Friday
Innovation and entrepreneurship are tightly coupled concepts. Innovation involves designing new ways of conceptualising, developing and producing a range of goods and services which society requires. Although inventing new things may be seen as part of innovation, innovation does not exclusively rely on new discoveries. Rather it can stem from simply seeing new ways of satisfying demand. Thus innovation is not a synonym for invention and almost anyone can come up with new innovations.
Entrepreneurship adds a further dimension to how new ideas are converted into goods and services. Entrepreneurship is sometimes said to be a mindset required to convert innovation into a real business situation which will deliver benefits to the stakeholders. Entrepreneurship is always driven by an individual or a small group of individuals who are referred to as entrepreneurs and who are sometimes colloquially referred to as the movers and shakers in our society. Thus the entrepreneur configures the various factors of products to that they become a viable proposition.
Both innovation and entrepreneurship are generally under-researched and the advisory group for the conference invites submissions of both academic and practitioner papers on a wide range of topics and a wide range of scholarly approaches including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative and critical methods