Life after-death: knowledge trajectories after innovation failure
Start date
17 July 2023End date
16 October 2024Summary
Failure is common among innovative new-start enterprises, but firm closure does not necessarily equate to the ‘death of knowledge’. Yet we know surprisingly little about the ‘after-life of ideas’, partly due to an academic and policy focus on ‘winners’. This project investigates the post-failure mobility of different forms of knowledge – tacit (personal to individuals) versus codified (manuals, prototypes, patents, copyrights, etc.) – and whether and how that influences subsequent innovation. What types of knowledge survive firm closures, how does it ‘move’, and what factors determine its re-use?
The research focuses on tourism start-ups because they have high failure rates and the fieldwork will be undertaken in Spain so as to build on their previous EU Marie Curie-funded investigation of tourism innovation in that country. Three stages of interviewing are involved: with key informants in policy and funding organizations, with ‘failed’ entrepreneurs, and with other key stakeholders such as employees and shareholders.
Funding amount
£84,818
Funder
The Leverhulme Trust
Team
Principal investigator
Dr Isabel RodrÃguez
Lecturer
Co-investigators
Professor Allan Williams
Chair in Tourism and Mobility Studies
Biography
Allan studied Economics and Geography at University College Swansea, 1969-72, before completing his PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE). He then held academic posts in the Geography Departments at the LSE, Durham and Exeter universities, before being appointed Professor of Human Geography and European Studies in 1995. At Exeter, he was also Co-Director of the Centre for European Studies and co-founder of the Tourism Research Group. He was appointed to the Chair in European Integration and Globalization at London Metropolitan in 2006, in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations, and the Working Lives Research Institute. He joined the Tourism Group at the ºÚÁÏÉç in January 2011.
He has been a member of several Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) committees including: the Research Grants Board and the 'One Europe or Several' Commissioning Panel, 1997-9. He has chaired the ESRC/NERC Transdisciplinary Seminars competition and was vice chair of the initial ESRC First Grants Commissioning Panel.
Within the Royal Geographical Society with the IBG, he has been Chair of the Annual Conference, Chair of the Research Groups Sub-Committee, and a Member of the Research Committee and Council. He was awarded the Heath prize of the Royal Geographical Society in 1995 for his research on Europe.
He was founding co-editor of , 1994-2009, and founding Co-Editor of , 1999-2015.
He is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Science, the Lisbon Academy of Science and the International Academy for the Study of Tourism.
Dr Brahim El-Habib
Researcher