How Banks Apply Marketing Expertise to Develop New Derivatives

For banks operating in the fiercely competitive derivatives market, the difference between the leaders and the also-rans often boils down to their respective approaches to product innovation. To achieve market leadership in this highly volatile field, a bank must develop and continually refine the processes and the expertise necessary for identifying new areas of business and attracting and retaining customers. Although the development of derivatives is a complex, expensive process, such development efforts provide the means for satisfying existing clients as well as attracting new customers. F. Axel Johne and M. Panos Pavlidis examine the managerial practices of banks that are acknowledged leaders in bringing new derivatives to market ahead of their competitors. In particular, they examine how those first-mover banks apply their marketing expertise and they review the advantages those banks enjoy as a result of their success in product innovation. The banks studied fall into one of two groups: highly active innovators and less active innovators. The study reveals several significant differences between the two groups with respect to managing marketing inputs for product innovation purposes. First, compared to less active banks, the highly active innovators take a more sophisticated, market-based approach to identifying innovation opportunities. Rather than looking for innovations that offer a close fit with existing products and competencies, they analyze the benefits sought by target clients and initiate innovation efforts based on those analyses. Highly active innovators recognize the important role that internal marketing plays in encouraging functional specialists to work together for the purpose of identifying follow-on development opportunities. Internal marketing also helps to ensure that all parties understand and can support the planned innovation. The highly active innovators in this study do not take a formulaic approach to the development of new derivatives; instead, they rely on marketing expertise to identify and capitalize on business opportunities. Rather than concentrate solely on improving the core technical features of a product, the highly active innovators also recognize the importance of product augmentation innovation (to ensure the appropriate support for various market segments), process innovation (so they can reduce prices, when necessary), and market innovation (to ensure that they pursue the optimal mix of markets).     

The Relationship of Individual Capabilities and Environmental Support with Different Facets of Designers' Innovative Behavior

Theoretical perspectives on employee creativity have tended to focus on an individual's capability to generate original and potentially useful ideas, whereas definitions of innovation also include the process of putting those new ideas into practice. This field study therefore set out to test how theoretically distinct types of individual knowledge and skills are related to different aspects of employees' innovative behavior in terms of both their new idea generation and idea implementation. Using a sample of design engineers (n = 169) in a multinational engineering company, measures were taken of different aspects of innovative work behavior (patent submission, real‐time idea submission, idea implementation) and a range of individual capabilities (creativity‐relevant skills, job expertise, operational skills, contextual knowledge, and motivation) and environmental features (job control, departmental support for innovation). Analyses showed that creativity‐relevant skills were positively related to indices of idea generation but not to idea implementation. Instead, employees' job expertise, operational skills, and motivation to innovate demonstrated a stronger role in idea implementation. In terms of environmental factors, job control showed no positive relationship with innovative work behavior while departmental support for innovation was related to employees' idea generation but not idea implementation. The theoretical perspective that correlates of idea generation differ in certain aspects to those for idea implementation are confirmed by the study. Practical implications for organizations wishing to improve their innovativeness are discussed in terms of tailored training, development, motivational, and environmental interventions designed to improve the capabilities of individuals to engage in all parts of the innovation process.     

Developing an expert system on project evaluation: Pt II: Structuring the system

The work here described is the early stages of a programme to develop a series of Expert Systems (ES's) in the management of R&D. In particular, the development of a prototype ES using a package program Crystal Ver. 2.1 is the focus together with the problems encountered. The literature had suggested that the use of such packages facilitated the process for those exploring ES's. What was not clear from the literature or the program manuals was the limited range of problems which could be handled. The programs have a rigid structure such that unless the logic of the problem solving process matches that of the program, severe difficulties will ensue. This paper outlines the inherent structure of the programs and indicates the kind of problems which would fit. Specific problems which were encountered when trying to stretch the use of the program are explained in detail. It goes on to explain how these problems were got round using Lotus 1–2–3 which proved far more flexible in practice. This kind of understanding is essential if ES's are to become every-day tools of R&D management. The objective in developing the Expert System (ES) was for it to be advisory to those preparing project proposals for possible submission to higher management within the context of an R&D laboratory. Thus the intention was to capture the expertise of senior managers, make it available to more junior ones, and thereby improve the quality of their work. This concept proved to be naive in that the expertise proved to be so diffuse that a wholly new rationale to structure the expertise had to be developed. This process, the subsequent development into a prototype ES, and its evaluation, have already been published (Wilkinson, 1991). The literature on ES's had suggested that the use of available package programs was straight forward and that the real problem was in establishing the expertise to be used and in structuring it to fit the program. This too proved to be an over-simplification. When this work started, the exact nature of the package programs had not been spelt out adequately. The purpose of this paper, Part II, is to describe their inherent structure and the limitations which this imposes on the kind of problems for which they can be used. The insights gained in this work into the evaluation of projects and the inadequacies of previous evaluation techniques will form the contents of Part III of this series of papers.     

