Identifying new dimensions of business incubation: A multi-level analysis of Karolinska Institute's incubation system

Relying on an in-depth case study of the incubator related to the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute's (KI), this paper identifies new analytical and strategic dimensions of incubation. Departing from the current literature's prevalent focus on incubators as organizations performing a predefined set of activities for incubatees (facility renting, coaching, training and connecting), we perform a multilevel analysis embracing, next to the organizational and the project-specific levels, also the broader institutional and inter-organizational level. Our analysis relies on seven key components of incubation, namely its time, place, sources, resources, control/governance, activities/services and outcomes. Further, we view incubators as strategic actors engaged in value creation on a broader arena than the strict incubation context, even an international arena, where incubators' choices and interactions can be analyzed with the help of concepts from various streams in the business strategy literature. The specific strategic drivers of business incubation that we identify in the KI incubator's case are six: positioning in the value chain, risk taking/time perspective, revenue model, governance/control, internationalization, and cooperation/competition. The paper concludes with managerial implications urging incubators to take more of a strategic perspective rather than focussing only on the established components of their operations.     

Sir Thomas More's Utopia: An overlooked economic classic

Sir Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, is a classic work of how to organise a society based on common property. With a unique mix of common property, institutions and sound economic insights, we argue that More built a framework for a society that could be viable in the long run. While the conditions that make Utopia work are quite restrictive, it does provide a sketch of a society where common property may not stifle long‐term development, but is associated with productive workers and people content with their lives.     

Strong risk invariance in multiobjective programming

A utility function exhibiting strong risk invariance (SRI) is employed to study a problem in which a decision maker's objectives, y, are linked to his decision variables, x, by the linear system y = Ax, with matrix A random. An application of the model to macroeconomic planning is considered.     

Improving impact of research papers

This editorial aims to assist authors in maximizing the impact of their work. While the editorial is written specifically for the journal Technovation, many items of advice are equally applicable to other publishing outlets. While the value of any article is its unique core contribution, the best way to present an article's core value is quite consistent and is the focus of this editorial.     

Su di una politica di bonus

Si prende in considerazione una politica di Bonus attuata da una Compagnia di assicurazione e si studia l'andamento della perdita attesa della Compagnia al variare dell'entità del Bonus nei casi in cui:

1. la funzioneL(s), che esprime il livello minimo dell'entità dei sinistri non occultabili all'istantes, sia lineare ins;
2. la funzioneL(s) renda massima la previsione del guadagno di ogni singolo assicurato.

     

Whatever happened to “The Technology of Foolishness”? Does it have any potential today?

In 1971, the organization theorist James March published "The Technology of Foolishness" (ToF). The essay can be seen as inspired by ideas of the late 1960s in California. ToF argues that wise decision making should not only focus on pursuing given goals, as is often done, but also on finding new and better goals. The present study traces the reception of ToF in the scholarly literature. It has been much praised, but little used relative to other of March's contributions. The reception has often been superficial and ritual and March's harsher ideas have to some degree been sugarcoated. ToF has inspired work regarding playfulness, improvisation, hypocrisy and not least entrepreneurship. But there is unused potential in ToF. This potential is discussed in the next to final Section of this article. One is called intelligent holes in stupid organizations and concerns how to maintain or achieve free thinking in organizations and society. Another one regards hypocrisy – how to handle and use truth and lies in and around modern organizations and political systems.     

Sunken Cities: Climate Change,Urban Futures and the Imagination of Submergence

Climate change presents multiple challenges to cities—not only in terms of the resilience and sustainability of the urban fabric, but also in relation to how urban inhabitants imagine they might adapt to a future transformed environment. This article explores imaginative modes of thinking in relation to future cities and climate change, focusing on representations of urban drowning or submergence. It considers, in turn, climate‐change fictions—from J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World to Paulo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities, published in 2012; visual representations from Gustave Doré's The New Zealander in 1872 to Alexis Rockman's 2004 Manifest Destiny; and architectural conjecture, from Wolf Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project from 1970 onwards to CRAB Studio's Soak City in 2009. The article draws out how these imaginaries intersect with theoretical understandings of science fiction and ecology, contending that an emphasis on multiple imaginaries of climate change is critical to expanding the narrow range of possibilities that currently characterize the literature on cities and climate change. Imaginative texts, images and designs mutually inform each other to encourage holistic ways of approaching how we think about the prospect of urban submergence and to incubate radical responses to it.     

