On Internal Knowledge Markets

In large organizations, knowledge can move rapidly or slowly, usefully or unproductively. Those who place faith in internal knowledge markets and online platforms to promote knowledge stocks and flows should understand how extrinsic incentives can crowd outintrinsic motivation

The Complexity Dilemma in Policy Market Design

Regulators are increasingly pursuing their policy objectives by creating markets. To create a policy market, regulators require firms to procure a product that is socially useful but that confers little direct private benefit to the acquiring party. Examples of policy markets include pollutant emissions trading programs, renewable energy credit markets, and electricity capacity markets. Existing scholarship has tended to analyze policy markets simply as market-based regulation. Although not inaccurate, such inquiries are necessarily incomplete because they do not focus on the distinctive traits of policy markets. Policy markets are neither typical regulations nor typical markets. Concentrating on policy markets as a distinctive type of market brings to light common characteristics of such markets, which in turn generates insights into how they can be used more effectively to implement policy. In particular, this Article focuses on a recurring fundamental challenge in policy market design: managing complexity. Typical markets manage complexity through market forces. As a regulatory creation, however, policy markets require regulators to manage their complexity. This poses what we call the complexity dilemma, which requires regulators to balance strong pressures both toward and away from complexity. The central argument of this Article is that although policy markets are an important part of a regulator’s toolkit, they are also subject to complexity that limits their usefulness. Understanding the complexity dilemma and its crucial role in policy market design forms an essential step toward progress in improving the design and function of these markets

Essays on the organizational consequences of on-line behavior of audiences

Over the past 2 decades, internet use has become increasingly more a part of our every-day lives. We communicate with our friends and colleagues using the internet, we work using the internet, we also shop using the internet. We learn and increase our knowledge from information available on the internet. While on the one hand, we advance from the instant access to online contexts individualistically, on the other hand we participate as members of a community for example when we share our experiences online. The ever growing use of the internet and its flourish in new segments of our daily life brings significant changes not only to us, the individuals, but also to the organizations. In the past decade, there has been a shift in the field of organizational theory considering the environment of organizations. Current approaches extend the horizon of the classical view proclaiming that organizational environment is not only constituted by rival organizations but also their audience members. Several studies found evidence that audience members' perceptions and behavior influence organizational success. For example, category-spanning organizations on average suffer from social and economic disadvantages in markets because they cannot meet the expectations of their audiences. This shift towards understanding the effect of audience responses on the organizational outcome motivates my dissertation. More specifically, I study how individuals on-line behavior affects organizations. I analyze three aspects of internet mediated communication and their consequences to the organization. Firstly, I address the need to compare how traditional face-to-face communication compares to the modern email communication (Chapter 2). Studies tend to take it for granted, that on-line information exchange mirrors it's off-line counterpart at the work place. Although, there are great advantages in the availability of email data, as it retains communication in its completeness, it does not fully correspond to previously studied relations, like friendship or advice seeking. The characteristics of on-line communications also differ from off-line information exchange. Employees respect divisional and hierarchical boundaries in face-to-face conversations while these boundaries are blurred out within the email exchange. Secondly, I analyze a special type of on-line behavior, the on-line word-of-mouth communication among audience members (Chapter 3). Online reviews play an increasingly important role in shaping organizational performance. Drawing conclusions on how customers perceive quality and typicality of a producer and how it manifests in on-line ratings increase the predictability of producer success. Thirdly, I approach audience behavior from a collective behavior perspective (Chapter 4). Specifically, I analyze audience dynamics with threshold models. Doing so I address the micro level mechanism of how audience behavior creates certain macro level patterns of producer success rather than assuming that they are simple aggregates of individual characteristics

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

Economics and Heritage Conservation: A Meeting Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, December 1998

Investigates the contributions that economic discourse and analysis can make to the work of conservation of heritage objects, collections, buildings, and sites

Entrepreneurship by Alliance

Recent years have seen the introduction of markets and a system of private property rights in China with a view to changing the composition of production and demand and enhancing welfare. Central to the success of these reforms is the rise of entrepreneurship with its potential to set the economy on a higher growth path by supplying the products which consumers need and want, creating new employment opportunities, and introducing new and more efficient technologies of production. But to what extent can we expect to see entrepreneurs in China behaving like their counterparts in the advanced industrial economies of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States? This is the question we address in this chapter. In our view, the reform programme has, indeed, opened up new opportunities for private enterprise activity; but idiosyncrasies of the business environment are at the same time generating novel institutional arrangements in support of entrepreneurs' investments. We agree, therefore, with Herrick and Kindleberger when they assert that "Development ought not to be viewed as a monotonic, stylized path, ever onward and upward, historically established and invariably repeated" (1983, p.62)

Intellectual Property Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: Executive Guide

Prepared by and for policy-makers, leaders of public sector research establishments, technology transfer professionals, licensing executives, and scientists, this online resource offers up-to-date information and strategies for utilizing the power of both intellectual property and the public domain. Emphasis is placed on advancing innovation in health and agriculture, though many of the principles outlined here are broadly applicable across technology fields. Eschewing ideological debates and general proclamations, the authors always keep their eye on the practical side of IP management. The site is based on a comprehensive Handbook and Executive Guide that provide substantive discussions and analysis of the opportunities awaiting anyone in the field who wants to put intellectual property to work. This multi-volume work contains 153 chapters on a full range of IP topics and over 50 case studies, composed by over 200 authors from North, South, East, and West. If you are a policymaker, a senior administrator, a technology transfer manager, or a scientist, we invite you to use the companion site guide available at http://www.iphandbook.org/index.html The site guide distills the key points of each IP topic covered by the Handbook into simple language and places it in the context of evolving best practices specific to your professional role within the overall picture of IP management

Customer value creation for the emerging market middle class: perspectives from case studies in India

This paper examines the customer value creation framework and discusses the design of the key elements for product development in emerging markets. A scientometric/bibliometric scoping literature review identifies a clear gap in the current research in studying prerequisites for customer value creation in emerging market contexts. Observing experiences of Daikin and Renault in the context of India, the purpose of this paper is to identify value creation strategic choices following which comprehensive customer value offerings in products and services can be successfully created by firms across the four facets of the framework in emerging markets. Value creation strategies include having a nuanced understanding of the latent contextual needs to offer localized high-quality products that embody distinct functional attributes that provide a functional value and being responsive to specific emotional needs and epistemic experiences of the target customers in product and service offerings to deliver a greater experiential value. Furthermore, the products should adopt a localized operational excellence strategy throughout the value chain to reduce costs for competitive price offerings in order to deliver superior cost value and develop brand image and equity strategy, thereby allowing for the provision of a greater symbolic value. Experiences of successful firms demonstrate the need for extensive local research into the emerging market followed by localization of production and development of a distribution network to be able to offer customized products at competitive prices whilst maintaining the brand value. We thus extend the customer value creation framework by introducing localization as a necessary condition for successful organizational performance in emerging markets