Life cycle sustainability assessment : a tool for exercising due diligence in life cycle management

Starting from the output ‘The Future We Want’ of the Rio+20 conference 2012, the main focus of this chapter is on social responsibility (SR) in the value chain. The historical context of SR is discussed, related to the international standards as are the Guidance on Social Responsibility and the Global Reporting Initiative, linked with the management of organizations and enterprises. It is emphasized that due diligence along the value chain is seen as a requirement for claiming ‘social responsibility’. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) contributes to the assessment and life cycle management (LCM) to the follow-up of exercising due diligence, all within the context of sustainable development. The over-arching LCSA is a combination of three different life cycle assessment techniques allowing to assess the impacts along the value chain: environmental LCA, social LCA and life cycle costing

On publicness theory and its implications for supply chain integration:The case of criminal justice supply chains

The literature has extensively discussed whether and how public organizations differ from private ones. Publicness theory argues that the degree of publicness is determined by ownership, funding, goal setting, and control structure of an organization. However, these theoretical ideas have not yet been extended to the interorganizational level. The need for further research is reflected in the sustained debate on the applicability of for-profit management approaches in public contexts and supply chains. Starting from the premise of the dimensional publicness theory, this study focuses on theory elaboration. We focus our empirical study on the criminal justice supply chain, which encompasses the process of bringing a criminal case to court. This chain provides an interesting public case to explore how specific dimensions of publicness affect or limit supply chain integration mechanisms. The results of our series of embedded cases focusing on Dutch criminal justice supply chains show that control structures, embodied in laws and regulations, define the governance of relationships between supply chain partners. In addition to these formalized ties, extensive known for-profit information and operational integration mechanisms can be observed, along with limited relational integration. Surprisingly, although similar integration mechanisms are used as in for-profit contexts, integration serves a different role in several of the relationships investigated: dealing with tensions stemming from the specific goal setting and stakeholders of criminal justice chains. Although our findings specifically relate to criminal justice supply chains, they have important implications for other supply chains using contracts and laws and those being selective in applying supply chain integration in cases of contrasting objectives. Moreover, we provide a stepping-stone for the extension of publicness theory to the interorganizational level

Measuring public value: a conceptual and applied contribution to the debate

Countries facing austerity measures need to create public value. Academics and practitioners have been discussing the ways in which public value can be created, managed and measured. This paper contributes to this conversation by proposing a public value measurement model. An Italian case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the model and the organizational implications when public value measures are available to public sector managers, politicians and the public

Measuring public value: a conceptual and applied contribution to the debate

Countries facing austerity measures need to create public value. Academics and practitioners have been discussing the ways in which public value can be created, managed and measured. This paper contributes to this conversation by proposing a public value measurement model. An Italian case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the model and the organizational implications when public value measures are available to public sector managers, politicians and the public

The Stakes in Bayh-Dole: Public Values Beyond the Pace of Innovation

Evaluation studies of the Bayh-Dole Act are generally concerned with the pace of innovation or the transgressions to the independence of research. While these concerns are important, I propose here to expand the range of public values considered in assessing Bayh-Dole and formulating future reforms. To this end, I first examine the changes in the terms of the Bayh-Dole debate and the drift in its design. Neoliberal ideas have had a definitive influence on U.S. innovation policy for the last thirty years, including legislation to strengthen patent protection. Moreover, the neoliberal policy agenda is articulated and justified in the interest of “competitiveness.” Rhetorically, this agenda equates competitiveness with economic growth and this with the public interest. Against that backdrop, I use Public Value Failure criteria to show that values such as political equality, transparency, and fairness in the distribution of the benefits of innovation, are worth considering to counter the “policy drift” of Bayh-Dole

An Integrated Framework for Intersectorality: Nonprofitness and Its Influence on Society and Public Administration Programs

Cross-sector interactions have long occurred in the public delivery of goods, services, and interests. While scholars have often addressed cross-sector interactions using the dimensions of publicness (state) and privateness (market), an intersectoral framework necessitates the understanding and incorporation of nonprofitness to account for the dimensions of nonprofits along the public-private continuum. This article proposes a framework for identifying the dimensions of nonprofits in an intersectoral world and draws on relevant examples to illustrate the presence and influence of nonprofitness. The article then focuses on the future of education in the field of public administration and, in light of the proposed framework, makes and considers recommendations to help educational programs better equip students to appreciate work across sectors

Innovation Practices in Emerging Economies: Do University Partnerships Matter?

Enterprises’ resources and capabilities determine their ability to achieve competitive advantage. In this regard, the key innovation challenges that enterprises face are liabilities associated with their age and size, and the entry barriers imposed on them. In this line, a growing number of enterprises are starting to implement innovation practices in which they employ both internal/external flows of knowledge in order to explore/exploit innovation in collaboration with commercial or scientific agents. Within this context, universities play a significant role providing fertile knowledge-intensive environments to support the exploration and exploitation of innovative and entrepreneurial ideas, especially in emerging economies, where governments have created subsidies to promote enterprise innovation through compulsory university partnerships. Based on these ideas, the purpose of this exploratory research is to provide a better understanding about the role of universities on enterprises’ innovation practices in emerging economies. More concretely, in the context of Mexico, we explored the enterprises’ motivations to collaborate with universities in terms of innovation purposes (exploration and exploitation) or alternatives to access to public funds (compulsory requirement of being involved in a university partnership). Using a sample of 10,167 Mexican enterprises in the 2012 Research and Technological Development Survey collected by the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography, we tested a multinomial regression model. Our results provide insights about the relevant role of universities inside enterprises’ exploratory innovation practices, as well as, in the access of R&D research subsidies