Managing Unsolicited Ideas for R&D

Existing academic and popular literature suggests that unsolicited ideas, the non-contractual and voluntary submission of innovation-related information from external sources to the firm, offer the promise of a bountiful and low-cost tool to sustain and extend firms' R&D efforts. Yet, in practice, many organizations find it difficult to deal with unsolicited ideas because of high quantity, low quality, and the need to transfer IP ownership. This article identifies a range of practices that allow organizations to meet these challenges and therefore realize some of the potential of unsolicited ideas for R&D

Going Off-Piste: The Role of Status in Launching Unsponsored R&D Projects

Many established organizations rely on unsponsored R&D projects to sustain and support corporate renewal. These ideas that emerge from dark corners of the organization are often the result of inventors’ proactive creative efforts. Yet, little is known about the origins of these creative efforts, and what drives individuals to decide for or against engagement in such behavior. Building on the notion of middle-status conformity, we argue for the existence of a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between inventors’ status and their participation in autonomous inventive efforts. We argue that this effect is further moderated by factors influencing the salience of existing status-granting institutions, specifically the novelty of the technological domain of the invention, the competitive position of the wider organization, and the inventors’ geographic location. Using a unique dataset of invention disclosures from a global technology-based firm, we find general support for our hypotheses. We propose implications for theories of innovation, networks, and status that add to our understanding of proactive forms of creative effort

The best of both worlds: The benefits of open-specialized and open-diverse syndication networks for new venture success

Open networks give actors non-redundant information that is diverse, while closed networks offer redundant information that is easier to interpret. Integrating arguments about network structure and the similarity of actors’ knowledge, we propose two types of network configurations that combine diversity and ease of interpretation. Closed-diverse networks offer diversity in actors’ knowledge domains and shared third-party ties to help in interpreting that knowledge. In open-specialized networks, structural holes offer diversity, while shared interpretive schema and overlap between received information and actors’ prior knowledge help in interpreting new information without the help of third parties. In contrast, actors in open-diverse networks suffer from information overload due to the lack of shared schema or overlapping prior knowledge for the interpretation of diverse information, and actors in closed-specialized networks suffer from overembeddedness because they cannot access diverse information. Using CrunchBase data on early-stage venture capital investments in the U.S. information technology sector, we test the effect of investors’ social capital on the success of their portfolio ventures. We find that ventures have the highest chances of success if their syndicating investors have either open-specialized or closed-diverse networks. These effects are manifested beyond the direct effects of ventures’ or investors’ quality and are robust to controlling for the possibility that certain investors could have chosen more promising ventures at the time of first funding

The Altman’s Revised Z’-Score Model, Non-financial Information and Macroeconomic Variables: Case of Slovak SMEs

In this paper, we assess the classification performance of the re-estimated Altman’s Z’-Score model for a large sample of private SMEs in Slovakia. More specifically, we assess transferability of the revised Z’-Score model (Altman, 1983) and explore the impact of the non-financial company-specific and macroeconomic variables. The dataset covers the period from 2009 to 2016 and contains 661 622 company-year observations about 149 618 individual companies with 1 575 failures. The discriminatory power of models is tested in out-of-sample period. We find that even though the model with re-estimated coefficients achieves better discrimination performance, it is not statistically different from the revised Z’-Score model. The non-financial variables improve the discriminatory performance significantly, whereas the macroeconomic variables do not. The latter even worsen the out-of-sample and out-of-time discriminatory performance

Modeling Contamination Migration on the Chandra X-Ray Observatory - III

During its first 16 years of operation, the cold (about -60 C) optical blocking filter of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), aboard the Chandra X-ray Observatory, has accumulated a growing layer of molecular contamination that attenuates low-energy x rays. Over the past few years, the accumulation rate, spatial distribution, and composition have changed. This evolution has motivated further analysis of contamination migration within and near the ACIS cavity, in part to evaluate potential bake-out scenarios intended to reduce the level of contamination. Keywords: X-ray astronomy, CCDs, contamination, modeling and simulation, spacecraft operation

The three dimensions of online child pornography offending

The internet has opened up opportunities for non-contact sex offending, such as the viewing of child pornography. This paper proposes a model for the classification of child pornography offenders as an aid for their assessment and treatment, deducted from empirical studies and existing typologies for child pornography offenders. Different subgroups of child pornography offenders may be described according to three dimensions: (1) type of offending, (2) the motivation behind child pornography offending and (3) the situational and social engagement in the offending behaviour. Distinct pathways of child pornography offending can be identified, related to differing criminogenic needs, severity of offending, and appropriate assessment and treatment strategies for the offenders