EEG 2017 — Mehr Markt bei der Erneuerbare-Energien-Förderung?

Within four years now, the German Renewable Energy Resources Act (EEG) has been amended in 2016 for the third time. The main point of the current reform is the extension of bidding schemes to determine the remuneration of renewable power generation. The articles analyses whether or not the expected decrease in costs and improvement of deployment control could ever occur, and considers the critique of thwarting the energy transition and jeopardising the diversity of actors involved in the industry.     

Metropolitan innovation,firm size,and business survival in a high-tech industry

This paper contributes to the growing body of business survival literature that focuses on regional determinants of the hazard faced by firms. Using parametric survival analysis, we test the effects of regional innovation on exit likelihood in the US computer and electronic product manufacturing during the 1992–2008 period. The novelty of our approach is in conditioning the effects of metropolitan innovation on firm size. Estimation results suggest a negative relationship between metropolitan patenting activity and survival of firms that started with 1–3 employees. This effect decreases if companies grow. Establishments with more than 4 employees at start-up are insensitive to metropolitan innovation, although size of firms that started with 4–9 employees improves their survival chances. These findings indicate that local knowledge spillovers do not translate into lower hazard. The negative relationship indicates either a creative destruction regime or decisions of entrepreneurs to shut down existing ventures in order to pursue other opportunities.     

Framing Sustainable Consumption in Different Ways: Policy Lessons from Two Participatory Systems Mapping Exercises in Hungary

Sustainable consumption as a complex phenomenon at the boundaries of different (ecological, economic, social) systems requires theoretical approaches that do justice to its complex causality and dynamism. Participatory systems mapping offers a tool to achieve this purpose. Its policy relevance lies in its ability to include diverse views, multiple actors, and offer options for policy intervention. The research reported here applied participatory systems mapping in order to define and identify system boundaries for sustainable consumption and uncover perceived causal relationships among the determining factors of sustainable consumption. By revealing the mental models of an expert and a conscious consumer panel on sustainable consumption in general, we can shed light on the cognitive constructions of sustainable consumption and identify most important boundaries that were chosen and their implications on policy-making. The expert panel framed the boundaries as lack of sustainable consumption, while the conscious consumer panel employed a positive framing as strong communities in sustainable consumption. The two panels also differed in their focus on scale: Experts targeted the national scale, while conscious consumers concentrated at the local scale.     

Governance and resource interaction in networks. The role of venture capital in a biotech start-up

This paper examines venture capital (VC) governance in innovation processes. The VC literature often presents the relationship between a VC firm and a start-up as dyadic and analyzes it with agency theory. In contrast, this paper deploys the resource interaction framework presented in Håkansson and Waluszewski (2002) to governance and innovation in networks. The paper reports an in-depth case study of Pyrosequencing, a Swedish biotech firm financed with VC. The results from this study reveal how the relationship between a VC and a start-up company is embedded in a wider network and how the governance of the VC spreads in the surrounding network and influences a start-up's possibilities to develop organizational and technical resource interfaces to critical counterparts such as suppliers and customers.     

Der MDK kommt!

Vorbereitung auf die Qualit?tsprüfung — Steht der MDK unangemeldet vor der Tür, kommt es unter den Mitarbeitern h?ufig zu Unsicherheiten, die sich negativ auf die Prüfung auswirken k?nnen. Doch durch klare Aufgabenverteilungen und einen „Handlungsleitfaden“ legen Sie und Ihre Mitarbeiter den Grundstein für ein gutes Prüfungsergebnis.     

Consumer response to food labels in an emerging market: the case of Romania

This study investigates consumer response to food labels in an emerging market. More specifically, it measures the levels of awareness, objective and perceived understanding, perceived usefulness and perceived trustworthiness of the most prominent food labels found in the Romanian market. An online survey was conducted with a convenience sample of 428 respondents (45.6% males of an average age of 30.6 years). Results revealed that for most respondents, awareness levels towards food labels are generally low, except for the Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) and the organic food labels. Objective understanding towards food labels was relatively high, especially towards those food labels that included a clear text element. Perceived understanding, perceived usefulness and perceived trustworthiness were found to be consistently high with regard to the GDA and the national organic food labels, while the European organic label scored lower. Finally, response to food labels was found to differ between aware and unaware respondents.