Department of
Sociology

Center for
Innovation

History of the Center for Innovation

The Center for Innovation was founded in 1982 when the Division of Engineering Sciences approached Jerald Hage to return to the study of organizational innovation. With a new assistant professor, Frank Hull, and with the cooperation of the industrial psychology program and the management program in the R. H. Smith School of Business, the Center was founded to study innovation in industrial organizations, primarily in the US but also in Japan. One of the main foci of interest was the problem of the adoption of flexible manufacturing. For the next eight years, the Center produced several dissertations, a number of papers and a book from a conference it held on the Futures of Organizations (Hage, 1988).

Starting in 1990 and for the next year eight years, the focus shifted to the study of the diversity of human capital and its consequences for economic growth. This line of research was at the nation state level and exploited a large data set that had been developed by Hage during the 1970s and 1980s on Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the period of 1870 through 1970. This research was conducted jointly with Maurice Garnier at Indiana University. The research program was funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation and the French government. Again, a number of papers were published, dissertations defined and a major report on technical education was written for the Department of Education in the US. A technique for measuring the social efficiency of the education system by measuring the costs and benefits of investing in technical and scientific education was developed for the Ministry of Planning in France.

At the conclusion of this eight year period and these macro studies, the Center again shifted focus back to research on organizational innovation with several important differences. First, an emphasis was placed on scientific innovation in a major comparative study of radical innovation in biomedicine in France, Germany, Britain, and the US, jointly conducted with the late J. Rogers Hollingsworth at the University of Wisconsin. Second, the approach was multi-level, that is micro or the laboratory, meso or the research organization, and macro or the institutional arrangements of science. This research program was funded by the Swedish government and the National Science Foundation. Again, several papers were published by Jerald Hage and Jonathon Mote on the Institut Pasteur.

During the third decade, the Center for Innovation expanded its work on the institutional sector of science in several directions. First, we began a comparative study of scientific research organizations. The focus of this research was to examine the nature of scientific work in these laboratories and in particular the amount of organizational learning that occurred. Second, with funding from the Science Section of the Department of Energy, the Center sponsored several international conferences to assess the research questions at three levels of analysis; micro, meso, and macro. A book (Hage and Meeus, 2006) summarizes the findings. Finally, a third direction was to develop a close working relationship with one specific scientific research organization, namely the STAR division of NOAA since they were located in the Washington, D.C area. Each year for eight years, the Director, Al Powell, Jr. would present us with an applied problem and we would attempt to develop an action theory solution on the basis of both theory and interviews.

Maintaining its concern with action theory solutions, the Center did a number of papers proposing solutions to various problems at both the Sandia National Research Laboratories and also the STAR division of NOAA. (See Mote et al, 2008, Mote et al, 2007).

Beginning in the third and on into the fourth decade of its existence, the Center shifted its focus more to the problems of the health care delivery systems in both developing and developed countries. In both cases, its focus has been on the importance of measurement. For the Canadian Medical system, Hage wrote a white paper, proposing 15 measures of technical advance in specific health categories by examining the stages of health care intervention. In addition three measures of increased knowledge were suggested. Special sections on various topics were created including one on measuring the quality of care and another on detecting gaps in medical research. With a large grant from the National Science Foundation, the Center assessed the socio-economic costs and benefits of medical research in several areas (see, for example).

Overseas, in cooperation with Joseph Valadez at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the Center has been evaluating the method of LQAS as a technique for low-cost evaluations of health care delivery systems. In addition, Hage was sent to Nicaragua, India, and Uganda to study fundamental problems in service delivery.

As the Center approaches its fifth decade of existence, it is focusing more and more attention on developing action theory solutions for a number of social problems. In particular, our emphasis is on building a more equal society, a more innovative economy and a more responsive democracy. The first effort was to propose solutions to the declining innovation rates of the United States. The book Restoring the Innovative Edge: Driving the evolution of science and technology (Hage, 2011) suggests six action theory solutions and documents their relative effectiveness at solving specific micro, meso, and macro problems. The second effort, which has resulted in the book Knowledge Evolution and Institutional Transformations takes a broader canvas and develops a theory about stages in knowledge evolution that disrupt the equilibrium of society, requiring action theory solutions.

As a good example of how we try to solve basic problems, in this instance our work on health care in developing countries, we have written a book on our study of a systematic coordinated inter-organizational network in Nicaragua, which is in press now at Routledge: Saving Society: Systematic coordinated inter-organizational networks, innovation and equality, (Hage, Valadez, and Hadden, forthcoming). Now we are shifting back our focus to the developed world and its twin crises of capitalism and democracy and writing a theory about a new mode of societal coordination that is highlighted in the book Saving Society.

References

Hage, J, ed. 1988. The Futures of Organizations: Innovating to Adapt Strategy and Human Resources to Rapid Technological Change. Lexington, MA: DC Heath.

———. 2008. Metrics for the Treatment Scector or Meso Level of the Canadian Health Care System. White Paper: University of Maryland, Center for Innovation. [pdf]

———. 2011. Restoring the Innovative Edge: Driving the Evolution of Science and Technology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [url]

———. 2020. Knowledge Evolution and Institutional Transformations: Action Theory Solutions to Solve Adaptive Problems. New York: Anthem Press.

Hage, J, WC Hadden, J Lucas, and JE Mote. 2014. Organizing Knowledge Sharing and Learning: The Case of a Mission Research Agency. University of Maryland, Department of Sociology, Center for Innovation. [pdf].

Hage, J, and M Meeus, eds. 2006. Innovation, Science and Institutional Change: A Research Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hage, J, and JE Mote. 2008. Transformational Organizations and Institutional Change: The Case of the Institut Pasteur and French Science. Socioeconomic Review 6 (2):313–36. doi: 10.1093/ser/mwm022.

———. 2010. Transformational Organizations and a Burst of Scientific Breakthroughs: The Institut Pasteur and Biomedicine, 1889–1919. Social Science History 34 (1):13–46. doi: 10.1017/S0145553200014061.

Mote, J, J Hage, YK Whitestone, GB Jordan. 2008. Innovation, networks and the research environment: examining the linkages. International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy 4 (3-4):246–64. doi: 10.1504/IJFIP.2008.017579.

Mote, J, GB Jordan, J Hage. 2007. Measuring radical innovation in real time. International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management 7 (4):355-77. doi: 10.1504/IJTPM.2007.015170.

Updated 18 April 2023