The Future of Environmental Engineering Technology:A Disruptive Innovation Perspective

Scientific and technological revolutions and industrial transformations have accelerated the rate of innovation in environmental engineering technologies.However,few researchers have evaluated the current status and future trends of technologies.This paper summarizes the current research status in eight major subfields of environmental engineering—water treatment,air pollution control,soil/solid waste management,environmental biotechnology,environmental engineering equipment,emerging contaminants,synergistic reduction of pollution and carbon emissions,and environmental risk and intelligent management—based on bibliometric analysis and future trends in greenization,low carbonization,and intelligentization.Disruptive technologies are further identified based on discontinuous transformation,and ten such technologies are proposed,covering general and specific fields,technical links,and value sources.Additionally,the background and key innovations in disruptive technologies are elucidated in detail.This study not only provides a scientific basis for strategic decision-making,planning,and implementation in the environmental engineering field but also offers methodological guidance for the research and determination of breakthrough technologies in other areas.

Disruptive Innovation in the Nordic Countries＇ Healthcare Systems

The Nordic healtheare model is recognized to be one of the most innovative in the world. Here billions of USD are annually invested in developing new treatments, drugs, robots etc. to diagnose and cure diseases. Nevertheless, this study establishes that there is a fundamental shortcoming in the system that supports healthcare innovation： It is strongly biased towards micro-level innovation projects focusing on new products, alternative processes, and new financial solutions. The problem with this approach to support new projects is that the results are created as inventions within the system thus lacking holistic perspectives. This has consequently contributed with increasing costs that are out of proportion with existing budgets. Therefore this study seeks to analyze the current understanding of the Nordic healthcare system from a business model perspective. Here other aspects of the healthcare system are explored to determine if they could be redesigned to promote new types of innovation projects. The purpose of undertaking this task is to challenge the established patterns of the current healthcare innovation support practices. Here the vertical innovation process （VIP） framework, which is a systematic radical innovation model that seeks macro-level outcomes based on standalone inventions （see more below）, is applied to analyze the current state-of-the-art in Nordic healthcare innovation projects. The results determine that very little attention is given to rethink and redesign the healthcare system at a macro-level, and it is discussed that stand-alone inventions ought to be rethought into the entire healthcare system to create a larger impact. Finally, it is argued that existing performance measures are inappropriate to foster projects that innovate the existing system： New measuring points should be developed to promote macro-level projects and to avoid the current rapid increase of costs in the Nordic healthcare system.

The Strategy of Industrial Clusters to Deal with Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation may be a fatal threat to industrial clusters, or it may be a major development opportunity. The key lies in how industrial clusters respond to disruptive innovation. The main obstacles to the development of disruptive innovation in industrial clusters are lock-in and cluster inertia, which originate from the negative effects of cluster system isomorphism. In order to break through the development barriers, industrial clusters need to adopt a targeted overall response strategy, including adopting bottom-up local subversive innovation policies, introducing external knowledge, encouraging spin-off entrepreneurial enterprises, and encouraging alliances and cooperation between incumbent enterprises and entrepreneurial enterprises, etc.

A hybrid method for product low-end disruptive innovation

Product innovation is often a process for improving existing products.Low-end disruptive innovation(LDI)enables a product to meet the most price-sensitive customers in the low-end market.The existing LDI methods are mainly based on unnecessary characteristics of disruptive innovations.Thus,they cannot easily identify and respond to the LDI design needs.This study proposes a hybrid method for the product LDI in two levels of the product design based on the summarized definition and essential characteristics of LDI.Feasible areas of the product LDI are determined using a hybrid relational function model to identify the maturity of dominant technologies.The technologies are identified through the technical search and evaluation of the feasible area for innovation to form an initial LDI scheme.Then,the product function is optimized using the trimming concept of theory of inventive problem solving based on the characteristics of LDI.The final LDI scheme is formed and evaluated based on the essential characteristics of the product LDI.The feasibility of the proposed method is verified in the design of a new dropping pill machine.

Commercialization of disruptive innovations:Literature review and proposal for a process framework

The challenges of disruptive innovations have gained significant attention from both academics and practitioners,commercialization being one of the most critical phases.At the same time,however,it is the less studied area of disruptive innovation.Therefore,this article examined scholarly papers on the commercialization of disruptive innovations through a multidisciplinary systematic literature review.It resulted in the analysis of 64 high-quality peer-reviewed academic articles.The analysis highlighted the commercialization models and main constructs that are affecting the commercialization process:market orientation,market learning,user’s involvement,market configuration,adoption networks and stakeholders,and innovation transference.The study evidences how commercialization has evolved from a later stage in innovation to influence even the early phases of innovation,characterized in turn by exploration,learning and ecosystem creation activities.Additionally,the analysis led to a proposition that established an integrated commercialization model for high uncertainty innovations.The model has three phases:1)Concept/value proposition validation,2)Business model validation&Market creation,and 3)Creating sales in the majority market.Lastly,the article contributes to a better understanding of commercialization processes in high uncertainty innovations,bridging also the academic-practitioner divide.

