The Pharmacia Story of Entrepreneurship and as a Creative Technical University - An Experiment in Innovation, Organizational Break Up and Industrial Renaissance

While innovative technology supply has been the focus of much neo Schumpeterian modeling, few have addressed the critical and more resource demanding commercializing of the same technologies. The result may have been a growth policy focused on the wrong problem. Using competence bloc theory and a firm based macro to macro approach we abandon the assumed linear relation between technology change and economic growth of such models, and demonstrate that lack of local commercialization competences is likely to block growth even though innovative technology supplies are abundant. The break up, reorganization and part withdrawal of Pharmacia from the local Uppsala (in Sweden) economy after a series of international mergers illustrate. Pharmacia has “released” a wealth of technologies in local markets. Local commercialization competence, notably industrially competent financing has, however, not been sufficient to fill in through indigenous entrepreneurship the vacuum left by Pharmacia. Only thanks to foreign investors, attracted by Pharmacia technologies, that have opted to stay for the long term the local Uppsala economy seems to be heading for a successful future. The Pharmacia case also demonstrates the role of advanced firms as “technical universities” and the nature of an experimentally organized economy (EOE) in which business mistakes are a natural learning cost for economic development.Competence Bloc Theory; Commercialization of Innovations; Experimentally Organized Economy; Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Pharmaceutical industry

Analysis of the guidance services employed in assisting students to select a business curricula

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

So what is Capital in the Twenty-First Century? Some notes on Piketty’s book Working paper, forthcoming in Capitalism & Society

This study was inspired by Piketty’s excellent and important book. Its title and numerous statements in it arouse in readers expectations of a comprehensive analysis of capitalism. By comparison the author of this paper felt important aspects were lacking. The capitalist system has numerous immanent traits and innate tendencies, of which the paper takes a closer look at three properties. 1. One basic feature is dynamism, innovation, and creative destruction. No picture of capitalism can be full if this basic aspect is ignored. 2. Capitalism inevitably brings about a high degree of inequality; this must be eased by reforms, but cannot be entirely overcome. 3. The basic characteristics of capitalism – private ownership and the dominance of market coordination – give rise to strong incentive mechanisms that encourage but owners and enterprise executives to innovate and to cooperate effectively. One of the main incentives is competition, especially oligopolistic competition. There are strong mutual effects among these three important tendencies. It is impossible to understand well Piketty’s main subject, the distribution of income and wealth, if it is divorced from the other two tendencies. The study ends with its author’s own value judgements on the favourable and harmful, unjust attributes of the capitalist system

The minimum wage and restaurant prices

Using both store-level and aggregated price data from the food away from home component of the Consumer Price Index survey, we show that restaurant prices rise in response to an increase in the minimum wage. These results hold up when using several different sources of variation in the data. We interpret these findings within a model of employment determination. The model implies that minimum wage hikes cause employment to fall and prices to rise if labor markets are competitive but potentially cause employment to rise and prices to fall if labor markets are monopsonistic. Therefore, our empirical results appear to provide evidence against the hypothesis that monopsony power is important for understanding the small observed employment responses to minimum wage changes.Labor market ; Wages ; Wages - Restaurants

Software Development as an Antitrust Remedy: Lessons from the Enforcement of the Microsoft Communications Protocol Licensing Requirement

An important provision in each of the final judgments in the government\u27s Microsoft antitrust case requires Microsoft to make available to software developers the communications protocols that Windows client operating systems use to interoperate natively (that is, without adding software) with Microsoft server operating systems in corporate networks or over the Internet. The short-term goal of the provision is to allow developers, as licensees of the protocols, to write applications for non-Microsoft server operating systems that interoperate with Windows client computers in the same ways that applications written for Microsoft\u27s server operating systems interoperate with Windows clients. The long-term goal is to preserve, in the network context, the platform threat to the Windows monopoly that was the focus of the government\u27s theory of monopolization. The platform threat was the possibility that middleware, like Netscape\u27s browser or Sun\u27s Java technologies, might evolve into a platform for other applications and thus erode the applications barrier to entry that protects Windows. This was the threat that the courts held Microsoft illegally thwarted by its contracts and product design. The protocol licensing provision rests on the assumption that middleware running on servers might also pose a platform threat to the Windows monopoly of client operating systems. District Judge Kollar-Kotelly, in entering the final judgments, singled out this provision as the key to assuring that the other provisions do not become irrelevant as more applications move to servers in local networks or the Internet. The provision has, however, proven to be by far the most difficult to implement. We argue in this Article that the provision has not accomplished its purpose and that courts and policymakers can draw some hard lessons from the experience.[...] We begin our analysis by briefly describing the liability holdings and the ensuing remedial proceedings in the Microsoft litigation. In the process, we provide an overview of the final judgments and the reasoning the courts offered for upholding them and rejecting any broader relief. We then narrow our focus to the communications protocol licensing provision, explaining its history, requirements, rationale, and mechanism of enforcement. We then analyze the administration of the program from its inception in 2003 to the most recent joint status report. In the final part, we argue that the program has failed because it violates basic principles of remedial design and implementation in monopolization cases

