Kovács, Katalin | Hungary

Kovács, Katalin | Hungary
Katalin Kovács is a PhD student at the Department of Management and Corporate Economics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She received her Master’s Degree in economics with specialization in small business management and environment protection, at the Corvinus University of Budapest, at the Faculty of Business Administration. She has more than 4 years work experience in the field of finance, business development and project management. Katalin also has experience in coordinating research projects on open innovation financed by the EU, Visegrad Fund or the Hungarian Government. The focus of her PhD research is the development of SME’s competitiveness by determining their possible open innovation activities. The research covers detailed analysis on current international practices on open innovation and identifies possible areas for interactive user involvement. Her PhD research contains theoretic and best practice analysis on open innovation concepts, especially user involvement and experimenting in real life environments (i.e. realizing Living Labs) and an assessment of the need of SMEs for open innovation and especially for Living Labs. The main goal of the doctoral research is to determine the possibilities to adopt the European practices of open innovation to the Hungarian economic situation with the main aim to strenghten the innovativeness of SMEs.


 

Project at IAS-STS: The role of SMEs and user-involvement in enhancing innovation in the renewable energies sector

The research aims at analyzing the effective and efficient modes of user-involvement, interactive value creation and SMEs collaboration related to Living Labs in order to increase the utilization of renewable energy technologies. Living Labs, by involving end-users even at early stages of the development process of new technologies are a breakthrough opportunity to promote the usage of renewable energy. The goal with the research is to create some base of a Hungarian-Austrian comparative analysis in the field of innovation, related to renewable energy technologies. Therefore it looks for collaboration forms with users, interactive value production and innovation processes of Austrian companies in the field of renewable energy. The analysis has the goals to map possible and pilot LL activities in Austria realizing user-involvement and interactive value production in the domain of renewable energy; identify effective and efficient methods of user-involvement and interactive value production, and its effects on the society and barriers to overcome. Additionally the research aims to identify methods of integrating user-feedbacks, and channelize outside knowledge into innovation process, identify barriers and related possibilities to overcome in order to make feedback integration process more effective.


 

Selected Publications

Imre Hronszky Dr. – Katalin Kovács (2011): Living Labs for SMEs, 9th International Conference on Management, Enterprise and Benchmarking, Budapest, June 3-4, 2011

Katalin Kovács (2011): Open innovation and SMEs, Living Lab best practices and the role of SMEs in interactive user-involvement, ERENET (Entrepreneurship Research and Education Network of Central European Universities) Profile Issue 22, March 2011

Imre Hronszky Dr. – Katalin Kovács (2010): Living Lab research in the Visegrad region, conference presentation, „Credit, World, Stage” International conference, University of West Hungary, Sopron, Hungary; 3. November 2010

Imre Hronszky Dr. – Katalin Kovács (2010): Research on Living Labs in the V4 region, Living Lab Summer School, La Cité des Sciences, Paris, France, 25-27 August 2010

Imre Hronszky Dr. - Katalin Kovács - József Veress (2010): Living Labs: A new method of collaboration in innovation, Short description and theoretical considerations with a hint on SMEs, ERENET (Entrepreneurship Research and Education Network of Central European Universities) Profile Issue V. 2010