Exploring Users' Appropriateness as a Proxy for Experts When Screening New Product/Service Ideas

Despite the popularity and extensive use of engaging users in crowdvoting, very little research has been conducted into the appropriateness of users as substitutes for experts when judging ideas. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of using users as a proxy for professional experts during the initial idea screening of new product/service ideas. In other words, are users' assessments during idea screening conformant with professional experts' assessments and are they reliable as a proxy for experts during idea screening? In a comparative study, two different approaches to outsourcing the screening of wireless ideas to users are examined, including assessment by two different user panels: (1) technically skilled users and (2) technically naïve users. These two approaches were compared with the assessments made by professional experts. The results showed no conformance between users and experts when comparing their absolute scores. However, during a relative comparison (the ranking of ideas), both user panels were conformant with the professional experts. A test of the user panels' ability to select the same top ideas as the professional experts was successful, indicating good conformance between the user panels and the professional experts. This paper's contribution is knowledge of how conformant external users are compared with professional expert judges during idea screening. The results indicate that companies can employ users during the initial screening process using criteria assessment to select the best ideas for further elaboration, something that would significantly reduce the number of ideas. The paper suggests an alternative design to crowdvoting, whereby the users assess the relevant criteria.     

Teaching science through designing technology

This paper is a review of the literature related to teaching science through designing technology. The premise of this method is that designing technology presents the students with the context through which they can apply the science concepts they learned and thus enhancing their understanding of these concepts. Despite the promise of this method, teachers attempting it were faced by many challenges such as: (1) teachers did not have a grasp of the complex relationship between science and technology and assumed that technology was simply applied science, (2) the students were not able to transfer their learning of science to designing technology, (3) teachers did not have a deep understanding of the design process and tried to teach it as a linear, context-free process without regard to the context of the problem. The purpose of this paper is to extract from the literature a better understanding of teaching science through designing technology and the elements that teachers need to satisfy in order to increase their chances of successfully implementing this method in the classroom.     

Role of search for domain knowledge and architectural knowledge in alliance partner selection

Research Summary: The literature on technological alliances emphasizes that search for knowledge drives alliance formation. However, in conceptualizing technological knowledge, prior work on alliances has not made a distinction between domain knowledge—knowledge that firms possess in distinct technological domains—and architectural knowledge—knowledge that firms possess about how to combine elements from different technological domains. We argue that firms seek partners that are similar in domain knowledge to deepen their knowledge, and partners that are dissimilar in architectural knowledge to broaden their knowledge. Our results indicate that the likelihood of alliance formation increases when two firms are similar in domain knowledge and dissimilar in architectural knowledge. Further, our results show that these effects are positively moderated by the degree of decomposability of a firm's knowledge base. Managerial Summary: In dynamic environments, companies need to continually deepen and broaden their technological knowledge, and they often look for alliance partners who can provide them that knowledge. For knowledge deepening, companies are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in similar technological fields. For knowledge broadening, they are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in the same technological fields, but have different recipes for combining knowledge from those fields. Furthermore, a company with a modular knowledge base is more likely to seek a partner that has expertise in similar technological fields or whose recipes for combining knowledge from different technological fields are different from the recipes it has.     

Food additive regulation in the UK

This paper reviews the use, regulation and testing of food additives in the UK. Comparisons are drawn with other industrialized countries. In particular, the reasons (both explicit and implicit) for the use of additives are examined and the institutional mechanisms for their control are described. Since regulatory policy is dependent on toxological expertise, the contribution and adequacy of toxological science is considered. Present regulations are viewed to have been too heavily influenced by the food industry at the expense of the protection of the consumer, and several possible avenues for reform of both toxological science and regulatory policy are explored.     

The determinants of university–industry collaboration in food science in Italy

Firms’ collaboration with academic institutions expands their range of expertise and can support the development of business innovations in several industries. For technological as well as structural reasons, university–industry collaborations are especially important in the case of the food industry. This paper aims at assessing the drivers of knowledge transfer from academic departments to industry. We analyse the dynamics of private funding of university research activities and investigate the drivers of university knowledge transfer from food science university departments, identifying how they differ from drivers in other areas of science. The empirical investigation is based on the econometric analysis of financial data on the whole population of university departments in Italy. We provide some implications for policy, highlighting whether and how university food science departments differ from university departments engaged in other areas of science, and how their interactions with industry can be increased.     

