René Jorna, born in Sneek, the Netherlands, in 1953. Ph.D. from the University of Groningen. Professor of Knowledge Management and Cognition at the University of Groningen. († 2013)
Fellow (1 September 2004 – 30 June 2005)
SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION: FROM KNOWLEDGE OF SUSTAINABILITY TO SUSTAINABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE
During my stay at NIAS, I worked on two projects: a) sustainable innovation and second generation knowledge management and b) intelligent planning. The work on sustainable innovation was based on a NIDO research programme (Jorna et al. 2004) and was made up of three interdependent projects. The first project focussed on improving the operationalisation of sustainability. The second project concerned setting up collaboration with the SNS-asset Bank to study the hypothesis that organizations that adopt the triple bottom line (People, Profit and Planet, Elkington, 1999) have a better long-term performance. The third project involved collaborating with McElroy of the Centre for Sustainable Innovation to implement his social footprint in order to assess, diagnose and evaluate an organisation’s performance on the basis of social and human dimensions. Part of this research is presented in a book “Sustainable innovation: the human, organisational and knowledge dimension”, submitted for review at Elsevier. In future research, we hope to integrate sustainable innovation, social capital and the social footprint to develop an assessment tool.
In addition, over a third of my time at NIAS was devoted to refining and editing a book entitled “Intelligent planning: aspects, motivations and methods” (eds. Jorna, van Wezel and Meystel) which was accepted by Wiley. The book describes theoretical aspects of planning and provides practical examples of planning in a shunting yard of the Netherlands Railways. Similarities and differences between four planning categories are discussed and the book will appear in December 2005.