CKIR, founded in 1999, is an international and multidisciplinary research center at the Aalto University School of Economics. CKIR promotes scientific research on knowledge- and innovation-based renewal and growth of companies and societies. CKIR conducts interdisciplinary research on organization, management, and social sciences, as well as on individual and contextual perception, cognition and emotion. CKIR is also interested in disciplines that deal with knowledge-based globalisation and economic and social value and wealth creation.
The interdisciplinary research at CKIR has three focus areas:
- Global Competitiveness through Creativity and Innovation: Co-evolution of Global Firms with Local Innovation Ecosystems
- Human-Centric and User-Experience-Based Media and Communication including its Impact on Technology
- Emerging Industries and Business Creation through demand, human-centric and user-driven open innovation including research, development and innovation (RDI) that benefits of parallel basic, applied and innovation research
Research at CKIR with multi-methodological approach
CKIR's action-oriented empirical research benefits from applied multi-methodological approach. The research is parallel to corporate venturing and R&D, or in case of cities parallel to regional and urban economic planning and innovation policy development. The issues may be addressed from individual, technological, organizational, institutional, national and regional point of view.
The research and development for innovation (RDI) may be conducted in real-life contexts such as everyday life, work, or leisure contexts. Methodologically the focus is on end-to-end approach to RDI (parallel basic, applied and innovation research) that provides knowledge of underlying human, social and socio-economic (pre-market) patterns and mechanisms. This is for designing
- new human centric systemic or social innovations, or
- demand and user-driven service and business models that may include new forms of value and wealth creation, and
- user-centric design rules for application development that needs human, social and technological interaction in enabling open innovation environments, such as Living Labs.
Sustainability and scalability for industry creation (value constellations), including new patterns of production and consumption, and business and service development may be validated through individual, organisational, institutional, socio-economic and social perspectives. This may include design rules for service and business model development that are based on user experience in context; let it be at home, in office, on the move or over the distance in social networks and “distributed environments”.
CKIR’s wide, international networks and projects
CKIR has wide international networks. CKIR is a founding member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). CKIR organized with the Finnish Prime Minister’s office and the European Commission (EC) the official Finnish EU Presidency event in November 2006 for Launching of a European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) as a first step towards European Innovation System. The network includes currently over 50 open innovation environments that apply Living Labs methodology in RDI. Through EU-funded projects, CKIR is networking with over 100 researchers and 30 companies in Europe. Some of the projects have also global reach. CKIR also belongs to the international Media, Interface, and Network Design Labs (M.I.N.D. Labs) consortium.
CKIR/HSE is a partner in ICT-SHOK (Tivit Oy) and active in Flexible Services (FS) program. In FS, CKIR participates in UDOI (User-Driven Open Innovation project) that develops RDI methodology for service development based on demand and user driven approach in open and innovative service ecosystems.
Leading minds at CKIR
There are about 30 researchers at CKIR including eight doctorate students. CKIR has seven distinguished international Visiting Professors such as Professor Ikujiro Nonaka (Hitotsubashi University, Japan), Professor Yves Doz (INSEAD, France), Professor Franc Biocca (Michigan, USA), Visiting professor C. Otto Scharmer (MIT, USA) and Professor Hans Schaffers. József Veress (Member of Hungarian Parliament) is a Visiting Scholar at CKIR and the Visiting Executive of CKIR/HSE is Mr. Richard Straub (IBM EMEA).
Photos: Aino Huovio