Innovations on Online Journalism： Discussing Social Business Design Models

The main focus of this paper is the analysis on how social business recent management proposals fit to a media/journalistic business environment. The discussion was based on three research questions focusing on： the drivers and the constraints of disruption innovation strategies; the adequate social business design framework to promote innovation; and an evaluation over the practices/experiences related to disruption, innovation, and creativity in journalistic businesses. A conceptual framework the Latour/Law Actor-Network Theory （ANT） has been taken as. Six possible dimensions of action to make this framework valuable some successful practices have also been identified, and in this paper the authors view over these concepts. The main conclusion goes through the understanding of journalistic culture and legitimacy embedded for centuries over society, and to change this will depend on multiple enablers.

The music industry ＆ its consumers： A potential divorce through technology and shifting market linkages？

A large market exists of online users who desire online video and music content. However, recent developments have shown that some industries, such as music and videos are not fully utilising the market benefits that disruptive technologies can bring to organisations despite the change of value drivers. According to Christensen et al （2004）, and based on RPV theory, organisations may decide not to pursue disruptive innovative ideas for a variety of reasons, such as their values are set in another direction, processes do not support the new technology and resources may become under-utilised or even obsolete. Trying to pursue partly aggressive strategies, partly defence or avoidance strategies, it is suggested that the music industry has missed to reengineer its business so far. At the same time, music consumers have found various peer-to-peer models to execute their own avoidance strategies, i.e., avoiding to buy music but to share it. Various consumption platforms for music, such as, pandora, hulu or spotify, emerged, which themselves show significant innovative power. As scholars＇ research tested, innovation has two beams, technology and market linkages. While the technological part is inevitably developing further, the music industry erects legal barriers to bloc those sites by applying the presently unclear DRM, since the new ways of music consumption threaten their established ways of content distribution. At the same time, barriers are placed that those consumers being online specialists find ways to circumvent them. The proposition is that by the salient marketing concept of CRM such behaviour increases the pressure on incumbents since risking market linkages with their customers. This paper will contrast technology and market linkages, discussing how online innovations may alter the status quo of the music industry, especially its record business. Research provides evidence that technological implications are supporting a sustainable shift of consumers＇ behaviour and the ways, by which consumers are able to overcome the legal and technological barriers for accessing P2P sites despite industrial prevention. It is suggested that there is further significance this paper addresses, since what affects the music industry today, will likely have an impact on the movie, games, software and other industries in the near future： Disruption of existing resources, processes and values and threatening market linkages by redefined ways of content distribution.

The role of digital technologies in supporting and improving fishery and aquaculture across the supply chain-Quo Vadis?

Fish constitute important high protein products to meet the demands of an increasing global population.However,the continued depletion of wild fish stocks is leading to increased strain on the aquaculture sector in terms of sustaining the supply of fish and seafood to global markets.Despite the fact that aquaculture is more diversified than other agriculture sectors,there are significant pressures on the industry to continue innovating in order to enable sustainability including increased fish production,improved appropriate selection of species,disease mitigation,reduced wastage,preventing environmental pollution and generating more employment globally.This viewpoint article addresses how digital transformation can help support and meet expansion needs of the fisheries/aquaculture industries that includes exploiting and harnessing ICT,IoT,Cloud-edge computing,AI,machine learning,immersive technologies and blockchain.Digital technologies are bringing significant operational benefits for global food chain,improving efficiencies and productivity,reducing waste,contamination and food fraud.The focus on digital technologies has recently evolved to Industry 5.0 where AI and robotics are coupled with the human mind in order to advance human-centric solutions.This viewpoint describes the role of Quadruple helix Hub(academic-industry-government and society)in delivering a convergent holistic approach to meeting the diversity of fishery industry needs by connecting and placing fisheries centrally in a defined ecosystem of stakeholders.This includes specialist training,testing technologies,providing access to finance and fostering disruption through aquaculture accelerator initiatives such as that provided by Hatch Blue.Connecting digital Innovation Hubs trans-regionally,nationally and internationally will also help mitigate against significant risks for the fisheries and aquaculture industry including climate change,global pandemics and conflicts that can jeopardize fish and seafood production and supply chains.There is also a commensurate need to avail of digital technologies in order to increase awareness of key industry issues across the value chain,such as through social marketing.Thus,addressing key challenges by way of the global digital transformation of fishery and aquaculture industry will meet several sustainable development goals of the United Nations catered around the application of disruptive technology.