Francesco Sandulli, UCJC Business & Society Review Director, 31 March 2020,

Dear readers, I present to you the 65^th (first quarter of 2020)  number of UCJC Business & Society Review.

The world is moving into a deep recession caused by the health crisis triggered by the spread of Covid-19. The innovation capacity of the industrial structure will be one of the main foundations of the future economic recovery. Measures to strengthen this innovation capacity should take into account that there is no a single innovation process, but innovation is a diverse and contingent process to specific places and times. 

The next two issues of UCJC Business & Society Review will focus on the diversity of innovation. Innovation is often addressed from a very monolithic perspective that forgets the different contexts in which innovation processes occur. Contrary to the approach of many academics and corporations, there is not a single process of innovation, but innovation actually develops on the basis of very heterogeneous resources, cultures, political systems, processes and tasks that make a process of innovation in one place and time hardly replicable in another different place and time.

This contingent vision of innovation will be studied in numbers 65 and 66 of UCJC Business & Society Review. In this issue, Professor Hilpert raises the elements on which the study of the diversities of innovation should focus such as products, markets for such products, workforce and skills, the structure of the supply chain, the branding of innovation locations and the process of change of existing skills and the duration of such processes. Professor Scherrer describes the nature and phases of innovation's long-wave processes and how developed economies are at the gates of the sixth long wave of innovation. In his article, Professor Scherrer explains the implications of this new long wave, starring technologies related to Industry 4.0, and its complementarities and divergences with the earlier wave characterized by the technologies of the information and communication. Professor Hickie addresses innovation within supply chains through the study of the automotive and aerospace industries. This research addresses the problem of where in the supply chain to innovate and when innovation should be promoted to optimize the relationship between risk and innovation capacity. Finally, Vassiliadis and Hilpert face the challenge of heterogeneous skill-sharing and discuss alternatives to promote a matching between workers' skills and productive structures that nonetheless overcome the problem of agglomeration skills in very specific locations.

I would like to end this letter by expressing a sincere and deep appreciation of UCJC Business Society Review's editorial team to all professional groups that are working tirelessly to overcome the current global health crisis: Thank you!