COVID-19 and public-sector capacity

The paper argues that to govern a pandemic, governments require dynamic capabilities and capacity—too often missing. These include capacity to adapt and learn; capacity to align public services and citizen needs; capacity to govern resilient production systems; and capacity to govern data and digital platforms

Reshaping Platform-Driven Digital Markets

The market size and strength of the major digital platform companies has invited international concern about how such firms should best be regulated to serve the interests of wider society, with a particular emphasis on the need for new antitrust legislation. Using a normative innovation systems approach, this chapter investigates how current antitrust models may insufficiently address the value-extracting features of existing data-intensive and platform-oriented industry behaviour and business models. To do so, it employs the concept of economic rents to investigate how digital platforms create and extract value. Two forms of rent are elaborated: ‘network monopoly rents’ and ‘algorithmic rents’. By identifying such rents more precisely, policymakers and researchers can better direct regulatory investigations, as well as broader industrial and innovation policy approaches, to shape the features of platform-driven digital markets

Challenge-Driven Innovation Policy: Towards a New Policy Toolkit

Policy makers are increasingly embracing the idea of using industrial and innovation policy to tackle the ‘grand challenges’ facing modern societies. This article argues that through well-defined goals, or more specifically ‘missions’, that are focused on solving important societal challenges, policymakers have the opportunity to determine the direction of growth by making strategic investments across many different sectors and nurturing new industrial landscapes, which the private sector can develop further, and as a result induce cross-sectoral learning and increase macroeconomic stability. This ‘mission-oriented’ approach to industrial policy is not about ‘top down’ planning by an overbearing state; it is about providing a direction for growth and increasing business expectations about future growth areas and catalysing activity that otherwise would not happen. It is not about de-risking and levelling the playing field, nor about supporting more competitive sectors over less since the market does not always ‘know best’ but tilting the playing field in the direction of the desired societal goals, such as the sustainable development goals. To achieve this requires a different policy framework, what we call the ‘ROAR’ framework, which involves strategic thinking about the desired direction of travel (Routes), the structure and capacity of public sector Organisations, the way in which policy is Assessed and the incentive structure for both private and public sectors (Risks and Rewards). The article argues that if we want to take grand challenges such as the SDGs seriously as policy goals, market shaping should become the overarching approach followed in various policy fields

Applying market shaping approaches to increase access to assistive technology in low- and middle-income countries

Development outcomes are inextricably linked to the health of the marketplace that delivers products and services to people in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Shortcomings in the market for assistive technology (AT) contribute to low access in LMIC. Market shaping is aimed at improving a market's specific outcomes, such as access to high quality, affordable AT, by targeting the root causes of these shortcomings. The paper summarizes the findings of market analyses conducted under the UK aid funded AT2030 programme in support of ATscale and aims to discuss how market shaping can help more people gain access to the AT that they need and what are the best mechanisms to unlock markets and commercial opportunity in LMICs. The paper also explores how market shaping for AT markets could be part of a mission-oriented approach AT policy. A mission-oriented approach can help accelerate progress toward a common objective among stakeholders, at country or global level. While market-shaping activities direct the outcomes of the market toward a specific end goal, such as access to quality, affordable products and services, missions are more comprehensive and include other policy interventions and stakeholder collaborations in order to create a robust and sustainable structure

Sizing for the apparel industry using statistical analysis - a Brazilian case study

The study of the body measurements of Brazilian women used the Kinect Body Imaging system for 3D body scanning. The result of the study aims to meet the needs of the apparel industry for accurate measurements. Data was statistically treated using the IBM SPSS 23 system, with 95% confidence (P 0,58) and from the Hip-to-Height Ratio - HHR (bottom portion): Small (HHR 0,68).This work is financed by FEDER funds through the Competitive Factors Operational Program (COMPETE) POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007136 and by national funds through FCT-Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under the project UID/CTM/000264.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Semantic Enrichment for Building Information Modeling: Procedure for Compiling Inference Rules and Operators for Complex Geometry

Semantic enrichment of building models adds meaningful domain-specific or application-specific information to a digital building model. It is applicable to solving interoperability problems and to compilation of models from point cloud data. The SeeBIM (Semantic Enrichment Engine for BIM) prototype software encapsulates domain expert knowledge in computer readable rules for inference of object types, identity and aggregation of systems. However, it is limited to axis-aligned bounding box geometry and the adequacy of its rule-sets cannot be guaranteed. This paper solves these drawbacks by (1) devising a new procedure for compiling inference rule sets that are known a priori to be adequate for complete and thorough classification of model objects, and (2) enhancing the operators to compute complex geometry and enable precise topological rule processing. The procedure for compiling adequate rule sets is illustrated using a synthetic concrete highway bridge model. A real-world highway bridge model, with 333 components of 13 different types and compiled from a laser scanned point cloud, is used to validate the approach and test the enhanced SeeBIM system. All of the elements are classified correctly, demonstrating the efficacy of the approach to semantic enrichment

Polar opposites? NGOs, left parties and the fight for social change in Nepal

In the early 1990s, when NGOs were rising to prominence as an ostensible force for social change in Nepal, the Maoists were also beginning to organise, and denounced NGOs as agents of imperialism. The Maoists came to prominence by fighting a People’s War launched in 1996, with the intention of improving life for the poor peasant and working-class majority. But after a decade-long struggle, the Maoists became incorporated into the parliamentary system. While Nepal’s first democratic revolution in 1990 met formal, popular political demands, which were consolidated in a subsequent revolution in 2006 overthrowing the monarchy and bringing the People’s War to an end, there was little socio-economic progress for the vast majority. The argument advanced in this article is that this lack of progress relied on the interplay of two phenomena: an anti-Maoist alliance consisting of the international community, the domestic ruling elite and NGOs, and a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the Maoists’ political theory