The Grounding of a Discipline: Cognition and Instruction in Technology Education

Technology education has long struggled to establish itself as an equal partner in general education and often struggled to gain recognition for the value of its instruction. Frequently technology educators tout the effectiveness of their programs based on anecdotal evidence gathered from their classroom experiences on how their instructional methods empower students to learn. Although technology education originated without any meaningful input from cognitive science research, it appears that technology education instruction methods are remarkably consonant with findings from cognitive science that define good instruction. Specifically, there is considerable accord between how instruction in technology education and cognitively based instructional models such as collaborative learning, socially distributed expertise, design/engineering, and project-based instruction can be connected. The role of the cognitive research findings on instruction could inform a long over-due theoretical grounding of instruction in technology education. The absence of research on learning and instruction in technology education could be attributed to a lack of theoretical grounding in this relatively new field. This paper examines four cognitively based models of instruction and reviews the relationships between research in the cognitive sciences on learning and instruction in technology education. The consonance between the research recommendations from the cognitive sciences and practice in technology education instruction could serve to stimulate debate on the theoretical grounding of an emerging field of study.     

Transferring technology and expertise from universities to industry: Britain's Teaching Company Scheme

Teaching Company Scheme programmes involve employing graduates known as Teaching Company Associates in companies on projects which are jointly supervised by academics and company staff. This article presents findings of a study of the effectiveness of these programmes in transferring university expertise in science, technology and management, to industry.     

R&D 'programmes-competencies' matrix: analyzing R&D expertise within the firm

The author suggests that the systematic identification of a firm's technologies opens up the possibility of evaluating, protecting, optimizing, enriching and exploiting these technologies to the full. A firm's technologies fall into two parts: those embodied and exploited in current operations and those evolving from the collective competencies of its R&D staff. The author's aim is to evaluate and describe the firm's R&D competencies.
The identification of R&D competencies proceeds in three steps: tracing the background of the current and past programmes, constructing a programmes/competencies matrix, and deriving an expertise profile. The construction of the matrix is the key activity and requires much care in its execution, if competencies are to be properly defined and truly existing, and if it is to be exhaustive. The author sketches a procedure for constructing a matrix and discusses problems of implementation and draws attention to some of its limitations.
The author claims that such an inventory of expertise could improve the efficiency of the use of the R&D resource, identify a laboratory's strengths and weaknesses, direct R&D into hitherto neglected channels, assist individuals to identify and evaluate their own expertise, justify obtaining funding for building expertise in shortage areas. The method should be considered as a starting point to formulate appropriate strategies to gain access to technology.     

Does it pay to acquire technological firms?

Abstract The paper focuses on several research questions: How do the firms differ in terms of their strategic objectives for foreign acquisitions? What are the determinants of ‘success’ of acquisition? What are the differences between the American and German firms in terms of their acquisition strategies and successes? Our special interest was to get a closer look into the technological motive of the foreign acquisitions. This made a two-step procedure necessary. A first survey of 86 firms had to identify those acquisitions which were motivated by technological interests through a questionnaire. Findings: There are four classes of companies with different motives for acquisitions: Market oriented entrepreneurs, Short-term profit seekers, Technological acquirers, Preemptive market protectors. The second survey investigated the process and the results of acquisitions with a special view on the role of research and development through 60 interviews in 30 acquisition cases in both acquiring and acquired units. Findings: A network of variables explains the success. The most important are context variables (uncertainty, cultural differences), size of both firms, low degree of formalization, expertise, and lack of conflicts about technological philosophy.     

