The World Bank's innovation market

Large, tradition-bound organizations can make space for radical, low-cost (and therefore low-risk) innovations. Just ask executives at the World Bank. The story of this best practice begins in 1998, when a young new-products group at the international funding agency proposed holding an Innovation Marketplace to capture novel ideas within the Bank for alleviating poverty. The forum, which eventually was opened to external participants, let people informally present their antipoverty ideas to potential funding sources. Funders could move among hundreds of booths and evaluate proposals for, say, a program that would provide postdisaster reconstruction insurance in developing countries or a vaccination development initiative. The marketplace truncated the Bank's standard project-review processes, which often stretched to a year or more, and gave funders permission to make commitments in the tens of thousands of dollars, rather than in the tens of millions more typical of Bank-financed projects. The marketplace concept met with some skepticism at the beginning. Some senior executives at the Bank felt no group had the right to spend the agency's money without following its well-established resource allocations process. But the marketplace team believed an open process for allocating grants would produce more breakthrough ideas in the long run than a centralized one. In this article, the authors describe how the new-products team brainstormed to create a market for ideas, how it got senior management's support, and how it has expanded on the original concept for these innovation marketplaces. The program's success, they contend, offers hope both for the world's poor and for business leaders looking to find new ideas under the hard crust of corporate dogma, conformance, and bureaucracy.     

Indonesian Trade Reform in Close-Up: The Steel and Footwear Experiences 1

In evaluating the widespread trade liberalisation that has occurred in Indonesia since 1983, it is important not to lose sight of the uneveness of many of the reforms, both intra- and inter-industry, that have been implemented. Different industry structures help to account for the different degrees of reform delivered within and between industries. This paper examines the extent and implications of the liberalisation process in two structurally diverse industries — steel and footwear. One objective of this paper is to illustrate the consequences for competitiveness of the reform sequence and the instruments of reform; another is to highlight the impediments to further progress.     

A Sensitivity Analysis of IRR Leasing Models

In this article we argue that advances made in automation, communication, and manufacturing portend a dramatic reversal of the “bigger is better” approach to cost reductions prevalent in many basic infrastructure industries; for example, transportation, electric power generation, and raw material processing. We show that the traditional reductions in capital costs achieved by scaling up in size are generally matched by learning effects in the mass production process when scaling up in numbers instead. In addition, using the U.S. electricity generation sector as a case study, we argue that the primary operating cost advantage of large unit scale is reduced labor, which can be eliminated by employing low-cost automation technologies. Finally, we argue that locational, operational, and financial flexibilities that accompany smaller unit scale can reduce investment and operating costs even further. All of these factors combined imply that with current technology, economies of numbers may well dominate economies of unit scale. Yet realizing the full potential of small unit scale will require technologists and business leaders to develop a new ability to “think small.”     

EFFICIENCY AND BARGAINING POWER IN THE INTERBANK LOAN MARKET

Using detailed transactions‐level data on interbank loans, we examine the efficiency of an overnight interbank lending market and the bargaining power of its participants. Our analysis relies on the equilibrium concept of the core, which imposes a set of no‐arbitrage conditions on trades in the market. For Canada's Large Value Transfer System, we show that although the market is fairly efficient, systemic inefficiency persists throughout our sample. The level of inefficiency matches distinct phases of both the Bank of Canada's operations as well as phases of the 2007–8 financial crisis. We find that bargaining power tilted sharply toward borrowers as the financial crisis progressed and (surprisingly) toward riskier borrowers.