Self-regulation and governmental oversight: a theoretical and experimental study

Journal of Regulatory Economics - A self-regulatory organization (SRO) is a non-governmental organization owned and operated by its members, with the power to create and enforce industry...     

Integrated Market-Immersion Approach To Teaching New Product Development In Technologically-Oriented Teams

This article presents a market immersion methodology for teaching NPD in technologically-oriented teams. This methodology was developed during the early 1990s at the Lally School of Management and Technology of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since then, it has been successfully utilized to train in excess of one hundred MBA-level student teams. The NPD course is taught by a 5-member cross-functional team of faculty with backgrounds in marketing, manufacturing operations, and accounting. The course is modeled on Cooper's stage gate process, and the course is designed to provide a combination of classroom and apprenticeship experiences. The 6-credit, year-long course requires students to work in self-directed teams of approximately 5 to 6 members. Each student team chooses its own industry or technology domain in which to concentrate its efforts, and students undertake intensive market and field research in order to assess any existing market opportunities. Once a specific target market and market need have been identified, students are then required to design a product and an organization to meet that need. In specific, students must produce a detailed marketing, manufacturing, operations, advertising, distribution, and financial plan that can bring their product to market. During the process, students create multiple potential product designs, build mock-ups of their products, and field test the mock-ups. At every phase of the course, the teams are continuously immersed in real customer markets. As a result, teams must struggle to incorporate new market information and learning into their project in a consistent and holistic manner. The following article presents the curriculum content and tools, lessons learned, and student reactions to this original pedagogical approach to teaching NPD. Due to the length of the course, particular attention is paid to the teaming issues that naturally arise when teams work together on long-run projects. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

The Gall in Mother's Milk

How the 1981 WHO code on infant formula marketing came about: the roles played by Nestlé, the other manufacturers, and activist groups.     

Analyzing supply chain robustness for OEMs from a life cycle perspective using life cycle simulation

Long-term relationships between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and stakeholders in their supply chain and end-of-life process can be designed, while considering uncertainty in future environmental legislation changes. This study proposes a method to analyze the capability of OEMs to reconfigure their supply chain and end-of-life operations to achieve performance targets, which are defined in terms of environmental impacts and life cycle costs. Using life cycle simulation (LCS), the physical deterioration and the functional obsolescence of individual products are considered as stochastic elements in the analysis. The analyzed reconfiguration capability provides the OEM with robustness against uncertainty from a life cycle perspective.     

Transdisciplinary Study of Sustainable Enterprise

Our research explores more holistic ways of understanding and creating sustainable enterprises. Enterprises and business school scholars are two primary actors in this research endeavor. Enterprises are moving towards sustainability but with a partial and selective understanding of global sustainability. Business school scholars generally study sustainability in their respective functional areas, such as management, accounting, finance and marketing, with some notable exceptions. We suggest that transdisciplinarity offers a unique real‐world problem‐solving framework that crosses disciplinary boundaries and the academic–practitioner divide. We explore the nature of transdisciplinarity and its application to corporate sustainability. We argue that enterprise sustainability requires trans‐functional, trans‐disciplinary, trans‐stakeholder, trans‐aesthetic and trans‐human knowledge that is possible through transdisciplinarity. We provide an example of transdisciplinary work in art and sustainable enterprise. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

An analysis of the implications of diversity for students' first level accounting performance

The present study investigates the impact of student diversity on performance of first-year undergraduate accounting students. The paper is motivated by (i) increasing diversity amongst the accounting student cohort because of the trend to internationalise education services in industrialised countries; and (ii) inconsistent and inconclusive prior evidence on the determinants of accounting student performance. The major contribution of the present paper is to provide a theoretical framework from the published educational literature that can explain much of the variation in the findings of prior studies. We employ this framework to develop and test several propositions in relation to students’ prior content and metacognitive knowledge. The results indicate students studying on-campus significantly outperform students studying by distance education. On average, international students studying on-campus perform better than domestic students (studying either on- or off-campus), with international students studying off-campus performing worst of all. Prior high school accounting, tertiary entrance score and motivation (reflected by both major of study and tutorial attendance) also influence student performance.     

The contribution of the systems approach to planning

This paper attempts a three-part review and critique of the state of the application of systems theory to planning. The first part is a critique of McLoughlin's thesis expounded in his book Urban and Regional Planning. The critique emphasises the mechanistic bias and passivity assumed in McLoughlin's exposition and suggests directions in which the systems approach may be widened and strengthened to include in particular the political process and to include dynamic profiles of variables in the systems being analysed.The second part considers how far Chadwick in his book A Systems View of Planning has developed the approach, and comes to the conclusion that while the dynamics of the model are more rigorously treated the philosophical and social science assumptions, though hinted at, are not pursued to significantly greater lengths than by McLoughlin.The third part argues that while it is necessary to pursue the assumptions of the model, it is still permissible to continue model-building before the assumptions are finally tested and agreed as accurate, so long as accurate prediction on the basis of hypothetical assumptions is not taken in itself to constitute the proof of the accuracy of the assumptions.     

Millionaire investors: financial advisors,attribution theory and gender differences

To date little attention has been paid to how social cognitive bias can influence how financial advisors interpret and respond to the needs of millionaire investors, and if this varies depending on the gender of the investor. This research investigates whether experienced professional financial advisors who work with millionaire investors make different attributions for the control and knowledge that investors have of their investments, and if they make different investment portfolio recommendations to equivalent male and female investors. Using methodology novel to finance, this vignette-based study that controls for gender finds evidence that professional financial advisors judge millionaire female investors to have less control over their investment portfolios relative to men. Empirical results also show that female advisors judge women to be less knowledgeable about investments than men. Despite such perceptual differences, advisors recommend equally risky portfolios to male and female investors. These results have implications for wealth management institutions and the monitoring of financial advisors for millionaire individuals.     

'The Navigator Network': a New Zealand futurewatch case study

New Zealand's 'Navigator Network' is a national scanning network of scientists and policy analysts providing 'early alert' advice about emerging areas of science and technology. It was established by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) to enhance the government's readiness to respond to the opportunities and risks around new technologies, particularly in biotechnology and nanotechnology. The Navigator Network has been tailored to the New Zealand context, which is characterised by a small, well-connected government sector and a strong focus on agricultural biotechnology and food. The network builds on these features, and is 'people-centric' rather than 'information-centric', using dialogic approaches to generate new knowledge between diverse stakeholder groups. It also focuses on building futures capability in the government and science sectors. Representatives from government agencies are integrated into the process as scanners to facilitate uptake. It also has an adaptive development process via an action learning component.