Nonparametric identification of a binary random factor in cross section data

Suppose V and U are two independent mean zero random variables, where V has an asymmetric distribution with two mass points and U has some zero odd moments (having a symmetric distribution suffices). We show that the distributions of V and U are nonparametrically identified just from observing the sum V+U, and provide a pointwise rate root n estimator. This can permit point identification of average treatment effects when the econometrician does not observe who was treated. We extend our results to include covariates X, showing that we can nonparametrically identify and estimate cross section regression models of the form Y=g(X,D^∗)+U, where D^∗ is an unobserved binary regressor.     

Epistemological reasons for preferring component analysis to factor analysis

Spearman's and Thomson's mathematical controversy over factor theory was forgotten when it became evident that empirical tetrad-differences bound away from zero (and when empirical evidence argued the need for extracting more factors from a matrix). In fact, both their models lead to zero tetraddifferences. Being more interested in the psychological than in the mathematical aspects of Spearman's model. Thompson remained indifferent to mathematical aspects of multiple factor analysis when Thurstone theorized it. Thus, he did not perceive that his counter-example negated the assumption Thrustone shared the rank of the matrix. The idea that components to be extracted must be equal to the rank of the matrix is not assumed in Hotelling's component model: as a result, this is the first epistemological reason for preferring component analysis to factor analysis. A second epistemological reason is the central theorem of Thurstone's multiple-factor model, which can be criticized because it is an assumption that, the rank of a complete matrix being n, it becomes k when commonalities are in the principal diagonal. This assumption goes against common sense, a fact demonstrated through comparison between residuals after k components have been extracted and after k principal factors have been extracted.     

Reduced rank regression in cointegrated models

The coefficient matrix of a cointegrated first-order autoregression is estimated by reduced rank regression (RRR), depending on the larger canonical correlations and vectors of the first difference of the observed series and the lagged variables. In a suitable coordinate system the components of the least-squares (LS) estimator associated with the lagged nonstationary variables are of order 1/T, where T is the sample size, and are asymptotically functionals of a Brownian motion process; the components associated with the lagged stationary variables are of the order T^−1/2 and are asymptotically normal. The components of the RRR estimator associated with the stationary part are asymptotically the same as for the LS estimator. Some components of the RRR estimator associated with nonstationary regressors have zero error to order 1/T and the other components have a more concentrated distribution than the corresponding components of the LS estimator.     

Financial benefits and risks of dependency in triadic supply chain relationships

The economic consequences of interdependent relationships with suppliers and customers have long been of interest to supply chain managers and academics alike. Whereas previous studies have focused on the benefits or risks of embedded relationships that accrue to buying firms, this study simultaneously investigates the effects of a supplier's and a customer's embeddedness, arising from resource dependency, on a focal firm's financial performance in triadic supply chain relationships. Using 1,144 unique focal firm-years for U.S. firms from Compustat, we find that a supplier's and a customer's dependency both increase the focal firm's performance in terms of return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS) by increasing asset turnover (ATO). As levels of supplier and customer dependency on the focal firm increase, however, the economic benefits of customer dependency diminish beyond a certain point, while those of supplier dependency continue to increase above that threshold. Thus, our findings show the paradoxically differing risks of the supplier's versus the customer's dependency, while establishing the unequivocal economic benefits of supplier and customer relations for focal firms in the middle of concentrated triadic relationships.     

All-or-nothing payments

We develop a general principal–agent framework in which to study optimal incentive schemes where agents are hired to work on multiple heterogeneous and interdependent projects. The incentive schemes can be based on output measures, interpreted as the principal’s payoffs, as well as input measures, regarded as observation of some of the agents’ efforts. We identify that a unifying feature of the optimal incentive schemes, called all-or-nothing payments, arises in three natural scenarios of the general framework: unobservable inputs, verifiable inputs, and observable but unverifiable inputs. Our framework and results embed and generalize several previous studies on multitask principal–agent problems with a limited liability constraint.     

From axial codes to Z-scores: Charting the diversity and scope of 25 years of nonprofit marketing research published in International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing

The International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing published practitioner and scholarly research for 25 years before it was rebranded to the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing. This research uses an emergent content analysis design to review all 629 research articles published in the first 25 volumes to document the field's marketing, theoretical, and methodological interests. This article provides important benchmark numbers to compare how the field evolves as the rebranded journal moves forward with a broader topical range.     

