LEGAL KNOWLEDGE AND AGILITY IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

To address agility in public administration, we have developed a knowledge acquisition infrastructure for legal knowledge, based on an implementation‐oriented conceptualization of the legal system. Our objective is to reframe legal knowledge as a knowledge source in a design‐oriented task ontology, building on insights from the CommonKADS methodology for intelligent system design. The main result is to make case law and legal expert knowledge of critical incidents in organizations, two diagnostic knowledge sources underutilized in modern management and engineering, more accessible as a resource for design of agile organizational structures and intelligent systems. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Combine harvesting

Mix the wisdom of internal and external networks and you might just come up with brilliant and unexpected solutions to apparently intractable problems. Julian Birkinshaw and Stuart Crainer report on how Roche Diagnostics is exploring an experimental approach to harvesting bright ideas.     

The innovation value chain

The challenges of coming up with fresh ideas and realizing profits from them are different for every company. One firm may excel at finding good ideas but may have weak systems for bringing them to market. Another organization may have a terrific process for funding and rolling out new products and services but a shortage of concepts to develop. In this article, Hansen and Birkinshaw caution executives against using the latest and greatest innovation approaches and tools without understanding the unique deficiencies in their companies' innovation systems. They offer a framework for evaluating innovation performance: the innovation value chain. It comprises the three main phases of innovation (idea generation, conversion, and diffusion) as well as the critical activities performed during those phases (looking for ideas inside your unit; looking for them in other units; looking for them externally; selecting ideas; funding them; and promoting and spreading ideas companywide). Using this framework, managers get an end-to-end view of their innovation efforts. They can pinpoint their weakest links and tailor innovation best practices appropriately to strengthen those links. Companies typically succumb to one of three broad "weakest-link" scenarios. They are idea poor, conversion poor, or diffusion poor. The article looks at the ways smart companies - including Intuit, P&G, Sara Lee, Shell, and Siemens- modify the best innovation practices and apply them to address those organizations' individual needs and flaws. The authors warn that adopting the chain-based view of innovation requires new measures of what can be delivered by each link in the chain. The approach also entails new roles for employees "external scouts" and "internal evangelists," for example. Indeed, in their search for new hires, companies should seek out those candidates who can help address particular weaknesses in the innovation value chain.     

Riskiness of Real Estate Development: A Perspective from Urban Economics and Option Value Theory

In this article, we define a new construct for urban economic and investment analysis, which revisits the conventional wisdom that investment in real estate development is riskier than investment in stabilized property assets. This new construct, referred as a “development asset value index” (DAVI), is a value index for newly developed properties (only) in a given geographical property market. It tracks longitudinal changes in the highest and best use (HBU) value of locations, and it reveals developer and landowner behavior taking advantage of the optionality inherent in land ownership. In particular, the DAVI reflects developers' use of flexibility in the exercise of the call option to (re)develop the property to any legal use and density. We empirically estimate a DAVI for commercial property (i.e., central locations) and compare it with a corresponding traditional transaction‐price‐based property asset price index (PAPI) corrected for depreciation. We believe that the difference primarily reflects the realized value of flexibility in land development. We find that the DAVIs display greater value growth and are smoother over time and less cyclical than their corresponding PAPIs for the same locations. This suggests that developers successfully use flexibility, and that development may be riskier than stabilized property investment due primarily only to leverage effects (construction costs). Practical implications are also discussed.     

An exploratory study of organizational politics in Kuwait

Because politics is a way of life in organizations, organizational politics has been studied by several scholars over the past 40 years. Few studies, though, have examined organizational politics outside of the United States and Europe. This study is a further step toward closing that gap. In particular, we (1) examined the applicability of the Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale (POPS) instrument in Kuwait, (2) examined the perceived existence of organizational politics in a public organization in Kuwait, and (3) sought to determine if perceptions of organizational politics seemed to be influenced by the same variables in Kuwait as in Western societies. The study found that the perception of organizational politics is relatively strong and that the POPS instrument was applicable in the Kuwaiti culture and could lead to an expanded understanding of organizational politics. The gender of the respondents, their tenure, and their current positions had some influence on perceptions of organizational politics. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

What does it mean to find the face of the franchise? Physical attractiveness and the evaluation of athletic performance

We show that attractiveness, as measured by facial symmetry, leads to greater rewards in professional sports. National Football League quarterbacks who are more attractive are paid greater salaries and this premium persists after controlling for player performance.     

Industry dynamics: Foundations for models with an infinite number of firms

This paper explores the connection between three important threads of economic research offering different approaches to studying the dynamics of an industry with heterogeneous firms. Finite models of the form pioneered by Ericson and Pakes (1995) capture the dynamics of a finite number of heterogeneous firms as they compete in an industry, and are typically analyzed using the concept of Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE). Infinite models of the form pioneered by Hopenhayn (1992), on the other hand, consider an infinite number of infinitesimal firms, and are typically analyzed using the concept of stationary equilibrium (SE). A third approach uses oblivious equilibrium (OE), which maintains the simplifying benefits of an infinite model but within the more realistic setting of a finite model. The paper relates these three approaches. The main result of the paper provides conditions under which SE of infinite models approximate MPE of finite models arbitrarily well in asymptotically large markets. Our conditions require that the distribution of firm states in SE obeys a certain “light-tail” condition. In a second set of results, we show that the set of OE of a finite model approaches the set of SE of the infinite model in large markets under a similar light-tail condition.     

Participation index: a measure to identify rural transport disadvantage?

This paper develops a composite participation index (PI) to identify patterns of transport disadvantage in space and time. It is operationalised using 157 weekly activity-travel diaries data collected from three case study areas in rural Northern Ireland. A review of activity space and travel behaviour research found that six dimensional indicators of activity spaces were typically used including the number of unique locations visited, distance travelled, area of activity spaces, frequency of activity participation, types of activity participated in, and duration of participation in order to identify transport disadvantage. A combined measure using six individual indices were developed based on the six dimensional indicators of activity spaces, by taking into account the relativity of the measures for weekdays, weekends, and for a week. Factor analyses were conducted to derive weights of these indices to form the PI measure. Multivariate analysis using general linear models of the different indicators/indices identified new patterns of transport disadvantage. The research found that: indicator based measures and index based measures are complement each other; interactions between different factors generated new patterns of transport disadvantage; and that these patterns vary in space and time. The analysis also indicates that the transport needs of different disadvantaged groups are varied.