Innovation in the context of European R&D collaborative programmes: The case of multimedia and the newspaper industry

International Journal of Technology Management

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 271-290

  Molina, Alfonso H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Alignment; European collaboration; Innovation; Multimedia; Newspaper industry; Sociotechnical constituencies

Indexed keywords

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT; SOCIAL ASPECTS; TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER;

MULTIMEDIA NEWSPAPER; NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY; TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION;

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING;

EID: 0030410321     PISSN: 02675730     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. See Molina (1992).
2. The European Currency Unit (ECU) is the common European money. It is used by the Commission for funding of European projects. All national European currencies have an ECU exchange rate. The present rate for the British pound is approximately IECU = £0.80.
3. The Commission of the European Communities (CEC) is part of the institutional structure of the European Union. The main bodies of this institutional structure are the European Parliament (518 directly elected members) which has a consultative and supervisory role in the Community; the Council of Ministers which is made up of government ministers from each of the Member States and is the main decision making body of the Community (the Parliament and the Council constitute the budgetary authority of the Community); the Court of Justice dealing with disputes concerning Community law; the Court of Auditors examining the lawfulness and soundness of the Community financial management; and the European Commission (17 members appointed by agreement between governments) which is the executive arm of Community government, overseeing the proper functioning and development of the Community and, generally, having the sole right to initiate Community policy. These institutions are evolving and soon the Commission will expand beyond 17 members as a result of new countries joining the Community. See CEC (1986).
4. In the future, this figure will grow significantly as a result of the expected entrance of Eastern European countries to the Community.
5. ESPRIT Review Board (1989), p.5. For a short account of the events of this period, see Sharp and Shearman (1987).
6. "In 1989, few observers would have predicted that the media, computing and telecommunications business would have converged within a decade." Business Week, 10 May 1993a, p.48).
7. Financial Times (8 July 1993a), p.22.
8. From the text of a talk by Mario Santinoli, Technical Director, El Periodico, 'Multimedia o el Nuevo Renacimiento' (ESPRIT Week, Brussels, 1992), p.2.
9. Business Week (12 July 1993), p.95.
10. From the text of a talk by Mario Santinoli, op. cit., note 8. Also, "nobody can say for sure what the term multimedia really means...But that's not preventing any one from projecting a market of CinemaScopic proportions: Inteco Corp., a research house in Norwalk, Conn., reckons that from a $4.68 billion market in the US in 1991, multimedia PC gear will balloon to $22 billion by 1995." (Business Week, 12 August 1991, p.48).
11. From the text of a talk by Mario Santinoli, op. cit., note 8. Also, "nobody can say for sure what the term multimedia really means...But that's not preventing any one from projecting a market of CinemaScopic proportions: Inteco Corp., a research house in Norwalk, Conn., reckons that from a $4.68 billion market in the US in 1991, multimedia PC gear will balloon to $22 billion by 1995." (Business Week, 12 August 1991, p.48).
12. Financial Times (21 September 1993), p.vii.
13. Multimedia Internal Working Group (1993), p.10.
14. Feldman (1991),p.6.
15. Multimedia Internal Working Group (1993), pp. 10 and 2.
16. "As computers, communications, consumer electronics, and digital media converge, cable-TV operators and phone companies are planning information superhighways to carry digitized movies, interactive games, video phone calls, and on-line shopping." (Business Week, 10 May 1993b, p.46). Also, "...the communications industry has embarked on the noisiest gold rush since the forty-niners left for San Francisco with pans clanking. It's not just media companies, either: computer makers and telephone companies are scrambling to get into the digital derby. All of them sense a chance to reinvent home entertainment and information services." (Business Week, 12 July 1993,pp.94-5).
