Communicating and Using Climate Survey Results

This white paper provides insight into how campus leaders can develop a thoughtful strategy for presenting campus climate information to the different campus community stakeholders

Organizational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries

The Semantic Web initiative holds large promises for the future. There is, however, a considerable gap in Semantic Web research between the contributions in the technological field and the research done in the organizational field. This paper examines, from a socio-technical point of view the impact of Semantic Web technology on the strategic, organizational and technological levels. Building on a comprehensive case study at the National Library in Norway our findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organizational level. The reason is mainly because inter-organizational and cross-organizational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined

Facilitating innovations

Many innovations involve changes which transcend the individual business or are only achievable when various businesses and/or interested parties take up the challenge together. In System Innovation Programmes, the necessary innovations are facilitated by means of workshops related to specific areas and by forming socio-technical networks

Effects of organizational innovations on firm's production performance

In the literature, various papers investigate the effects of the technological (product and process) innovations on firms performance. However, research on the effects of organizational innovations is rare. Furthermore, the performance of the firms is usually measured in terms of financial criteria such as the return on assets or equity., and the research on the effects of innovations on production performance is limited. The objective of this paper is to explore the role of different innovation types as well as the organizational innovations on the firm's production performance based on an empirical study covering 184 manufacturing firms in the Northern Marmara region within Turkey. A significant positive relationship between organizational innovations and the firm's production performance is determined

Pricing under innovation

We study pricing when firms introduce process and product innovations over time. We set up a model of endogenous productivity and markup under imperfect competition and dynamic pricing. We estimate it using output price indices reported by an unbalanced panel of 2,300 Spanish manufacturing firms during 1990-2006. Markups turn out to be procyclical and change with the introduction of innovations. Firms use innovation to increase margins, but product innovators are careful to raise prices on new or improved goods. Process innovations tend to leave prices unchanged, product innovations tend to raise prices and firms that introduce both tend to decrease them

Sparking Innovations in Management

{Excerpt} Gary Hamel defines management innovation as a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices (or a departure from customary organizational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed). He deems it the prime driver of sustainable competitive advantage in the 21st century

Does innovation stimulate employment? A firm-level analysis using comparable micro-data from four European countries

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated using comparable firm-level data from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Results show that displacement effects induced by productivity growth in the production of old products are large, while those associated with process innovations, which are likely to be compensated by price decreases, appear to be small. The effects related to product innovations are, however, strong enough to overcompensate these displacement effects

Work Organisation and Innovation

[Excerpt] Innovations in work organisation have the potential to optimise production processes in companies and improve employees’ overall experience of work. This report explores the links between innovations in work organisation – under the broader label of high performance work practices (HPWPs) – and the potential benefits for both employees and organisations. It draws on empirical evidence from case studies carried out in 13 Member States of the European Union where workplace innovations have resulted in positive outcomes