Enhancing Concept Test Validity by Using Expert Consumers

In standard concept testing practice, consumers may be invited to participate in a test if they use or possess the product. However, merely using or possessing a product is no guarantee that a consumer has the level of product knowledge that is necessary for judging the concept. Conducting a concept test with consumers who lack the necessary product knowledge may jeopardize the validity of the test results. That is, the results of such a concept test may not accurately indicate how consumers will evaluate the real product. To ensure the validity of concept test results, Jan Schoormans, Roland Ortt, and Cees de Bont suggest that consumers who are invited to participate in a concept test should possess a degree of product knowledge. When a consumer is asked to evaluate a concept, their product expertise allows them to understand product information faster, fill in missing information, and learn more easily. Consumers with product expertise are better able to discriminate between important and unimportant aspects of a product. They are also better able to infer benefits from a product's physical attributes. To explore the effects of consumer expertise on the quality of the evaluations provided by concept tests, the authors conducted two experiments, both of which resemble actual concept tests. The first experiment examines the effect of consumer expertise on the results of a concept test for a major innovation, Videotext. This experiment tests the hypothesis that the similarity between the evaluations of a concept and an actual product will be greater for consumers with a high level of product-category expertise than for consumers with low product-category expertise. The results of the experiment clearly support the idea that product-category expertise enhances a respondent's ability to evaluate concepts in a test of major innovations. From this, it is concluded that only respondents with high product-category expertise should be used for concept tests of major innovations. The second experiment explores the effects of product expertise on consumers' evaluations of a minor innovation, a redesigned coffee maker. This experiment tests two hypotheses. First, it is proposed that consumers with high product expertise give more consistent evaluations in a concept test than consumers with low product expertise. Second, it is suggested that consumers with product expertise generate more stable evaluations over time than consumers without product expertise. The results of this experiment clearly indicate that using consumers with moderate to high levels of product expertise is beneficial to the validity of the results from concept tests of minor innovations.     

Heuristics and CAD modelling: an examination of student behaviour during problem solving episodes within CAD modelling activities

Design activities typically involve and culminate in the creation of models representative of new ideas and conceptions. The format is often dictated by the specific discipline, with ideas in design and technology education regularly being externalised through the use of computer aided design (CAD). This paper focusses on the realisation stage of a design process, specifically when conceptual ideas are being externalised through CAD. Acknowledging students as novices or quasi-experts with regards to their levels of technical expertise and recognising the limitations in the cognitive capacities of humans suggests merit in investigating problem solving strategies through the lens of heuristics. A comparative study was employed between two distinct CAD systems to examine students modelling behaviour. Considering the situational context of the problems encountered and the bounded rationality which the students are operating within, a number of insights are generated from the findings which are of importance from a pedagogical perspective within design and technology education.     

R&D projects in the science sector

The purpose of this research was to determine and analyse diversity in various features of R&D projects implemented in the science sector in Poland, financed mostly from public funds. More exactly, the following aspects of R&D projects implemented in the science sector in Poland were examined: the relation between the actually achieved and the initially set goal, the project management methodologies and project time management methods used, features of the project team, the relation between the plan and the actual project realisation and management difficulties encountered in practice. These aspects and their diversity were examined in the context of the whole country, of various fields of science and various research units implementing pure research (the ‘R’ area) or applied research and experimental development (the ‘D’ area). The research was conducted by means of survey methodology covering a sample of participants of R&D projects in the science sector in Poland. The results were analysed by means of statistical methods (which constitutes a clear novelty with respect to the existing literature on R&D projects) and statistically significant phenomena gave rise to several important conclusions on how R&D projects implemented in the science sector are managed and what their realisation looks like in various fields of science and various institutions, in a relatively new EU members state and a former communist country like Poland. These conclusions may be the basis for important hypotheses (which require further research) on the project management quality in the science sector in Poland and in similar countries, which is closely linked to the problem of public money allocation, its efficient spending and control. Also, practical suggestions on improvement measures in the science sector with respect to R&D projects, limited not only to countries like Poland, but of a more general nature, are formulated.     

Managing the Design Innovation–Brand Marketing Interface: Resolving the Tension between Artistic Creation and Commercial Imperatives*

The relationship between design and marketing is an uneasy one. Managing this tension is critical for luxury marketers, whose point of differentiation is a combination of design excellence and market execution. This article explores the tensions between marketing and design and the integration of design into the brand management process in luxury wine firms. The results of the investigation describe five design‐based values held by luxury winemakers: remaining true to craft, expressions of place, stylistic consistency, living up to the brand's heritage, and remaining current. Five methods of integrating design into the firm are identified. These are top leadership support and integration at the strategic level, simultaneous loose–tight coupling, being in the marketplace versus being of the marketplace, intergenerational teams, and deliberate decoupling. This last is a novel solution and involves designers walking a fine line between their commitment to their values and the ongoing evolution of the brand. Essentially, designers of luxury wine products downplay their scientific expertise, market knowledge, and responsiveness in favour of appealing to their five espoused values.     

