Bitcoin: a Money-like Informational Commodity

The question "what is Bitcoin" allows for many answers depending on the objectives aimed at when providing such answers. The question addressed in this paper is to determine a top-level classification, or type, for Bitcoin. We will classify Bitcoin as a system of type money-like informational commodity (MLIC)

Entrepreneurial Literary Theory: A Debate on Research and the Future of Academia

Across the world at present, researchers and teachers are being exhorted to become entrepreneurial. Universities are being restructured accordingly. The debate presented in this book considers what that involves and portends for academia. Literary studies are often regarded as the most resistant to – unfit for – entrepreneurial purposes. Literary research is therefore taken as a baseline for this debate. The uneasy place of literary research within profit-driven academia is revealing of the prevailing conditions for scholarship in all areas. Questions that are raised and discussed here include: What does doing research for the public good mean? What is the relationship between profits and benefits from research? What are applied and basic research? Are concepts of academic freedom and disinterestedness meaningful? What is the relationship between corporate and academic research? Are skills and knowledge different? Can pursuits like close reading and text interpretation be made profitable? What is literary value and how can it be measured? Can the literary system be modelled to profitable ends? Can university teaching be automatized? What are the differences between a standard publication agreement and a scholarly publication agreement? How can digital and open-access academic publication be made profitable? Does the academic monograph have a future? What sorts of knowledge and skills inform entrepreneurial leadership

Goal Congruence, Trust and Organisational Culture: Strengthening Knowledge Links

Collaboration between organizations benefits from knowledge links -- a form of strategic alliance that gives organizations access to the skills and capabilities of their partner and opportunity to create new capabilities together. Using the example of alliances between two universities and SAP AG, the market leader in Enterprise Software, the paper suggests some management practices to improve goal congruence, trust and alignment between different organizational cultures. For example, face-to-face interactions are critical for building a close relationship over time. A theoretical framework of the five phases of partnership development and the three challenges faced by knowledge link partnerships is proposed, along with implications for management, universities and research

Institutional innovation: synthesis of programme outcomes

Report of the work of the Projects funded by the JISC Institutional change/innovation Programme 2008-2010. Report produced by the Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Team linked to the Programme

Targeting Industries, Training Workers and Improving Opportunities: The Final Report from the Sectoral Employment Initiative

Over the past 30 years, American workers have faced daunting challenges, including declines in real wages and dwindling upward mobility. Paths to advance within companies have deteriorated, leaving many low-skilled workers "stuck" indefinitely in low-wage jobs -- and swelling the ranks of the working poor. As opportunities for less-educated workers to access well-paying jobs grow scarce, it is clear that our nation requires new approaches to workforce development.In a departure from traditional strategies, some workforce organizations have begun to implement services and activities that focus on the needs of specific industry sectors. By identifying local sectors that lack workers -- which might range from health care to manufacturing to construction -- these organizations can help low-income workers acquire the specific skills they need to fill available positions. To explore the potential of this approach, P/PV launched the Sectoral Employment Initiative (SEI) in 1998, with support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. This final report relies on data gathered during interviews with staff members at the SEI organizations and other key players in the targeted sectors, site visits, reviews of program documentation, and baseline and follow-up interviews with program participants focusing on a range of outcomes, including employment, earnings, education, housing and household income. The report presents key findings and explores some of the challenges sectoral programs encountered

Assessing the Impact of Organizational Practices on the Productivity of University Technology Transfer Offices: An Exploratory Study

We present quantitative and qualitative evidence (field research) on university technology transfer offices (TTOs). These offices negotiate licensing agreements with firms to commercialize university-based technologies. A stochastic frontier production function framework is used to assess the relative productivity of 113 university TTOs. Our field research provided a useful reality check on the specification of the econometric model. The empirical findings imply that licensing activity is characterized by constant returns to scale. Environmental and institutional factors appear to explain some of the variation in TTO efficiency. Relative productivity may also depend on organizational practices in university management of intellectual property, which potentially attenuate palpable differences in the motives, incentives, and organizational cultures of the parties to licensing agreements. Unfortunately, there are no existing data on such practices, so we rely on inductive, qualitative methods to identify them. We present detailed information on our use of these methods. This information may be useful to economists who are contemplating fieldwork. Based on 55 interviews of managers/entrepreneurs and administrators at five research universities, we conclude that the most critical organizational factors are likely to be reward systems for faculty, TTO staffing and compensation practices, and actions taken by administrators to extirpate informational and cultural barriers between universities and firms.

Attributes of Embodied Leadership: A beginning in the next chapter of leadership development

Research and guidance on leadership behaviour has been documented throughout history, from the epics to more recent leadership theories, evolved over the last century. Why then, when there is so much research and advice available are leaders still making so many errors? A review of literature in leadership studies reveals that recommendations have often been descriptive, assumptive and prescriptive without considering various differences in individuals. Additionally, leadership development often utilises methodologies in which individuals are trained to ‘act’ as leaders rather than fully embody leadership behaviour. This paper explores the generic attributes that describe embodied leadership behaviour. Semistructured interviews were performed on a panel of individuals from different backgrounds and analysed using a grounded theory approach. Along with the interviews, the works of Scharmer (2008) and behavioural traits identified in leadership by Derue, Nahrgang, Wellman and Humphrey (2011) were also taken into consideration. A final consensus was reached using a set of ten attributes that potentially contribute to embodied leadership behaviour; being non-judgemental, embracing uncertainty, active listening, congruence (morals and ethics), intuition, reflective practice, sense of meaning/purpose, holistic decision making, authentic presence and intention