Theme 6: Adoption of Successful Innovations
From Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication
Innovation – its nature, pace, drivers, and characteristics – is an underlying concept for many of the other themes explored at the meeting. The process of assimilating innovations into communication practices depends upon our ability to characterize and to understand their sources, trajectories, and potential benefits. Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations[1] speaks to the processes of adoption (and rejection). Moving beyond incubation necessitates an understanding of how to deploy innovations so they can be scaled for widespread adoption.
Assessing the potential of scaling innovations requires criteria for evaluation that allows the useful recognition of “failures.” It is the nature of some experiments to fail. Acknowledging and sharing results from failures may help others avoid wasting time and resources.
Illustrative Challenges
Innovation is difficult to track and may not be recognized for some time after it occurs. Even useful innovations aren’t necessarily recognized and used by those who stand to benefit from them. Adoption of new communications approaches is varying widely within disciplines and even within sub-disciplines. Scholars want the fastest possible access to new approaches and technologies, but don’t want to waste time on things that don’t work. Publishers are often uncomfortable with taking the risks inevitably associated with innovation. Libraries attempt to deal with the full range of domain change in scholarly communication and struggle to act as change agents to accelerate the spread of useful developments.
Librarians may not be asking questions or listening to their faculty in ways that can elicit how innovation occurs and how it can be encouraged through partnerships, new services, practices, business models, and support systems. Is it possible to determine whether traditional methods and practices inhibit innovation and creative intellectual insights? What new examination of our own services can inform our ability to foster innovation?
Research Possibilities
- Analyze the nature, pace, and drivers for innovation in scholarly communication systems by drawing from the extensive literature on innovation and cultural change.
- Case studies characterizing successful innovations from various perspectives, such as valuing and reward systems, research acceleration, and new avenues of research and inquiry.
- Studies surveying, documenting, and suggesting mechanisms to encourage or reward publishing in alternative channels, the creation of large datasets, scholarly software, and other new modes of scholarly activity.
NEXT: Theme 7: Preservation of Critical Materials
