中国全面迈入超大型集装箱船时代

自2013年起,建造、交付万箱及以上集装船的中国船厂迅速增加;目前中船集团已研发成功14000TEU、16000TEU、18000TEU集装箱船,并开工建造18000TEU集装箱船。     

Reengineering--setting a course for radical change

When you pull up anchor and start reengineering, the seas can look a little rough. Here's what the strategist can expect when retooling some of the typical business processes that make up an average company: manufacturing, sales, information technology, back office/support services, and human resources.     

氮氧自由基阻聚剂的开发与应用

介绍了氮氧自由基的阻聚机理及4-羟基-2,2,6,6-四甲基哌啶氮氧自由基的合成路线,以及它的应用情况.     

Performance expectations of small firms considering radical product innovation

Performance expectations influence business decisions such as investment decisions and demand for supplies, particularly in small firms with limited strategic planning. Despite widespread use of performance expectations by firms and governments when making sales forecasts and economic outlooks, surprisingly little research exists about how small firms form performance expectations. This paper contributes to reduce this knowledge gap by analyzing performance expectations of small firm managers operating in markets with radical product innovations. This paper proposes a model and hypotheses, which explain performance expectations of small firm managers based on firms' current success, radical product innovation, and variables that indicate firms' ability to respond to customer needs for radical product innovation. Data from 200 decision-makers in a real decision-making context support the model. The results show that performance expectations in small firms are only to a limited extent a naïve extrapolation of current success: radical product innovation and small firm's ability to respond to customer needs for radical product innovation influence performance expectations.     

Redshift: A radical change in the fabric of computing

Some companies are boosting their computing power to massive scales. Should your company? That depends on whether your company's needs are blueshifting or redshifting. Greg Papadopoulos, Jonathan Schwartz and Jason Woods explain why these new business terms could define your company's future.     

Mainstream and radical theories of the multinational enterprise: Complementary approaches?

This article reviews contemporary mainstream and radical theories of the multinational enterprise (MNE), finding that each research tradition exhibits serious shortcomings. Theories of the MNE dominant in the international business literature are overly economistic, preventing scholars from considering the significant–even determining–effects of political, military, and cultural factors operating at national, international, and global levels on MNE behavior and performance. Conversely, radical theories of the MNE focus primarily on macroeconomic and noneconomic factors, largely ignoring the firm and industry level dynamics that drive MNE behavior. Despite these differences, we suggest that theoretical space exists in which mainstream and radical insights can be synthesized in order to improve our understanding of the MNE. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Sadness bright as glass: the acceptance of emotionally sensitive radical innovation

Abstract

The existing literature acknowledges the importance of emotions in consumer decision-making and the challenges of radical innovation adoption; however, the literature seldom combines these two streams. The purpose of this study was to analyse potential adopters’ considerations concerning an innovation that is targeted at intense negative emotions. Choosing a case-study strategy enabled us to focus on extremely negative emotions (related to death) and the acceptance of a radical innovation (a memorial stone made of glass). In this study, we applied a longitudinal mixed-methods approach. Data were collected via interviews with consumers (357 respondents), the entrepreneur and her employee. Findings show that an emotionally sensitive radical innovation evokes more intense emotions and emotional ambivalence among consumers. Its acceptance also seems to depend on the age and gender of the customers and requires cultural change. A lengthy adoption process seems to be characteristic of emotionally intensive innovation. This study has implications for managers facing the challenge of creating new markets for a radical innovation that involves extreme emotions on the part of consumers. Theoretically, the study contributes to both innovation adoption and consumer decision-making literature.     

Managing radical innovation: The importance of specialized knowledge in the biotech revolution

This work has implications for managers, investors and entrepreneurs in times of breakthrough innovation at the firm or industry level. The work shows that the marketplace understands the importance of retaining and motivating critical specialized knowledge. By analyzing initial public offerings during the biotechnology discovery wave I find evidence that a dramatic decrease in the ability to include secondary shares (liquidity for early investors and entrepreneurs) in biotechnology IPOs corresponds with the radical increase in the importance of specialized knowledge in that industry, at the time of the rDNA breakthrough discovery and development.     

Different determinants at different times: B2B adoption of a radical innovation

This research aims to empirically determine which factors best explain business to business adoption of a radical, high-tech innovation early in the diffusion process. Early lifecycle data collection provides insights about the differences in determinants of adoption at different times in the product diffusion process. The results indicate that differences do exist between the determinants of early adoption, intent to adopt later, and unawareness of the innovation. The influencers of earliest adopters appear to be innovation-focused: the perceived benefits of the innovation as well as the strength of the producer network positively relate to early adoption; early adopters also tend to perceive the technology in the innovation as less different than previous technology than do those who intend to adopt later. The influence of a champion within the adopting firm, the ability of the firm to sense and respond to new technology, and the depth of technology knowledge within the adopting firm are significant influencers across multiple stages of diffusion, showing that firm-internal traits are particularly important influencers of adoption. Laggard firms are missing the critical firm traits that lead to information gathering and understanding of innovations. In addition to contributing to adoption research theory and methodology, this research has implications for innovation-marketing and innovation-adopting firms.     

