This page is part of the CRIC web archive

Industrial Ecology and Spaces of Innovation

17^th-18^th June 2003
Organised by CRIC/Institute of Innovation Research
University of Manchester/UMIST, UK
Contact : Sally Randles (sally.randles@umist.ac.uk)

Rationale & Aims

To date, social scientists of innovation have not pro-actively and systematically engaged with industrial ecology scholars, to see what can be gained from bringing understandings about the innovation process - its embeddedness in structures of social relations (including those that inform consumption patterns and practices), industrial relations, technological relations, and capital/investment relations to perspectives already well developed by those directly working with industrial ecology concepts, either in an academic, consultancy, corporate or policy context. This concentrated two-day workshop brings together people actively involved across these areas of interest. We anticipate developing new and interesting lines of enquiry contributing equally to both. We are bringing together contributions from academia, industry, practitioners and policy makers working in - or potentially across - these fields. The papers presented will draw together examples of models, systems and technological approaches to IE with more sociological/institutional and governance/regulation questions. There will be case studies drawn from a variety of contexts and scales, from regional to national, and comparative e.g. comparative European and Indian field studies. Two papers will be corporate case studies and a variety of industrial contexts will be included, for example construction and chemicals. Of course the ultimate aim is to identify practice, opportunities and determinants contributing to, and preventing change aimed at reversing environmental degradation and the depletion of natural resources.

Two principal outputs are proposed: a book collection of papers from the workshop, and a special edition of a relevant journal.

Taking place during the first year of the new Institute of Innovation Research a joint initiative which houses research teams from the University of Manchester and UMIST in Manchester (CRIC, PREST, CROMTEC, the Tyndall Centre North) , the workshop situates under the Institute's Theme 4 entitled 'Innovation and Sustainability: the Political and Economic Imperatives of Sustainability and Quality of Life' and links with existing CRIC work on forms of competition (industrial organisation, and models involving a multiplicity of institutions), distributed innovation processes, the sociology of consumption, and instituted economic processes involving the structured interdependencies of market and non-market exchange.

Top

CRIC is now proud to be part of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR)
Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), The University of Manchester,
Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West, Manchester M13 9QH, England
Phone +44 (0)161 275 7365 Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 7361
Site maintained by: Ishty Hussain