My PhD project: The Role of Intermediaries in Culture-Driven Innovation

Companies increasingly open up towards external sources to inspire and frame innovation. We find that technology as a driver of innovation loses importance in favor of culture, e.g. where lifestyle aspects dominate over the technological features in a product’s appearance. Lifestyles and other socio-cultural developments and trends often emerge at the fringes of society in communities and sub-cultures like avant garde circles of artists. Detecting and translating upcoming socio-cultural developments as a source for innovation is difficult because this belongs to so-called tacit knowledge - knowledge that is hard to grasp and cannot simply be written down. Therefore, intermediaries play a significant role for companies to make use of socio-cultural resources in their early innovation process (the front end of innovation), gaining competitive advantage in increasingly dynamic market environments.

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I found this presentation about creative youth and product "hacking" very interesting:

Absorbing knowledge from creative youth

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