The scorpion collections (Arachnida, Scorpiones) held in the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali of Turin (Italy)

Data and considerations about the history and contents of the scorpion collection housed in the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali of Turin (MRSN) are reported. Information on type material and important historical specimens are provided, as well as biographical notes about the major zoologists of the museum

Evolution Cum Agency: Toward a Model of Strategic Foresight

This study examines the origin of the strategic innovation that changed the face of financial services—Charles Merrill’s financial supermarket business model—through three well-known and largely juxtaposed conceptual models of strategic foresight. Our study, whose purpose, business historical focus, and structure mirrors Graham Allison’s famous “Conceptual Models of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” allows us to make three contributions. First, it sharpens our understanding of the models we used in the study. Second, it provides the foundations of an integrated view and model of strategic foresight that suggests disciplined strategic foresight is possible, understandable, and replicable within some precise boundaries. Finally, it suggests directions for future behavioral strategy work

Strategy Making in Novel and Complex Worlds: The Power of Analogy

We examine how firms discover effective competitive positions in worlds that are both novel and complex. In such settings, neither rational deduction nor local search is likely to lead a firm to a successful array of choices. Analogical reasoning, however, may be helpful, allowing managers to transfer useful wisdom from similar settings they have experienced in the past. From a long list of observable industry characteristics, analogizing managers choose a subset they believe distinguishes similar industries from different ones. Faced with a novel industry, they seek a familiar industry which matches the novel one along that subset of characteristics. They transfer from the matching industry high-level policies that guide search in the novel industry. We embody this conceptualization of analogy in an agent-based simulation model. The model allows us to examine the impact of managerial and structural characteristics on the effectiveness of analogical reasoning. With respect to managerial characteristics, we find, not surprisingly, that analogical reasoning is especially powerful when managers pay attention to characteristics that truly distinguish similar industries from different ones. More surprisingly, we find that the marginal returns to depth of experience diminish rapidly while greater breadth of experience steadily improves performance. Both depth and breadth of experience are useful only when one accurately understands what distinguishes similar industries from different ones. We also discover that following an analogy in too orthodox a manner—strictly constraining search efforts to what the analogy suggests—can be dysfunctional. With regard to structural characteristics, we find that a well-informed analogy is particularly powerful when interactions among decisions cross policy boundaries so that the underlying decision problem is not easily decomposed. Overall, the results shed light on a form of managerial reasoning that we believe is prevalent among practicing strategists yet is largely absent from scholarly analysis of strategy

An Examination of the Antecedents and Implications of Patent Scope

This paper focuses on the concept of patent scope, and contributes to existing research in three ways. First, it offers a re-examination of the construct and identifies two dimensions of patent scope, (1) the number of variations of the core inventive idea identified in the patent, reflected in the number of claims in the patent (e.g. Merges and Nelson, 1994); and (2) the positioning of those variations in the inventive space, which is reflected in the number of technological classes in which patent examiners classify those claims. Second, it investigates the implications of patent scope for the firm’s subsequent inventive performance, and finds that, when the scope of a patents spans across a higher number of technological classes, the extent to which the inventing firm itself succeeds in building on the knowledge underlying its own patent is lower. Third, it investigates the antecedents of scope, and suggests that prior investment in scientific knowledge and in related inventive experience are two factors that affect the scope of the patents that firms develop. The theoretical predictions elaborated in this paper are supported by an empirical examination of a longitudinal sample of firms in the photonics industry

Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers Revisited

In this paper we reflect on the contribution of our 1989 article ‘Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers’. We begin by recalling our backgrounds and motivations as collaborators on the project, and then discuss recent developments in the Scottish Borders knitwear industry. Noting that the industry has suffered continual decline in the twenty years since we published our paper, we suggest that the case still raises issues that remain open questions in the field despite the significant efforts by management researchers in recent years to understand the sources of industrial decline and revitalization. We outline what we feel are gaps in the existing literature and then end with the suggestion that these gaps are likely to be addressed only through multidisciplinary research that integrates resource, power, and cognitive theories of industrial dynamics

Essential Micro-foundations for Contemporary Business Operations: Top Management Tangible Competencies, Relationship-based Business Networks and Environmental Sustainability

Although various studies have emphasized linkages between firm competencies, networks and sustainability at organizational level, the links between top management tangible competencies (e.g., contemporary relevant quantitative-focused education such as big data analytics and data-driven applications linked with the internet of things, relevant experience and analytical business applications), relationship-based business networks (RBNs) and environmental sustainability have not been well established at micro-level, and there is a literature gap in terms of investigating these relationships. This study examines these links based on the unique data collected from 175 top management representatives (chief executive officers and managing directors) working in food import and export firms headquartered in the UK and New Zealand. Our results from structural equation modelling indicate that top management tangible competencies (TMTCs) are the key determinants for building RBNs, mediating the correlation between TMTCs and environmental sustainability. Directly, the competencies also play a vital role towards environmental practices. The findings further depict that relationship-oriented firms perform better compared to those which focus less on such networks. Consequently, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the micro-foundations of environmental sustainability based on TMTCs rooted in the resource-based view and RBNs entrenched in the social network theory. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings, and we provide suggestions for future research

Organizational structure as a determinant of performance: Evidence from mutual funds

This article develops and tests a model of how organizational structure influences organizational performance. Organizational structure, conceptualized as the decision‐making structure among a group of individuals, is shown to affect the number of initiatives pursued by organizations and the omission and commission errors (Type I and II errors, respectively) made by organizations. The empirical setting is more than 150,000 stock‐picking decisions made by 609 mutual funds. Mutual funds offer an ideal and rare setting to test the theory, since there are detailed records on the projects they face, the decisions they make, and the outcomes of these decisions. The study's independent variable, organizational structure, is coded based on fund management descriptions made by Morningstar, and estimates of the omission and commission errors are computed by a novel technique that uses bootstrapping to create measures that are comparable across funds. The findings suggest that organizational structure has relevant and predictable effects on a wide range of organizations. In particular, the article shows empirically that increasing the consensus threshold required by a committee in charge of selecting projects leads to more omission errors, fewer commission errors, and fewer approved projects. Applications include designing organizations that achieve a given mix of exploration and exploitation, as well as predicting the consequences of centralization and decentralization. This work constitutes the first large‐sample empirical test of the model by Sah and Stiglitz ( 1986 ). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91096/1/1969_ftp.pd

Intergroup conflict management strategies from a nobel peace laureate: The case of Jose Ramos-Horta

We report on the case of Dr. José Ramos-Horta (JRH), a 1996 Nobel Peace Laureate, former President of East Timor, and current envoy of the United Nations to Guinea-Bissau. JRH agreed to an interview detailing the peace building strategies he has used to manage conflicts. The transcript of his Nobel Laureate acceptance speech was also analysed to strengthen the overall narrative. Our findings suggest two higher-order themes: (1) psycho-social skills, and (2) social networking. Specifically, JRH uses active listening, mindful breaks, and awareness of media trends to create personal and strategic networking contacts, which are critical elements in managing conflict