Universities and enterprise education: responding to the challenges of the new era

Purpose The article suggests that the international financial and economic crisis in 2008 produced a new economic era with significant implications for enterprise and entrepreneurship education. It explores: 1. The changing influences on entrepreneurship education and learning; 2. What is the new era in entrepreneurship? The consequences of changing economic, social and cultural movements; 3. How entrepreneurship education and learning can respond to these challenges. Approach The research approach is informed by practitioner-based educational enquiry, reflective practice and research, education and participation with groups of universities, educators, students, entrepreneurs and other groups during the economic crisis. Findings The article proposes that the nature of entrepreneurship is changing in response to social and cultural movements in the new economic era. Ethical and environmental concerns are creating a discourse of responsible entrepreneurship informed by social entrepreneurship. The article conceptualises this as the shift from an ‘old’ to ‘new’ entrepreneurship. Practical implications Implications for the future development of enterprise and entrepreneurial education are presented, referring to the factors shaping change including the social and economic context; learners; learning and teaching; and institutional change. Originality/value The article presents new thinking on the future challenges and directions for entrepreneurship and related education in the context of fundamental economic change

Continuity, Discontinuity and Dynamics in Mathematics & Economics - Reconsidering Rosser's Visions

Barkley Rosser has been a pioneer in arguing the case for the mathematics of discontinuity, broadly conceived, to be placed at the foundations of modelling economic dynamics. In this paper we reconsider this vision from the broad perspective of a variety of different kinds of mathematics and suggest a broadening of Rosser’s methodology to the study of economic dynamicsContinuity, Discontinuity, Economic Dynamics, Relaxation Oscillations

Governance for sustainability: learning from VSM practice

Purpose – While there is some agreement on the usefulness of systems and complexity approaches to tackle the sustainability challenges facing the organisations and governments in the twenty-first century, less is clear regarding the way such approaches can inspire new ways of governance for sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to progress ongoing research using the Viable System Model (VSM) as a meta-language to facilitate long-term sustainability in business, communities and societies, using the “Methodology to support self-transformation”, by focusing on ways of learning about governance for sustainability. Design/methodology/approach – It summarises core self-governance challenges for long-term sustainability, and the organisational capabilities required to face them, at the “Framework for Assessing Sustainable Governance”. This tool is then used to analyse capabilities for governance for sustainability at three real situations where the mentioned Methodology inspired bottom up processes of self-organisation. It analyses the transformations decided from each organisation, in terms of capabilities for sustainable governance, using the suggested Framework. Findings – Core technical lessons learned from using the framework are discussed, include the usefulness of using a unified language and tool when studying governance for sustainability in differing types and scales of case study organisations. Research limitations/implications – As with other exploratory research, it reckons the convenience for further development and testing of the proposed tools to improve their reliability and robustness. Practical implications – A final conclusion suggests that the suggested tools offer a useful heuristic path to learn about governance for sustainability, from a VSM perspective; the learning from each organisational self-transformation regarding governance for sustainability is insightful for policy and strategy design and evaluation; in particular the possibility of comparing situations from different scales and types of organisations. Originality/value – There is very little coherence in the governance literature and the field of governance for sustainability is an emerging field. This piece of exploratory research is valuable as it presents an effective tool to learn about governance for sustainability, based in the “Methodology for Self-Transformation”; and offers reflexions on applications of the methodology and the tool, that contribute to clarify the meaning of governance for sustainability in practice, in organisations from different scales and types

Measuring and Evaluating a Design Complexity Metric for XML Schema Documents

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been gaining extraordinary acceptance from many diverse enterprise software companies for their object repositories, data interchange, and development tools. Further, many different domains, organizations and content providers have been publishing and exchanging information via internet by the usage of XML and standard schemas. Efficient implementation of XML in these domains requires well designed XML schemas. In this point of view, design of XML schemas plays an extremely important role in software development process and needs to be quantified for ease of maintainability. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of XML schema documents (XSD) written in W3C XML Schema language. We propose a metric, which measures the complexity due to the internal architecture of XSD components, and due to recursion. This is the single metric, which cover all major factors responsible for complexity of XSD. The metric has been empirically and theoretically validated, demonstrated with examples and supported by comparison with other well known structure metrics applied on XML schema documents

Financing Constraints and a Firm's Decision and Ability to Innovate: Establishing Direct and Reverse Effects.

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of financing constraints as a possibly serious obstacle to innovation by .rms. The econometric framework we employ in our study is the simultaneous bivariate probit with mutual endogeneity of direct indicators of financial constraints and innovation decisions by firms. A novel method for establishing coherency conditions is used. It allows us for the first time to estimate models hitherto classified as incoherent through the use of prior sign restrictions on model parameters. We are thus able to quantify the interaction between financing constraints and a firm's decision and ability to innovate without forcing the econometric models to be recursive. Hence, we obtain direct as well as reverse interaction effects, leading us to conclude that binding financing constraints discourage innovation and at the same time innovative firms are more likely to face binding financing constraints.DSGE model ; Currency union ; Heterogeneity ; Matching frictions ; Welfare.