Analysing clusters of skills in R&D — core competencies, metaphors, visualization, and the role of IT

Though it is now universally accepted that companies should try to align their R&D activities with their business objectives, achieving this alignment is notoriously difficult in practice. The rise of the core competence framework has been very helpful in creating, and legitimizing, a language in which issues of technical competence and R&D strengths can be followed through to their consequences for competitive advantage. Companies are starting to express their R&D priorities explicitly in terms of core competencies.
Without effective IT support, core competence concepts are often applied arbitrarily. This has led to accusations that core competence theory can become yet another battlefield upon which companies play out their internal political battles. Computer-based techniques can help counteract this danger by enabling large volumes of relatively objective data to be collected, then making it possible to analyse and draw out patterns from this data, and finally enabling the data to be represented effectively.
It is in this last area of data representation that information technology is now of particular benefit. In order to make the core competence approach sufficiently robust as a basis for decision making, it is necessary to collect and process large volumes of data. However, this data is normally difficult to represent in such a way that managers can assimilate it. In our recent experience, we have come to realize the particular importance of effective representations and metaphors, and have started to shift our own emphasis towards these areas in addition to analysis per se .
The paper shows how core competence approaches can support R&D management decision making by exploring the roles of data collection, analysis and representation. Information technology is an integral part of these approaches, and we draw out some generalized lessons for the successful use of IT in decision support.     

Incorporating vintage differences and forecasts into Markov switching models

This paper incorporates vintage differences and forecasts into the Markov switching models described by Hamilton (1994). The vintage differences and forecasts induce parameter breaks close to the end of the sample, too close for standard maximum likelihood techniques to produce precise parameter estimates. A supplementary procedure estimates the statistical properties of the end-of-sample observations that behave differently from the rest, allowing inferred probabilities to reflect the breaks. Empirical results using real-time data show that these techniques improve the ability of a Markov switching model based on GDP and GDI to recognize the start of the 2001 recession.     

Gender Mainstreaming and Corporate Social Responsibility: Reporting Workplace Issues

This paper investigates the potential and actual contribution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to gender equality in a framework of gender mainstreaming (GM). It introduces GM as combining technical systems (monitoring, reporting, evaluating) with political processes (women’s participation in decision-making) and considers the ways in which this is compatible with CSR agendas. It examines the inclusion of gender equality criteria within three related CSR tools: human capital management (HCM) reporting, CSR reporting guidelines, and socially responsible investment (SRI) criteria on employee and diversity issues. Although evidence is found of gender equality information being requested within several CSR related reporting frameworks, these requirements are mostly limited in scope, or remain optional elements. The nature and extent of relevant stakeholder opportunities are investigated to explain this unfulfilled potential.     

Research and Technology Outsourcing

The paper discusses the process of externalization and the contracting out of R&D and technical activity. The focus of the analysis is on the outsourcing of R&D and technical activity undertaken by firms and now outsourced to companies and organizations which supply the Contract Research and Technology (CRT) market. The analysis highlights that not only is it important to understand the factors in the demand for such services but also in changing dynamics of the nature of the research and technical services supplied and the way they are supplied. The paper then investigates the implications of these dynamic trends for the conduct of the R&D function, particularly towards research externalization and outsourcing, via the use of firms and organizations involved in contract research and technology.     

Trading in derivatives when the underlying is scarce

Regulatory restrictions and market frictions can constrain the aggregate quantity of long and short positions in a security. When these constraints bind, we refer to the security as scarce, and its price becomes distorted relative to its value in a frictionless market. We show that an otherwise redundant derivative can reduce the price distortion of the underlying security by relaxing its scarcity. We also show that it is especially important to analyze the underlying and derivative markets jointly when evaluating the impact of regulation, such as short-sales bans and position limits in derivatives, that restricts trade.     

Comovement in GDP trends and cycles among trading partners

It has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade more intensively with one another. However, nations face shocks to both the cyclical and trend components of their GDP series. Contrary to the result for cyclical fluctuations, we find comovement of shocks to the trend component of real GDP is weaker among countries that trade more intensively with one another. We simulate changes in ten-year output growth correlations corresponding to the estimated effects of trade and show that the impact of trade on trend comovement is quantitatively more important than its effect on cyclical comovement.     

Religion and politics: understanding the effects of conservative origins on contemporary patterns of sub-national relative human development

Understanding the effects of historical circumstance on contemporary development patterns is important in understanding the overall trajectories of societies. Using a spatially centered technique and various sources of historical and contemporary data, this link is tested by examining variations in historical levels of conservative values in the American South on contemporary patterns of development. This context provides an interesting case study involving a time and region marked by rapid social change. Results show that the spatial distribution of development levels is non-random and that historical levels of highly conservative values are associated with lower levels of contemporary development.     

Control rights, pyramids, and the measurement of ownership concentration

The recent corporate governance literature has emphasised the distinction between control and cash-flow rights but has disregarded measurement issues. Control rights may be measured by immediate shareholder votes, the voting rights as traced through ownership chains, or voting power indices that may or may not trace ownership through chains. We compare the ability of various measures to identify the effects of ownership concentration on share valuation using a German panel data set. The widely used weakest-link principle does not perform well in this comparison. Furthermore, measures that trace control through ownership chains do not outperform those that rely on immediate ownership, thus questioning the role of pyramids in the separation of control and cash-flow rights. The paper emphasises that there is a distinction between these two aspects of ownership even without pyramids or preferred stock, identification of which requires measures that, like the Shapley–Shubik index, do not simply equate control rights with voting rights.