<Symposium Overview: Presentations' outlines>Reading the Exchange : Mapping Journals as Platform for Urban Knowledge

Mapping the Transfer (1920s-1970s): Magazines as Platforms for Architecture and Urban Knowledge (resp. Gaia Caramellino and Nicole De Togni) is a project inaugurated in 2014 and developed over the last three years with the contribution of the Master students of the course in History and Theory of Architecture, at the Politecnico di Milano. It is based on the inquiry conducted on forty-six periodicals published in seventeen diverse countries between the 1920s and the 1970s. The presentation will discuss the creation of a database aimed at facilitating the study of the international circulation of models, persons and discourses in areas of diverse cultural and linguistic background. A powerful tool/source for the research in the field of transnational studies, the database will not be used to address the history of periodicals and the editorial culture – observed within their national boundaries –, but will rather encourage a cross-national and cross-cultural reading, aimed at investigating the international dimension of the process of production and discussion of architectural and planning knowledge over the 20th century. As a testing ground, the database will be used for the investigation of the transfer of urban notions and visions between US and Italy, after WWII. The main goal will be to map the exchange, but also to analyze the forms of reception and adaptation at local level, by questioning their impact on the urban environment

Universities as Embedded Knowledge Hubs and the Challenge of Local Development the Us Lessons and the Italian Case

This article discusses the claim of a new paradigm in the knowledge production and diffusion process, and the need to assess the regional and local implications of this modal shift. After introductory remarks included in the first part of the paper, its next section introduces the theme of localisation of knowledge as a source of regional development; section three examines the lessons we can extract from the US university system (with a particular regard to the case of Johns Hopkins University and the recent project for a biotech park in the city of Baltimore); in section four an illustration of the Italian University system leads to a description of the current evolution of the University of Bologna toward a new entrepreneurial role. The last part of the paper discusses the embedded role of universities in the light of the two cases presented in the previous sections and draws the conclusions in terms of regional policy

Managing sustainability: the role of multinational corporations in the global south

Multinational corporations and international business practices as well as international investment are considered important elements for the diffusion of new modes of production, namely through a flow of cleaner production and new management practices such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). This view is lacking consistency and is not buttressed on strong empirical evidence. The positive driver of environmental sustainability is probably not international business and trade but strong and good institutions. The focus here is on four limitations: the context of the private firms and corporations, the workings of complex organizations, the technology and the right institutions that buttress the global, national and local contexts, taking as concrete examples some specific cases from the Global South, as Mozambique. The article concludes that these aspects have to be considered and contrasted to the technological and management solutions for sustainability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Technology upgrading of middle income economies: A new approach and results

We explore issues of measurement for technology upgrading of the economies moving from middle to high-income status. In exploring this issue, we apply theoretically relevant and empirically grounded middle level conceptual and statistical framework based on three dimensions: (i) Intensity (ii) breadth of technological upgrading, and (iii) technology and knowledge exchange. As an outcome, we construct a three-pronged composite indicator of technology upgrading based on 35 indicators which reflect different drivers and patterns of technology upgrading of countries at different income levels. We show that technology upgrading of middle-income economies is distinctively different from that of low and high-income economies. Our results suggest the existence of middle-income trap in technology upgrading - i.e. countries' technology upgrading activities are not reflected in their income levels. Based on the simple statistical analysis we show that the middle-income trap is present in all three aspects of technology upgrading, but their importance varies across different aspects. A trap seems to be higher for 'breadth' of technology upgrading than for 'intensity' of technology upgrading and is by far the highest for the dimension of knowledge and technology interaction with the global economy. Finally, our research shows that technology upgrading is a multidimensional process and that it would be methodologically wrong to aim for an aggregate index

R&D and Technology Transfer: Firm-Level Evidence from Chinese Industry

The capacity of developing economies to narrow the gap in living standards with the OECD nations depends critically on their ability to imitate and innovate new technologies. Toward this end, developing economies have access to three avenues of technological advance: technology transfer, domestic R&D, and foreign direct investment. This paper examines the contributions of each of these avenues, as well as their interactions, to productivity and knowledge production within Chinese industry. Based on a large data set for China’s large and medium-size enterprises, the estimation results show that technology transfer – whether domestic or foreign – affects productivity only through its interactions with in-house R&D. Foreign direct investment does not appear to facilitate the adoption of market-mediated foreign technology transfer. Firms wishing to produce patentable knowledge do not benefit from technology transfer; patentable knowledge is created exclusively through in-house R&D operations.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39968/3/wp582.pd

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

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