During the last two decades innovation has increasingly become a central focus for policy makers. The reason for this is the central role innovation is assumed to play for income and employment growth (and quality of life more generally). However, in spite of this, innovation has not always received the scholarly attention it arguably deserves. For instance, students examining the causes of long-run economic change used to focus on other factors, such as capital accumulation or the working of markets, rather than innovation. This is now changing. Research on the role of innovation for economic and social change has proliferated in recent years, particularly within the social sciences, and with a bent towards cross-disciplinarity.

Although a few scholars were active in this area in the early years of the previous century (Joseph Schumpeter is the most obvious example) innovation studies did not really emerge as an academic field before the 1960s. When it did, it did so mostly outside (or in the fringes of) the dominant disciplines in the social sciences and the most prestigious universities. Technical universities also became host to many new research centres in this area, as did business/management schools, especially in the United States. Many of these adopted a cross-disciplinary orientation.

The cross- and/or multi-disciplinarity that characterize much scholarly work in this area reflect the fact that no single discipline deals with all aspects of innovation. Arguably, developing a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon requires a combination of insights from several disciplines. However, this diversity in backgrounds and orientations may also create problems. For example, different parts of the research community use the same concept (such as “innovation” for instance) in different senses, and, similarly, different concepts are used to explain the same phenomenon. Such “conceptual fuzziness” may be an important obstacle for meaningful interaction between researchers in the field.

This does not mean that attempts to have constructive interaction between scholars with different backgrounds in this field are doomed to failure. Instead, it suggests that effort and leadership are needed to create and support such interaction. One such attempt in which several of the potential participants in this project were involved, was the TEARI-project (2002-2004) which led to publication of the Oxford Handbook of Innovation (Oxford University Press, October 2004), edited by Jan Fagerberg, David Mowery and Richard Nelson. The current project builds on the results obtained there. However, while the TEARI project attempted to create a broad overview of our current knowledge on the subject, the current project aimed at exploring a small set of strongly interrelated issues in greater depth. During the lifetime of the project three thematic conferences were organized with participation from the researchers in the project and a group of invited leading international scholars in the field (drawn among other places from the TEARI network). In this way a large number of researchers working at the frontier of innovation research were invited to give a contribution to the project. These conferences contributed to enhance the quality of the work undertaken during the project and disseminate it to a wider audience.