Entrepreneurial aesthetics

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper examines the aesthetic dimension of innovative entrepreneurship. It treats markets as aesthetic systems that involve the creation, interpretation and...     

Ecological Gentrification in Response to Apocalyptic Narratives of Climate Change: The Production of an Immuno-political Fantasy

Anxieties over the potential impacts of climate change, often framed in apocalyptic language, are having a profound, but little studied effect on the contemporary Western urbanscape. This article examines the ways in which current theorizations of ‘ecological gentrification’ express only half the process, describing how green space is used for social control, but not how ecology is used as a justification regime for such projects. As urbanites seek out housing and living practices that have a lower environmental impact, urban planners have responded by providing large-scale regeneration of the urbanscape. With the demand for this housing increasing, questions of inequality, displacement and dispossession arise. I ask whether apocalyptic anxiety is being enrolled in the justification regimes of these projects to make them hard to resist at the planning and implementation stages. The article shows that, in capitalizing on collective anxiety surrounding an apocalyptic future, these projects depoliticize subjects by using the empty signifier, ‘Sustainability’, leading them into an immuno-political relationship to the urbanscape. This leaves subjects feeling protected from both responsibility for, and the impacts of, climate change. Ultimately, this has the consequence of gentrification coupled with potentially worsening consumptive practices, rebound effects and the depoliticization of the environmentally conscious urbanite.     

Property rights as a complex adaptive system: how entrepreneurship transforms intellectual property structures

This article aims to provide some elements of an evolutionary theory of property rights. It applies a systems-based capital-theoretic perspective to explain the formation and transformation of property rights structures. The approach emphasizes how entrepreneurs create capital combinations by connecting capital goods—defined widely to include property rights, such as patents—in their production plans. Their actions change complementarity relations between property rights as used in production. We treat the property rights structure as a complex adaptive system that exhibits increasing structural complexity as it evolves. Entrepreneurs discover gaps in the property rights system. As they organize production to exploit profit opportunities, entrepreneurs regroup existing intellectual property rights (IPR) into new modules, such as patent pools, that encapsulate more complex combinations of basic building blocks of intellectual property. A patent pool constitutes an interpolation of a new meso level within the macro IPR structure. We apply our framework to the first of the patent pools for digital video compression technology used in digital television and DVDs.     

Measuring the Impact of Socio-Economic Factors on School Efficiency in Australia

This paper examines the productive efficiency of government schools in New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. The study uses a technical inefficiency effects model applied to a unique three-year panel dataset containing 1235 primary and 371 secondary schools in NSW. A stochastic frontier production function and an inefficiency effects function that control for school socioeconomic and environmental factors are estimated. The dataset contains information on various school inputs, school expenditures by major functional area, parental socioeconomic characteristics, student characteristics, and standardized test scores. We examine the degree to which school and non-school educational inputs influence student achievement scores and find that, overall, primary schools are 88.6% and secondary schools 96.4% efficient. The index describing community socio-educational advantage has the most significant influence on students’ achievement scores.     

Beyond invention: the additive impact of incubation capabilities to firm value

Incubation is a process whereby the firm nurtures breakthrough discoveries and inventions to test their potential as new business platforms. The recent emergence of organizational roles associated with innovation incubation shows that internal incubation is becoming recognized as an important organizational capability. This development also suggests that firms that invest in discovery for competitive advantage recognize a need to leverage that investment more fully. While case studies describe incubation activities and note their importance, empirical research linking this capability to firm performance is limited. The current study represents an initial attempt at exploring the relationship empirically. Our main finding is that financial markets have difficulty valuing a firm's exploratory discovery investments and that the presence of an incubation capability positively moderates the impact of such investments on firm market valuation. The implication of this result is that investments in certain types of R&D may be suboptimized if there is not a parallel investment in a capability to incubate the opportunities that arise from potentially breakthrough inventions.     

E–Commerce and the Australian Economy

This paper considers the likely impact of e–commerce and the Internet on the Australian economy. It surveys literature on the extent and development of e–commerce in Australia and its impact on the shape of the Australian economy. Evidence for the 'renewal' of the Australian economy is presented and examined, especially the question of whether Australia has enjoyed increases in productivity as a result of the production and/or use of new information and communications technology. Australia is seen as broadly well placed to benefit from the Internet and e–commerce. Traditionally isolated from the world's main economic centres and reliant on commodities in international trade, the advent of the Internet is ideal for a country in transition to a service–orientated, knowledge–based economy. As the composition of Australia's exports becomes more service–orientated and knowledge–intensive, traditional trading links with Europe and North America may strengthen relative to those with Asia.     

The influence of redemption time frame on responses to incentives

In the present research, Construal Level Theory is used to predict that consumers will mentally characterize incentive offers differently as a function of their redemption time frames. Data from two experiments indicate that concrete features, such as the face value of an offer or its mode of presentation (as a dollar figure or as a percentage discount), are prominent for incentives with short time frames but not for incentives with long ones. In the latter case, abstract features, such as the incentive’s goal congruity or fit with personal values, are more likely to influence responses.