffusion of innovations through an innovation system.
IJ covers the innovation system. By reporting on the people, processes, and practices of innovators, they improve systems of innovation.
IJ covers the interaction of innovation systems. IJ draws attention to risks and opportunties as money and innovations cross language, national, and industry boundaries.

IJ may improve the efficiency and competitiveness of a country's national innovation system. Innovation journalism affects the covered organizations and those affected by them. Without this reportage, most actors in an innovation system make decisions with less information. This makes the system less efficient through duplication of effort, pursuing proven market failures, and other market surprises.

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IJ's History

June 2003. VINNOVA, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems, launches Innovation Journalism Fellowships.
October 2003. VINNOVA publishes the first paper using the expression "Innovation Journalism": The Concept of Innovation Journalism and a Programme for Developing It, by David Nordfors [1].
April 2004 the First Conference on Innovation Journalism was held at Stanford University, organized by The Swedish Innovation Journalism Initiative run by VINNOVA in co-operation with the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. Links: Conference Program [2], Conference Papers[3], News Release [4]
June 2004 VINNOVA launches second round of Swedish IJ Fellowships.
The Swedish-US initiative was followed in November 2004 by a Finnish Innovation Journalism research and education initiative at the University of Tampere. pdf archive.

January 2005, an Innovation Journalism initiative was created at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University in the United States, in co-operation with the Swedish program.
April 2005, The Second Conference on Innovation Journalism is held at Stanford, organized by the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning and The Swedish Innovation Journalism Initiative run by VINNOVA, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems. The conference is co-sponsored by The Finnish Innovation Journalism Initiative and The Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism. Documentation: Conference Program [5], Conference Papers [6]. News releases: Innovation Journalism news release [7] and Stanford news release [8].
June 2005, VINNOVA launches the third round of Swedish IJ fellowships.
November 2005. Session dedicated to Innovation Journalism at the Global Conference of TCI, The Competitiveness Institute, in Hong Kong.

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