Software Development as an Antitrust Remedy: Lessons from the Enforcement of the \u3ci\u3eMicrosoft\u3c/i\u3e Communications Protocol Licensing Requirement

An important provision in each of the final judgments in the government\u27s Microsoft antitrust case requires Microsoft to make available to software developers the communications protocols that Windows client operating systems use to interoperate natively (that is, without adding software) with Microsoft server operating systems in corporate networks or over the Internet. The short-term goal of the provision is to allow developers, as licensees of the protocols, to write applications for non-Microsoft server operating systems that interoperate with Windows client computers in the same ways that applications written for Microsoft\u27s server operating systems interoperate with Windows clients. The long-term goal is to preserve, in the network context, the platform threat to the Windows monopoly that was the focus of the government\u27s theory of monopolization. The platform threat was the possibility that middleware, like Netscape\u27s browser or Sun\u27s Java technologies, might evolve into a platform for other applications and thus erode the applications barrier to entry that protects Windows. This was the threat that the courts held Microsoft illegally thwarted by its contracts and product design. The protocol licensing provision rests on the assumption that middleware running on servers might also pose a platform threat to the Windows monopoly of client operating systems. District Judge Kollar-Kotelly, in entering the final judgments, singled out this provision as the key to assuring that the other provisions do not become irrelevant as more applications move to servers in local networks or the Internet. The provision has, however, proven to be by far the most difficult to implement. We argue in this Article that the provision has not accomplished its purpose and that courts and policymakers can draw some hard lessons from the experience

Santa Fe New Mexican, 12-24-1913

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/sfnm_news/4987/thumbnail.jp

Curiosity, Commerce, and Conversation in the Writing of London Horticulturists during the Early-Eighteenth Century

PhDThis dissertation explores the social and literary worlds of horticulturists who lived, worked, and wrote in early-eighteenth-century London. The period witnessed not only a growing market for printed books and pamphlets about gardening, but also the emergence of the nurseryman as a distinct commercial and cultural identity. In many cases, trading nurserymen also published horticultural writing, their texts exploiting the publicity of representation both in order to persuade readers of the quality and reliability of their goods and services, and to evidence a wide range of intellectual interests and social aspirations. At the same time, increasing numbers of more gentlemanly authors had recourse to nursery and physic (or botanical) gardens and their curators as authoritative sources for their own manuals of horticulture and treatises of natural philosophy. Part one addresses the publications produced by nursery-gardeners and seedsmen during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through close-readings of texts by George London and Henry Wise, Thomas Fairchild, and John Cowell, chapters one and two examine how such men sought to represent themselves as polite and precise practitioners of gardening successful in their businesses, sociable in their dispositions, and curious in their approaches to the natural world. Chapter three embellishes these themes by describing the genealogy and formation of the Society of Gardeners, a voluntary association of horticultural tradesmen. Part two (chapters four and five) locates these broad arguments more specifically, by presenting a biographical account of Richard Bradley, the most important and prolific horticultural writer of the 1710s and 1720s. Combining published and manuscript resources these chapters interrogate pivotal moments in Bradley's career, demonstrating how its undulating trajectory was shaped by the opportunities and limitations afforded within the spaces of physic gardens (both real and projected), and ultimately turned on his capacity for manipulating contemporary practices and conventions of curiosity and sociability

The Material Theory of Induction

The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it.The content of that logic and where it can be applied are determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference