The emergence of sustainable industries: building on natural capital

This paper focuses on the emergence and growth of sustainable industries, specifically analyzing the rise of the wind energy industry in California. Based on a favorable institutional environment and the presence of abundant natural capital, the wind energy industry took root and flourished in California during the last two decades. This paper analyzes this phenomenon by exploring the determinants of where and when wind energy projects would be established. Findings suggest that in locations where natural, social, and economic influences converged, greater wind energy activity followed. The paper advances a simple framework that uses natural capital, site specificity, and institutional environments to predict which sustainable industries will enjoy growth in coming decades. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How social media applications affect B2B communication and improve business performance in SMEs

Social Media Apps (SMA) are widely used to facilitate individual communications. In company situations, they are utilized as a channel to communicate with their customers. However, studies examining how SMA have been utilized in the Business-to-Business (Social Media Benchmarking Report, 2014) context are lacking. Using a model based on Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), we present one of the first empirical studies investigating the relationship between the capabilities of SMA (transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability) and B2B communication and business performance. Five case studies based on face-to-face interviews with the senior managers/owners of SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) were conducted. The data were analyzed and the findings confirmed the SMA media capabilities as explained by MST. The findings also revealed a missing SMA capability, that of information security and control, which has been added to the proposed model and which may be an important addition to MST. This study calls for more research to verify this finding.     

An integrated marketing capability benchmarking approach to dealer performance through parametric and nonparametric analyses

The role of marketing capabilities as a source of sustainable competitive advantage has been discussed previously in the marketing strategy field. Benchmarking, a well-known learning mechanism, is suggested as a tool to identify and improve the marketing capabilities of a firm. Despite its popularity as a theoretical concept, there is not much empirical evidence to support the view of benchmarking marketing capabilities as a route to guide managers' efforts in this direction. This paper contributes to the three perspectives in the literature that support the view that benchmarking marketing capabilities can offer a basis for sustainable competitive advantage of the firm through both a conceptual and integrated benchmarking model. They are empirically analyzed using stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis methods based on four-year data set of forty-five dealers of a leading business-to-business supplier. The results indicate the importance of competent salespeople and building a long-term relationship in enhancing dealer performance. In addition, they reinforce a recipe of how marketing capabilities can be benchmarked to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Discussions and implications for managers are also presented.     

Optimal regulation with exemptions

Despite decades of research on mechanism design and on many practical aspects of cost-benefit analysis, one of the most basic and ubiquitous features of regulation as actually implemented throughout the world has received little theoretical attention: exemptions for small firms. These firms, although individually small, may generate a disproportionate share of harm due to their being exempt and because exemption induces additional harmful activity to be channeled their way. This article analyzes optimal regulation with exemptions where firms have different productivities that are unobservable to the regulator, regulated and unregulated output each cause harm although at different levels, and the regulatory regime affects entry as well as the output choices of regulated and unregulated firms. In many settings, optimal schemes involve subtle effects and have counterintuitive features: for example, higher regulatory costs need not favor higher exemptions, and the incentives of firms to drop output to become exempt can be too weak as well as too strong. A final section examines the optimal use of output taxation alongside regulation, which illustrates the contrast with the mechanism design approach that analyzes the optimal use of instruments of a type that are not in widespread use.     

Digital servitization: Crossing the perspectives of digitization and servitization

For over three decades now, several product companies around the world have been undertaking servitization paths. They have been devoting growing and substantial efforts to expand their service business. Expanding the service business in addition to their traditional core product business secures long-term growth and strengthens competitive advantages in business-to-business marketplaces. Recently, service business expansion has taken up many of the new digital technologies offered through the digital transformation. Thus, the servitization literature has progressed toward a dialogue on digital servitization . Against this background, the present article introduces the reader to this special issue. It first recalls key aspects of the emerging digital servitization discussion, and then depicts, through illustrative case studies, the growth paths utilized by industrial product companies when they take advantage of the digital servitization process. After discussing how the articles included in this special issue advance the literature, the article develops a number of directions for future research on digital servitization.     

An Empirical Comparison of Sales Forecasting Models

There has been a veritable industry of forecasting models in recent decades, spurred partly by planners' search for certainty and partly by the data crunching capabilities of computers. In this article, Sanjay-kumar Rao tests two families of models on some common data sets to see how they compare. He examines how well the models fit the data and how reliable they are as forecasting tools.     

产业集群演化与生命周期研究述评

在过去的几十年间,产业集群问题引起各国学者的广泛关注,他们从各自的范式出发,对产业集群的演化问题进行了研究。随着产业集群在全球范围内的发展与演化,各国学者开始对产业集群演化的周期性问题进行研究,文章对国外、国内产业集群生命周期的研究进行梳理和评价,并提出了产业集群生命周期有待深入研究的问题。     

Changing Strategies and Tactics for New Product Development

There has been a considerable amount of effort and writing devoted to improving the new product development process during the last two decades. Although there have been some surprises in this literature and in reports from the field on how to manage this complex business process, we now have a good view of the state-of-the-art practices that work and do not work to accelerate commercial success of new ventures. We know much less about how firms change their strategies for new product development.
In this article, we report on a study to investigate how companies change the way they originate and develop new products in manufacturing. We made no prior assumptions about what best practices might be for changing the direction of the new product development process, but we reasonably were sure there would be trends in how companies were attempting to create this strategic change. Even though one size does not fit all, there were significant trends in our findings.
We studied eight manufacturing firms using in-depth, open-ended interviews and were surprised to find that most of these companies are beginning to develop products that are new to the firm, industry, and the world (nearly half, or 10 of 21 new product projects), where they had not been eager for radical change in the past. These newer products likely are to be driven by a combination of market and technology forces, with general requirements being directed by internal forces: middle and top management. Results also indicate significantly that being able to marshal resources and capabilities is easier if change is less demanding and less radical, but when middle managers are driving the conversion of general requirements into specifications, resource issues have yet to be resolved. Implications of these findings are discussed for companies aspiring to change the entire process of new product development in their firms based on these significant results.     

A genetic algorithm based heuristic for two machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problems with class setup times that minimizes maximum lateness

Machine scheduling problem has been extensively studied by researchers for many decades in view of its numerous applications on solving practical problems. Due to the complexity of this class of scheduling problems, various approximation solution approaches have been presented in the literature. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm (GA) based heuristic approach to solve the problem of two machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problems that the setup time on the machines is class dependent, and the objective is to minimize the maximum lateness of the jobs processed. This class of machine scheduling problems has many practical applications in manufacturing industry, such as metal refinery operations, food processing industry and chemical products production processes, in which no interruption between subsequent processes is allowed and the products can be grouped into families. Extensive computation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Results show the proposed methodology is suitable to be adopted for the development of an efficient scheduling plan for this class of problems in real life application.     

Testing theories of regulatory behavior

Many decisions by regulators have been analyzed over the last two decades in an effort to test regulatory behavioral theories. As a result, the interest group theory of behavior has gained a considerable following and the public interest theory has been largely dismissed. However, many of these tests are inadequate; with the regulatory decisions analyzed, both the interest group and public interest theories lead to the same predictions. To properly distinguish between these theories, a set of necessary conditions that a regulatory decision must satisfy is developed. Based on these conditions and the extant empirical literature, public interest concerns of regulators cannot be dismissed, and a more general theory of regulatory behavior is suggested.     

Pay and Job Rank among Academic Economists in the UK: Is Gender Relevant?

This article presents and explores a rich new data source to analyse the determinants of pay and job rank among academic economists in the UK. Characteristics associated with individual productivity and workplace features are found to be important determinants of the relative wage and promotion structure in this sector. However, there is also a substantial unexplained gender pay gap. Men are considerably more likely to work in higher paid job ranks where there are also substantial within-rank gender pay gaps. We show that the nature of the gender pay gap has changed over the last two decades; but its size has not, suggesting a role for suitable policy intervention.     

Spectrum auctions in a thin market: The Korean case

In 2010, the Korean government adopted spectrum auctions and introduced a market mechanism into spectrum management. However, the government has often been confronted with conflicts between diverse policy goals of spectrum auctions. A thin spectrum market, where only three incumbent MNOs bid for spectrum, has led to concerns that the government may fail to maximize revenues.Based on the past experiences in Korea, this paper examines the Korean government's choice of auction rules in the face of conflicting policy goals. This paper also recommends that the government implement the following regulatory reforms and consider the auction related measures to deepen its spectrum market or increase the number of bidders: (i) relaxation of foreign ownership restrictions, (ii) introduction of regional or site-specific spectrum licenses, and (iii) modification of auction formats. Spectrum markets tend to be thin in many countries, and the Korean experience may offer implications for those countries when they implement spectrum auctions.     

‘Howzat’—how do artefacts without matter,matter? The case of decision review systems in professional cricket

It has been argued that the social and material worlds are increasingly entangled as they become mediated by and experienced through virtual representations of live events. Virtual decision review systems in professional sport provide an albeit unusual case study example of such developments where virtual (re‐)representations of events are increasingly used in match play to inform adjudicator decisions concerning ‘what really happened’. This has prompted an ongoing debate in many sports over both the accuracy and appropriateness of these technologies for representing events which are often fast moving and difficult to judge with the human eye. We explore these issues using a sociomaterial practice lens and indicate the broader relevance of the case for basing judgements and decisions on virtual views of reality.     

Work frustration in engineering departments

A large number of engineers work in organizations with specialized jobs of a routine nature. In many ways they can be compared with workers on a production line; it is the same work that is done over and over again. Empirical studies demonstrate that this leads to frustration. There is no standard solution available, but there are a number of approaches that can lead to greater satisfaction if one is willing to experiment with them. A more organic, less structured management system and more use of problem oriented project groups may bring benefits. Job enrichment, where engineers are given more responsibility by transfer of tasks previously done by managers and seniors, and special training where engineers are given an opportunity to systematically develop their capabilities should be considered. Further, organizational development must be mentioned where an external change agent together with the people involved develops a solution aiming at the satisfaction of the needs of both the individual and the organization. Finally come flexible working hours which have an indirect effect on the job situation by allowing for a richer life off the job.     

Deregulation and environmental differentiation in the electric utility industry

This paper analyzes how economic deregulation impacts firm strategies and environmental quality in the electric utility industry. We find evidence that the deregulation introduced to this historically staid industry has stimulated environmental differentiation. Differentiation is most likely to appear where its point of uniqueness is valued by customers, and we confirm this relationship in our sample. Specifically, utilities that served customers who exhibited higher levels of environmental sensitivity generated more ‘green’ power. The tendency for firms to differentiate in this way is lessened if they are relatively more dependent on coal‐fired generation or relatively more efficient. Thus, there is evidence that firms sort themselves into either differentiation or low‐cost strategies as the competitive realities of a deregulated world unfold. Deregulation and the ensuing environmental differentiation illustrate how utilities exploited formerly unmet customer demand for green power. The result has been greater levels of renewable generation and, hence, a cleaner environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于标杆瞄准的石油企业安全文化建设方法研究

运用标杆瞄准的方法对石油企业安全文化建设进行全面的评价、分析,通过与标杆企业安全文化建设的对标及分析,找出石油企业安全文化建设与优秀企业安全文化建设之间的差距及其本身存在的问题和不足,从而制定改进计划并加以实施,由于标杆瞄准的持续改进性,所以能达到长期的、全面的改善石油企业安全文化建设的目的。     

From R&D to strategic knowledge management: transitions and challenges for national laboratories

The past two decades have witnessed unprecedented changes to national laboratories as they have adjusted to globalized and technology based competition. These transitions are reviewed in the context of how Canada's National Research Council has progressed from an internally oriented R&D organization into a more externally focused innovation organization, now coping with the challenges of strategic knowledge management. The paper traces the steps and paradigms involved in this transition and offers some commentary on the extent of the corporate cultural learning that has been required to effect these changes.     

From Towns to Hotels: Changes in Mining Accommodation Regimes and Their Effects on Labour Union Strategies

A radical shift in the spatial organization of the global mining industry has occurred over the last three decades. I argue that the shift from the traditional mining town, where workers lived close to the mine, to the new model of long distance commuting, where workers are transported in from distant cities for their shifts, transforms labour union strategies. Drawing on an in‐depth case study from Peru, I show that long distance commuting reduces workers’ capacity to mobilize locally by affecting the dynamics in three social spaces: the mining camp, the home and the union hall. Moreover, and in contrast to prior research, I detail how mining unions have developed new compensatory strategies to maintain their bargaining power.     

重构我国复式预算体系

复式预算概念引入我国已有几十年的历史,试编复式预算也已有十多年,但从实践来看,我国现行复式预算依然存在许多问题。因此,有必要重新审视我国复式预算制度,构建与市场经济条件下公共财政相适应的复式预算体系。     

Transmitters and receivers' investment to avoid interference: Is there an optimal regime?

The management of interference has been, and still is, the main concern in spectrum policy. Historically, interference has been dealt with by heavy regulation under an administrative control regime. Over the last decades, a new approach has been put forward based on users' property rights, better able to cope with a rapidly changing technological environment. The issue of dealing with interference across bands, however, remains crucial: What obligations should be put on users so as to keep interference at a socially acceptable level? Also, given that some unwanted emissions are bound to occur, how can private parties be provided with the right incentives to invest in high-quality reception technology? This paper assesses how well different regulatory regimes can lead to efficient outcomes. It develops an economic model of spectrum interference and identifies the efficient solution. A regime where spectrum users have the power to enjoin intruding emissions beyond a predefined level (property rights protection) is compared with a regime where users are forced to bear with intruding emissions, but are entitled to economic compensation for the harm suffered (liability rules protection). The analysis suggests that different regimes may perform differently under different circumstances depending on the cause of interference and, critically, on whether the services are organised as an open- or a close-architecture system. This suggests that regulators should pay more attention to the specific features of the different bands, and that the appropriate spectrum management regime should be designed to recognise these differences.