Beyond radical affordability in the base of the pyramid: The role of consumer self-confidence in product acceptance

When developing products and services for base of the economic pyramid (BoP) consumers, it has been widely assumed that organizations must set extremely low prices that are dependent on substantial product acceptance and economies of scale. However, such pricing is often not feasible. Growing evidence suggests that more moderate price levels are needed for organizations to viably serve the needs of low-income consumers. However, price sensitivity is less understood in low-income contexts. To promote the success of social enterprises through fresh insight, we reexamine the extremely low-price BoP assumption by investigating product acceptance among low-income consumers using two experiments in Latin America. Results reveal that a belief in one's capabilities to make effective consumption decisions, consumer self-confidence, helps explain the acceptance of moderately-priced products. Discussion highlights directions for stimulating acceptance of socially beneficial products in low-income contexts.     

Calling Baumol: What telephones can tell us about the allocation of entrepreneurial talent in the face of radical institutional changes

In his seminal contribution, Baumol (1990) proposes that the direction of entrepreneurial effort towards its productive (e.g., start-up activity) or unproductive (e.g., rent-seeking) use in a society depends on institutions or the “rules of the game”. We focus on an important micro-foundation of Baumol's theory namely that certain individuals change the direction of entrepreneurial efforts with institutional change. Our research contrasts with previous work on the role of institutions, which mostly focuses on the aggregate macro-level, while not observing individual behavior. We analyze who decides to start a venture in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and find that many individuals who demonstrated commitment to the anti-entrepreneurial communist regime in the GDR were active in launching new ventures soon after German re-unification. We argue that commitment to communism among post-communist entrepreneurs reflects rent-seeking. Once institutions change radically, entrepreneurial efforts are directed towards start-up activity. We rely on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) that includes information on whether East German respondents had a telephone before German re-unification, which was one of the most sought-after rewards for commitment to the regime. We find that telephone owners had a higher propensity of becoming successful firm founders. Telephone owners were also more likely to have an entrepreneurship-prone personality profile and value orientation. Our results confirm Baumol's theory and suggest that alertness to entrepreneurial arbitrage opportunities is guiding the redirection of entrepreneurial effort in the face of drastic institutional change.Executive summaryThere is a large body of literature on the effect of institutions on entrepreneurship. A good share of this literature is rooted in the seminal contribution by Baumol (1990) who argues that the shape of institutions determines whether people direct entrepreneurial effort to productive, unproductive or destructive entrepreneurial activities. Despite the fact that Baumol‘s main argument is at the individual micro-level, most of the literature focuses only on the macro-level implications of his theory. In contrast to most previous studies, we are not focusing on the aggregate level of entrepreneurship but explore the micro-foundations of Baumol's theory and analyze how (drastic) institutional change affects the entrepreneurial choice at the individual level.In our discussion of Baumol's work, we also introduce Kirzner's concept of individual alertness to arbitrage opportunities which he originally formulated for market economies. We extend Kirzner's insights on the role of alertness to other institutional contexts (e.g., socialism) and forms of arbitrage (e.g., engagement in socialist organizations) other than start-up activity, and highlight the role of institutional change in shaping processes of opportunity formation.It is important to understand how individuals allocate their entrepreneurial effort in times of major historical shocks and institutional changes for several reasons. First, since entrepreneurship is an important driver of economic growth and development, it is crucial to understand how institutional change affects entrepreneurial behavior at the individual level for designing policy measures targeted at increasing the entrepreneurial propensity of people. Second, the share of people with an entrepreneurial talent in a society is an enormous resource to cope with socio-economic change. Third, it is also important to understand the micro-foundations of Baumol's work as vast empirical evidence on the impact of institutions on entrepreneurial activities that is available at the macro-level relies on the validity of the micro-foundations.We find that people who demonstrated commitment to one of the most anti-entrepreneurial institutional regimes in history—communism—were more likely to start a firm after transition to a market economy. Our analysis is based on the case of East Germany that saw a sudden shift from an anti-entrepreneurial communist regime that did not reward start-up activities towards an entrepreneurship-facilitating market economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Those people who were actively committed to the regime as evidenced by material rewards obtained in the GDR were more likely to become (successful) self-employed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We also observe that people with an entrepreneurship-prone personality profile and those who put a strong emphasis on entrepreneurial values were more likely to have obtained material rewards in communism that indicate a strong commitment to the system.We argue that applying and extending Baumol's and also Kirzner's ideas helps understanding this puzzling phenomenon. In essence, regime commitment can be seen as a form of rent-seeking activity, which is a classic example of unproductive entrepreneurial activity discussed by Baumol. Rent-seeking in the context of communism could be expressed, for example, in enthusiastic engagement in public organizations (e.g., party councils, youth organizations, state-owned enterprises) in exchange for specific material rewards. Their pronounced alertness to new arbitrage opportunities may have enabled these same individuals to switch to start-up activity once this option became available to them and if it was more profitable than rent-seeking.We contribute to the literature by supporting the idea that the institutional framework conditions determine the type of entrepreneurial activity to which entrepreneurially talented people devote their efforts. So far, this claim found support mainly in aggregated macro-level data. Another important insight from our analysis is that entrepreneurs are flexible and agile economic agents who are alert to arbitrage opportunities and able to promptly adapt themselves to even radical changes, such as the shock transition from a socialist command economy to a market economy. Alertness to opportunities in a market economy context could hardly be learned in an anti-entrepreneurial context. Hence, an immediate re-allocation of entrepreneurial efforts indicates that alertness to arbitrage opportunities emerging in a market economy does not necessarily require experience in a market economy context.Our assessment also suggests that institutional change is shaping subjective processes of opportunity formation. Hence, the debate on whether opportunities are ‘out there’ or they have to be created should take into consideration how institutions and institutional change set the boundaries for opportunities. In particular, identifying and pursuing new opportunities brought about by institutional change could represent a specific form of “entrepreneurship talent.”