A positive correlation between turnout and plurality does not refute the rational voter model

Many papers have tested the prediction of the rational voter model that, ceteris paribus, turnout will be low when potential voters expect the winner's plurality to be large. The appropriate null hypothesis, however, is unclear. We show that statistical models of voting in which each voter's decision of whether to vote does not vary with the expected plurality can nonetheless generate data which lead to both positive and negative correlations between turnout and plurality.     

Public Choice and Land Tax Fairness

Land value taxation (LVT) as desirable U.S. tax policy was brilliantly set forth by the American publicist and economist, Henry George, in the book Progress and Poverty, published 100 years ago. Economists concerned with state and local taxation have generally accepted the basic elements of George's analysis. The absence of substantial LVT legislation despite the economic efficiency and ethical strengths of land as a tax base arises from two sources. First, the public perception of land has not separated land's attributes from those possessed by other property. Second, land ownership data have not been gathered and publicized. Groups favoring taxes that promote economic justice and efficiency should support efforts to develop land ownership data. It would be an important first step toward fully utilizing the potential of LVT.     

The winners and losers of tax reform: An assessment under financial integration

I quantify the macroeconomic and redistributive effects of the unilateral elimination of the capital income tax in a two-country, heterogeneous-agent incomplete markets model with progressive labor income taxes. Home, by implementing the reform, induces government responses where labor income is taxed in Home and mostly subsidized in Foreign. In addition, post-reform price dynamics reduce Home’s wealth and suppress households’ ability to do consumption smoothing, with negative effects on the majority—particularly on the poor. In turn, Foreign accumulates wealth, and price movements work particularly in favor of the poor. As a result, a large majority in Home prefers the status quo whereas Foreign supports the reform unanimously. These findings are robust to alternative scenarios where (i) the borrowing constraints are relaxed, (ii) both countries jointly eliminate capital income taxes, (iii) foreign interest income is taxed, and (iv) Home capital income tax is reduced from 40% to 35%.     

On generalized transforms of distribution functions

In this note we discuss the following problem. LetX andY to be two real valued independent r.v.'s with d.f.'sF and ?. Consider the d.f.F*? of the r.v.X oY, being o a binary operation among real numbers. We deal with the following equation: $$\mathcal{G}^1 (F * \phi ,s) = \mathcal{G}^2 (F,s)\square \mathcal{G}^3 (\phi ,s)\forall s \in S$$ where \(\mathcal{G}^1 ,\mathcal{G}^2 ,\mathcal{G}^3 \) are real or complex functionals, т another binary operation ands a parameter. We give a solution, that under stronger assumptions (Aczél 1966), is the only one, of the problem. Such a solution is obtained in two steps. First of all we give a solution in the very special case in whichX andY are degenerate r.v.'s. Secondly we extend the result to the general case under the following additional assumption: $$\begin{gathered} \mathcal{G}^1 (\alpha F + (1 - \alpha )\phi ,s) = H[\mathcal{G}^i (F,s),\mathcal{G}^i (\phi ,s);\alpha ] \hfill \\ \forall \alpha \in [0,1]i = 1,2,3 \hfill \\ \end{gathered} $$ .     

A bayesian approach to time-varying cross-sectional regression models

This paper presents a Bayesian approach to regression models with time-varying parameters, or state vector models. Unlike most previous research in this field the model allows for multiple observations for each time period. Bayesian estimators and their properties are developed for the general case where the regression parameters follow an ARMA(s,q) process over time. This methodology is applied to the estimation of time-varying price elasticity for a consumer product, using biweekly sales data for eleven domestic markets. The parameter estimates and forecasting performance of the model are compared with various alternative approaches.     

A Cramér-type large deviation theorem for sums of functions of higher order non-overlapping spacings

Let U ₁, U ₂, . . . , U _n–1 be an ordered sample from a Uniform [0,1] distribution. The non-overlapping uniform spacings of order s are defined as \({G_{i}^{(s)} =U_{is} -U_{(i-1)s}, i=1,2,\ldots,N^\prime, G_{N^\prime+1}^{(s)} =1-U_{N^\prime s}}\) with notation U ₀ = 0, U _n = 1, where \({N^\prime=\left\lfloor n/s\right\rfloor}\) is the integer part of n/s. Let \({ N=\left\lceil n/s\right\rceil}\) be the smallest integer greater than or equal to n/s, f _m (u), m = 1, 2, . . . , N, be a sequence of real-valued Borel-measurable functions. In this article a Cramér type large deviation theorem for the statistic \({f_{1,n} (nG_{1}^{(s)})+\cdots+f_{N,n} (nG_{N}^{(s)} )}\) is proved.