Innovation studies—The emerging structure of a new scientific field

Abstract

The scholarly literature on innovation was for a long time not very voluminous. But as shown in the paper, this is now rapidly changing. New journals, professional associations and organizational units within universities focusing on innovation have also been formed. This paper explores the cognitive and organizational characteristics of this emerging field of social science and considers its prospects and challenges. The research reported in this paper is based on a web-survey in which more than one thousand scholars worldwide took part.