17. "As computers, communications, consumer electronics, and digital media converge, cable-TV operators and phone companies are planning information superhighways to carry digitized movies, interactive games, video phone calls, and on-line shopping." (Business Week, 10 May 1993b, p.46). Also, "...the communications industry has embarked on the noisiest gold rush since the forty-niners left for San Francisco with pans clanking. It's not just media companies, either: computer makers and telephone companies are scrambling to get into the digital derby. All of them sense a chance to reinvent home entertainment and information services." (Business Week, 12 July 1993,pp.94-5).
18. Financial Times (8 July 1993b), p.22.
19. The Internet is a worldwide network of computers which can exchange information with one another. There are several areas in the net, including the World Wide Web (WWW), FTP, Gopher and Usenet. By far, the most popular sector is the World Wide Web, "a simple multimedia format originally developed at CERN to provide a mechanism for sharing information between collaborative researchers. The Web's attraction is its graphical interface, point-and-click interactivity and hypertext links. Compared with the realtime interaction found on CD-ROM, it is definitively clunky in response, but then you have access to a lot more information than can fit onto a 600Mbyte CD-ROM." (MacUser, 26 May 1995a, 77).
20. MacUser (26 May 1995).
21. Simpson (1994).
22. See also Business Week (27 February 1995) for a special report on the Internet.
23. MacUser (26 May 1995).
24. Financial Times (21 August 1995).
25. MacUser (26 May 1995), p.69.
26. Business Week (13 November 1995).
27. The Sunday Times Innovation Web (3 September 1995).
28. Byte (June 1995), p.147.
29. See also The Sunday Times (15 October 1995).
30. Focus in Japan, for instance, reports that "[a]t present video phone conference systems are the most popular video phone products. Following the rapid expansion of NTT's integrated services digital network (ISDN) around Japan, more and more companies are making savings in both travel time and expenses by using video conferencing...Today, video conferencing...allow participants to hook audio-visual (AV) equipment, computers, and faxes to the basic video phone systems, allowing remote parties direct access to business data and presentations." (September 1993, p.5).
31. The idea for the Media Lab, modelled on MIT's successful AI Lab, was conceived in 1979 but, Negroponte says, "it took five years to raise the money and build the lab." (The Guardian, 22 July 1993, p.19).
32. Brand (1988), p.36. A demonstrator of NewsPeek was produced but it had limited personalization, it could not be individualized for each visitor to the Lab and that was "a significant frustration, since the idea of intense personalization to the user is at the heart of most of the Lab's projects." (ibid, p.37).
33. See INES, Newspapers on World Wide Web (Internet address: http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/INES/wwwLiNKSWO.html The first count was dated 8 October 1995, the second 12 October 1995.
34. Internet address http://www.mediainfo.com/edpub/
35. Outings (21 August 1995).
36. The Guardian OnLine (23 June 1994), 5.
37. Cracknell (1995). This is an essay for a journalism diploma project on the future of electronic newspapers. It is found in electronic version in the Internet (see bibliography).
38. Financial Times (15 May 1995).
39. This section relies heavily on Outing (12 October 1995).
40. Outing (12 October 1995). This is the case of the Washington Post's Digital Ink, the News and Observer Co. NandO.net, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Interactive Studio.
41. For the list of partners, see Acknowledgement (before Bibliography).
42. Phrase popularised by the MIT Media Lab.
43. 'Sociotechnical constituencies' are defined as dynamic ensembles of technical constituents (e.g. machines, instruments) and social constituents (e.g. institutions, interest groups) which interact and shape each other in the course of the creation, production and diffusion of specific technologies or services such as the 'multimedia newspaper'. On the concept of 'sociotechnical constituencies', see Molina (1990, 1993,1995).
44. On the concept of 'sociotechnical alignment', see Molina (1995, 1996).
45. Obviously, what is happening inside El Periodico is intimately related to the inter-institutional alignment of project NewsPad and, indeed, the concepts discussed in this section are of validity for this level of analysis as well. For the sake of this paper, however, the argument concentrates fully on the intra-institutional level of analysis.
46. Williamson (1979) uses the term 'governance structure' to refer to "the institutional matrix or framework within which transactions are negotiated and executed..." (239). Governance is used here in the similar sense of the organization's framework guiding or influencing individual and collective interactions and associated resource allocations.
47. See Leonard-Barton (1988, 1991).