MAINE’S INNOVATION PROSPECTS Maine’s Innovation Prospects: What the Research Can Tell Us

The literature on innovation suggests Maine faces a number of challenges. In this overview article, Linda Silka discuss-es the literature, noting how recent findings about boundary spanning point to the importance of both individual skills and group collaboration in innovation. Silka highlights the implications for policies to jumpstart innovation and suggests the importance of looking to history, looking across topics, looking across disciplines, looking to other states, and looking to other countries to avoid becoming too short-sighted and parochial in approaches. Innovation can be surprisingly simple yet exceedingly complex. At its essence, it involves finding ways to see the familiar with fresh eyes. Consider something as seemingly straightforward as the signs we see everywhere marking parking spaces reserved for the disabled. The symbol has remained unchanged since 1968 (Figure 1a). Yet, the artists involved in the Accessible Icon Project (re