Promoting student-led science and technology projects in elementary teacher education: entry into core pedagogical practices through technological design

Future elementary school teachers often lack self-efficacy for teaching science and technology. They are particularly anxious about encouraging children to carry-out student-directed, open-ended scientific inquiry and/or technological design projects. Moreover, because this often also is the case with practising elementary school teachers, it is difficult for student–teachers to gain practical experience facilitating student-led project work during practicum sessions. To provide student–teachers with expertise and motivation for promoting student-directed, open-ended project work, therefore, a group of future elementary teachers were taken through a constructivism-informed ‘apprenticeship’ during their university-based teaching methods course and then invited to make project work the subject of the action research that they were required to complete during their practicum. In this paper, successes that one student–teacher (out of 78 studied) experienced in promoting student-directed, open-ended technological design projects are reported. Although she judged children’s designs to be modestly successful, data indicate that her self-efficacy for promoting project work increased significantly. Analyses of qualitative data collected during the methods course and practicum also indicate that aspects of the curriculum, teachers, students and milieu appeared to contribute to this success. Such findings suggest that teacher educators should focus on helping future elementary teachers to develop expertise and motivation that would enable and encourage children to conduct technological design projects before conducting scientific inquiries. Such a tack may be the most pragmatic—and, arguably, epistemologically-sound—approach for helping ‘science- and technology-phobic’ student–teachers to move from the periphery to the core of practices in science and technology education.     

From laboratory to clinic: science commercialization within university-centered entrepreneurial ecosystems

The commercialization of scientific discoveries within the university-industry nexus is multifaceted and complex, characterized by dynamic interactions between multiple agents, organizations, and institutions. These interactions support a university-centered entrepreneurial ecosystem (UCEE). Our study investigates agent-institution dynamics within the UCEE to explore how individual agents seek to commercialize their scientific discoveries. Specifically, relying on 47 narrative interviews, we explore how UCEE agents across three UCEEs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia respond and adapt to institutional commercialization mandates during commercialization of their stem cell-based regenerative medicine discoveries. Our findings emphasize the bi-directional relationship between individual agents and institutions within a UCEE, facilitating a much-needed multi-level perspective on academic entrepreneurship research. We extend recent frameworks that propose how the formative stages of the entrepreneurial process – opportunity evolution – influences ecosystem emergence. Specifically, by investigating the latter stages of the entrepreneurial process – how (science-based) opportunities are commercialized within UCEEs – we reveal distinct behavioral responses to science commercialization mandates, which underscore how UCEEs evolve. Furthermore, by explicating the importance of UCEE agent behavior during science commercialization, our study shines an important spotlight onto the microfoundations of science commercialization and UCEEs. Our research imparts important policy implications for institutions tasked with commercializing scientific discoveries and policy makers challenged with developing high growth, sustainable UCEEs.     

Two-stage hands-on technology activity to develop preservice teachers’ competency in applying science and mathematics concepts

This paper discusses the implementation of a two-stage hands-on technology learning activity, based on Dewey’s learning experience theory that is designed to enhance preservice teachers’ primary and secondary experiences in developing their competency to solve hands-on problems that apply science and mathematics concepts. The major conclusions were that: (1) preservice teachers understood the science and mathematics concepts related to the hands-on activity, but they need more help in exploring practical products of applying discipline related concepts for the purpose of stimulating their design ideas; and (2) the two-stage hands-on technology learning activity served as useful prompts in developing preservice teachers’ primary and secondary experiences in applying science and mathematics concepts during the design process. However, it was evident that preservice teachers still needed more training in improving their design ideas by the application of more in-depth related science and mathematics concepts.     

Open Science and Open Innovation in a socio‐political context: knowledge production for societal impact in an age of post‐truth populism

This conceptual paper traces the origins and progress of Open Science and proposes its generative coupling to Open Innovation in the contemporary socio‐political context; where universities are re‐imaging their civic missions in the face of anti‐establishment populist politics. This setting is one of changing knowledge production regimes and institutional pressures that create contradictions identifiable through the prism of the series of scientific norms conceptualised by Robert K. Merton. This paper privileges a sociological perspective to proffer scientific knowledge production as a societally embedded process, which is well illustrated by scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Science in Society fields. In doing so, it identifies the co‐evolution, co‐existence and co‐production of Open Science with Open Innovation; and notes how it shares the attributes of other recent diagnoses of changing knowledge production regimes; in particular Mode 2, post‐normal science and the Quadruple Helix. It also argues that Open Science can be coupled with Open Innovation to catalyse positive societal change, but that the rise of a populist post‐truth era opposed to objectivity, expertise and technocratic political solutions gives the demand for openness and participation a different complexion. Merton's norms provide a useful lens to observe recent shifts in the delivery of science, knowledge and innovation in society towards more inclusive, ethical and sustainable outcomes; and expose the limited reflection on how the appropriation and exploitation of open scientific knowledge encounters industrial R&D and Open Innovation.