Why Does Dave Spend Ten Times More Time on Interaction with Industry than Paul? : Toward a Model of Social Capital Activation for Entrepreneurial Academics

This paper focuses on academics that are looking for entrepreneurial ways to pursue their teaching, research and commercialization interests, in particular by actively engaging in university-industry interactions. The paper aims to improve our knowledge of why some academics exploit their social networks with industry more actively than others. We develop a conceptual model that aims to explain a mechanism behind social capital activation, and to identify factors that are likely to have the highest predictive power. We theorize on how academic’s motivation, perceived social influence and perceived ability unite into readiness to activate social capital, and under what circumstances this readiness is likely to result in actual behavior. Specifically, the objective of this paper is to further develop the model constructs and to operationalize them into a set of measurable items. For each of the readiness constructs, we present a set of composite variables, as well as corresponding observable variables. We conclude with implications of our analysis for theory and practice, and set directions for future research

STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE: BETWEEN HIERARCHIES, MARKET AND NETWORK FORMS

In the current economic, social and political context, the problem of the competitiveness reform in public sector lies in the assumption of strategic approaches focused on meeting the public interest, with the lowest cost for society. The philosophy management which governs public sector reform tends to create new paradigms and contributes to shaping a new way of thinking and behavior. Central idea of this paper is that the two dominant models of administration: bureaucracy and governance, provides a range of institutional opportunities but also raises a number of barriers to strategic approaches to emerging public sector. Bureaucracy is for example, criticized because the lack of prioritization skills and lack of goals and also because lacks to stimulate innovation in the public sector. Bureaucracy leads to uniformity, flattening of public services. Governance model contains a number of similarities with the strategic approach in the public sector, when we talk about networks, interdependence and self-organizing nature of public administration. The issue that we are trying reveal to your attention is that the current institutional conditions are more complex than two models mentioned are able to cover. These new demands require the types of organizational structures based on flexible, decentralized structure to replace the traditional centralized, which now is totally inapplicable. Institutional framework may, for example, to provide an opportunity for the New Public Management, but also create a barrier to governance.bureaucracy, governance, public policy, networks, multilevel governance.

Overview of technologies for building robots in the classroom

This paper aims to give an overview of technologies that can be used to implement robotics within an educational context. We discuss complete robotics systems as well as projects that implement only certain elements of a robotics system, such as electronics, hardware, or software. We believe that Maker Movement and DIY trends offers many new opportunities for teaching and feel that they will become much more prominent in the future. Products and projects discussed in this paper are: Mindstorms, Vex, Arduino, Dwengo, Raspberry Pi, MakeBlock, OpenBeam, BitBeam, Scratch, Blockly and ArduBlock

Keystone sector methodology:a network comparative study

Within neoclassical economic growth approaches there is no fully satisfactory explanation for regional asymmetric growth. More recent extensions of the neoclassical model (new endogenous growth theories) recognise the possible influence of a set of intangible factors, which, nevertheless, do not allow a treatable empirical formalisation. Neo- institutional and evolutionary theories highlight the complex nature of economic growth, recognising the difficulty of non-linear dynamic modelling; however, both theories highlight the influential role played by innovation and technology diffusion processes. Missing from these theories is any appreciation of the social network characteristics of regions and the interaction between social and economic systems in conditioning the growth and development processes. In the present PhD thesis, we take the institutional network in small towns as the unity for analysis where information, money and support flows among them are studied. We apply a social network analysis framework, which allow us to find numerical indicators for the whole network as for each individual institutional role in it. Applying this framework in two case studies (in Portugal and in the USA) we found a set of interesting differences about the institutional mediation roles. While in the US, the private sector leaded by banks plays the keystone sector role, in Portugal, we still have public institutions as the main players. After the identification of the significant variables and attending to the different results in the two studies, we built a testable cross-section model that, controlling for proximity from urban centre, transportation costs, local factor endowments, amenities and so forth, can be tested using a broader database, to correlate town economic performances with the network identified variables. The deep understanding of the relational structure within these small towns makes it possible to quantify a set of crucial intangible variables that, acknowledged in a regional policy design, will contribute to increase its efficiency. Without a complete understanding of these social network structures, it is possible that current EU criteria used to define regions eligible for assistance may be inadequate. At the present time, the criteria for receipt of regional development funds are based on relative (to EU average) per capita levels and do not explore differences in economic potential or the capacity for regions to develop. Part of this capacity is rooted in the social network structure. Further on-going research will contribute to the deepening of neoclassical growth models, complementing considerations that evolutionary economics uses to explain the complexity of modern socio-economic life.Network methodology; regional development

Keystone sector methodology:network analysis comparative study

In this paper, we present some new perspectives on rural regional development strategies. Contradictory goals in macroeconomic policies, such as maximizing growth, efficiency and technological innovation with equity or efficient growth with regional disparities, tend to appear with higher costs to small open economies. A large number of studies are focused on this trade-off, using national and some regional aggregate indicators mostly based on economic flows prices and quantities). However the urbanization process is still concentrated in a few traditionally big cities, which is particularly the case in Portugal. The ‘keystone sector’ methodology we apply here shows that other important flows embedded in small town social networks can provide complementary understanding of such issues. Conclusions about a case study in Portugal, its internal and external relations and the comparison with some US similar studies described in the literature, will highlight and enhance the understanding of this approach to the articulation of development strategies in sparsely populated regions in the E.U.

Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This article examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States

Leveraging Social Foci for Information Seeking in Social Media

The rise of social media provides a great opportunity for people to reach out to their social connections to satisfy their information needs. However, generic social media platforms are not explicitly designed to assist information seeking of users. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identify the social connections of a user able to satisfy his information needs. The information need of a social media user is subjective and personal, and we investigate the utility of his social context to identify people able to satisfy it. We present questions users post on Twitter as instances of information seeking activities in social media. We infer soft community memberships of the asker and his social connections by integrating network and content information. Drawing concepts from the social foci theory, we identify answerers who share communities with the asker w.r.t. the question. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework is effective in identifying answerers to social media questions.Comment: AAAI 201