About this issue

The importance of the subject of this special issue cannot be over-emphasized´ to the readers of this Transactions. A large number of the members of the IEEE and our other readers are intimately involved in the process of innovation as active participants groping with the nitty-gritty aspects of technical innovation in their day-to-day work. A number of us are also making significant efforts to understand and report on the phenomenon as observers and researchers. In publishing this special issue, we fully empathize with the comments by Langrish, Gibbons, Evans and Jevons in their preface: “The process of technological innovation is so universally recognized to be of salient importance for the life of modern man, and yet so imperfect is our understanding of what makes it happen in the ways that it does, there need be no undue academic reticence about bursting into print with something that may make a possible contribution, even though it does not have all the answers pat”[1].