Sustainable qualities: Powerful drivers of social change

Looking attentively at the complexity of contemporary society, we can detect a variety of creative communities involved in sustainable social innovation. Behind each of these initiatives stands a group of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage something new, beyond the standard ways of thinking and doing. They have succeeded in challenging the apparent hegemony of mainstream ideas about how problems need to be solved by providing valuable alternatives. A primary common feature of such creative communities is that most of them have sprung from collaboratively confronting the problems of everyday life. Facing up to these, they have conceived new models of thought and action where everybody wins – individuals, society and the environment. A second common feature is that they produce and are, in turn, driven by new notions of qualities: new qualities of their physical and social environments. We can refer to these as sustainable qualities: qualities that require more sustainable behaviours in order to enjoy their benefits

Are there any differences between family and non-family firms in the open innovation era? lessons from the practice of European manufacturing companies

Although there is an increased interest in studies on FFs and open innovation (OI) the existing knowledge is rather limited. This study explores the open innovation choices, their determinants and the relative innovation performance in FFs with respect to non-family firms. By means of an European survey involving Italian, Swedish, Finnish and UK family and non-family firms we aim at investigating whether FFs are adopting a peculiar behaviour in the open innovation era. In order to achieve this goal, we rely on concepts and constructs already defined by open innovation literature and we explore the behaviour of FFs and non-family firms. Analysis of differences show that family firms are in general less open than non-family firms, when we consider openness in terms of breadth, while they show a higher intensity of collaboration behaviour when we consider the measures of depth. FFs perceive as slightly higher the competitive pressure, but very similar is the perceived technological pressure. Also drivers of collaboration and innovation strategy are on average very similar. Significant differences between FFs and non-FFs are found as concerns the use of IP legal rights (lower for FFs). On average, FFs declare a slightly higher novelty performance. A first type of regressions shows the contribution of some environmental and internal firm-specific factors as explanatory variables of openness degree and thus allow to depict the specific profile of FFs. When we explore differences on the supposed mediating factors of the relationship between openness and innovation performance, the organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge as factors over which FFs exert particular care. A second type of regressions shows that, beside the external social capital, organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge for FFs as a relevant mediator in the relationships between OI depth and innovation performance

IP Strategy in the Open Innovation Era: The Case Of Collaborative NPD

The most recent literature as well as the practice of companies are bringing into evidence that ensuring appropriability is very difficult, in the context of open innovation. The purpose of this paper is to study this problem, and, in particular, it is analyzed the role of organizational and managerial mechanisms in reinforcing the effectiveness of other IPPMs in collaborative NPD. The paper is based upon literature analysis and a multiple case study, involving three companies, and sheds some light on the specific organizational and managerial interventions that can be introduced within companies in order to improve the effectiveness of the IP strategy in collaborative NPD

Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov exhibits a structure similar to native Solar System comets

We processed images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to investigate any morphological features in the inner coma suggestive of a peculiar activity on the nucleus of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. The coma shows an evident elongation, in the position angle (PA) ~0-180d direction, which appears related to the presence of a jet originating from a single active source on the nucleus. A counterpart of this jet directed towards PA ~10d was detected through analysis of the changes of the inner coma morphology on HST images taken in different dates and processed with different filters. These findings indicate that the nucleus is probably rotating with a spin axis projected near the plane of the sky and oriented at PA ~100d-280d, and that the active source is lying in a near-equatorial position. Subsequent observations of HST allowed us to determine the direction of the spin axis at RA=17h20m+/-15d and Dec = -35d+\-10d.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures (low resolution). Full-resolution figures and bonus material at this url https://web.oapd.inaf.it/bedin/files/PAPERs_eMATERIALs/BORISOV_comet/ Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters on 2020 April 1st (not a joke ;

When IPPMs reduce uncertainty

The Intellectual Property (IP) management in Open Innovation (OI) is one of the most interesting topic in the literature: several authors have highlighted that IP protection mechanisms IPPMs can be useful in order to cope with uncertainty regarding the control over critical know-how, the management of both the background and the foreground knowledge, the property rights and the rights to use innovations, as well as the resolution of possible legal disputes. Our purpose is to identify how IPPMs should be combined along the collaboration phases in order to reduce uncertainty and if IPPMs should be differentiated depending on the different types of partners. On the basis of two case studies in two Italian companies, it emerges the importance to regulate the IP management since the early stages of the collaboration through contractual tools such as Non-Disclosure Agreement, Memorandum of Understanding, Joint Development Agreement, and Rights to Use. Hence, differently from the literature, case studies suggest that the Right to Use and the agreements governing the joint development should be defined in the exploration phase, in order to produce immediate effects in terms of uncertainty reduction. Once in the development phase, each partner will mostly monitor the other partners’ respect of such agreements

Chemistry-climate model SOCOL: a validation of the present-day climatology

International audienceIn this paper we document ''SOCOL'', a new chemistry-climate model, which has been ported for regular PCs and shows good wall-clock performance. An extensive validation of the model results against present-day climate obtained from observations and assimilation data sets shows that the model describes the climatological state of the atmosphere for the late 1990s with reasonable accuracy. The model has a significant temperature bias only in the upper stratosphere and near the tropopause in the tropics and high latitudes. The latter is the result of the rather low vertical resolution of the model near the tropopause. The former can be attributed to a crude representation of the radiation heating in the middle atmosphere. A comparison of the simulated and observed link between the tropical stratospheric structure and the strength of the polar vortex shows that in general, both observations and simulations reveal a higher temperature and ozone mixing ratio in the lower tropical stratosphere for the case with stronger Polar night jet (PNJ) as predicted by theoretical studies