Sources of innovation and competitiveness

Abstract

There are (and have been) many efforts to support the development of new forms of work organisation in Europe, most of them being project-driven either as enterprises’ own initiatives or funded by public sources. Dissemination is making rather slow progress, though, despite proven economic benefits. Moreover, national programmes supporting work organisation activities are unevenly distributed among EU member states. While Finland, Denmark or Germany, for example, provide more than one national programme with efforts to promote work organisation in different areas, the majority of EU member states — namely Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain — seemingly have no national activities of this kind, although there might be some regional or project-based efforts with public funding like ADAPT or EQUAL. Comparing new national initiatives with earlier programme activities, it seems that efforts have been cut back. In the final section, a number of recommendations for further initiatives are derived that focus on implementation and dissemination issues.

Conditions for Low Stress-Risk Jobs

“…Given the resistance to change in general (Robbins 2001: 547), we do not expect the Tayloristic model to have disappeared completely and presume Tayloristic changes (i.e., adaptations) are still present today (see the dotted arrow in Figure 4). Knowledge about the prevalence of new work organizations is scarce, although we know it is not widespread (Sisson 2000;Savage 2001;Brödner and Latniak 2002;Totterdill et al 2002). Estimates vary between 10 per cent and 25 per cent, with manufacturing companies in the lead, but they concern all kinds of organizational change (OECD 1996: 133;Business Decisions Limited 1999).…”

The new Finnish workplace development programme (TYKES-FWDP) as an approach to innovation

“…This can be interpreted as a reflection of the increased priority on working-life R&D in Finnish public policy. In fact, Finland has gained international recognition for its increased efforts in workplace and work organization development in recent years (Ashton et al 2003;Brödner and Latniak 2003;Kok 2003). On the other hand, the apparently large relative increases reflect the low level of input in working-life R&D in Finland only a few years ago.…”

Robots Working with Humans or Humans Working with Robots? Searching for Social Dimensions in New Human-Robot Interaction in Industry

“…In these branches, larger companies have developed automation processes to improve their productivity. Such companies are better placed to focus on human involvement in technology processes with new organizational schemes, as indicated, e.g., by Anderson and Gartner [28], Bernstein et al [29], Brödner and Latniak [50], and Cypher [30]. The more robots are introduced in work environments, the more human interaction with those systems becomes crucial.…”