This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.In a village that seems to have forgotten the future, three young men—Mikkel, Erik, and Villiam—dream of more. Of something bigger, something beyond the heavy stillness of the fields and the faint taste of smoke in the air.They steal a van and head south, driven by the restlessness of youth and the quiet, unspoken promise they’ve made to each other: to leave this place behind, even if only for a while.On highways lit by ...

This Open Access book illuminates the significant transformation processes brought about by economy-wide shifts towards sustainable modes of production, distribution, and consumption. In particular, the accelerating industrial transformations towards sustainability, in response to global warming and planetary boundary constraints, bring a range of new research challenges.By integrating perspectives from the interdisciplinary fields of innovation, policy, and sustainability transiti...

Basic scientific research and technological development have had an enormous impact on innovation, economic growth, and social well-being. Yet science policy debates have long been dominated by advocates for particular scientific fields or missions. In the absence of a deeper understanding of the changing framework in which innovation occurs, policymakers cannot predict how best to make and manage investments to exploit our most promising and important opportunities.Since 2005, a s...

Economists examine the genesis of technological change and the ways we commercialize and diffuse it. The economics of property rights and patents, in addition to industry applications, are also surveyed through literature reviews and predictions about fruitful research directions. Two volumes, available as a set or sold separately - Expert articles consider the best ways to establish optimal incentives in technological progress - Science and innovation, both their theories and applications...

This open access book represents a journey documenting the development of tools and methodologies over 3 decades and asks where the future lies. It further develops seminal work carried out under the auspices of the Capacity building in Sustainability and Environmental Management (CapSEM) project co-funded by the EU Erasmus programme from 2016-2019 as well as research projects such as IGLO-MP2020, SUSPRO, and SISVI. It gathers existing paradigms of environmental management within the relev...

This open access book is a compact guide to the development of sustainable business, which has become the central concept in discussions about the future development of humanity and planet earth. It provides basic terminology and concepts on sustainable business and offers insights into a new management paradigm that integrates social and environmental dimensions into business models, strategies, and operations. New business concepts such as the donut economy, the circular economy, social ...

The 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have made the authorities to increasingly turn inward and use ethnocentrism, protectionism, and top-down approaches to guide policy on trade, competition, and industrial development. The continuing aftereffects of such policies range from the rise and seeming success of authoritarian states, rise of populist and protectionist trends, and evolving academic agendas inspiring the reemergence of top-down industrial policies across the world.

The main purpose of the book is to discuss new trends in the dynamic geography of innovation and argue that in an era of increasing globalization, two trends seem quite dominant: rigid territorial models of innovation, and localized configurations of innovative activities. The book brings together scholars who are working on these topics. Rather than focusing on established concepts and theories, the book aims to question narrow explanations, rigid territorializations, and simplistic polic...

This open access book describes the complex dynamics that coevolve in cities and from cities, to inform agendas for urban research and urban policy with a view to future city missions. It provides a suite of research-informed chapters on urban pathways that are early signals and visions for how future cities can be shaped and transformed as well as chapters from policy, industry and intermediary organization actors that relate and respond to these pathways from a mainstreaming and implemen...

The role and meaning of sustainable development have been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. However, there has recently been a dynamic increase in interest in the subject, which results in numerous, in-depth scientific research and publications with an interdisciplinary dimension. This edited volume is a compendium of theoretical knowledge on sustainable development. The context analysed in the publication includes a multi-level and multi-aspect analysis starting from th...

How can we design circular business models? How can we organize the transition from a linear to a circular economy? And how can we imagine circular futures that help us transform current realities? This book aims to provide answers to these questions while addressing the challenges and opportunities of the circular economy.The authors reflect on why conventional sustainability models – such as the ‘triple P’ (People, Profit and Planet) or eco-efficiency – have failed in addressing ...

In the last four decades the developed economies have developed into veritable knowledge economies at the same time as more and more economies have entered the road to economic development. Typical for the developments during this time has been substantially increased investments in research and development (R&D) to generate new knowledge and new technologies and increased investments in diffusing existing knowledge by means of education and thereby raising the volume of human capital....