Translating sustainable and smart city strategies into performance measurement systems

This paper shows how sustainable and smart strategies can be implemented in cities and how these strategies influence, and are influenced by, performance measurement systems. Drawing upon the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, the authors present the case of Gothenburg in Sweden, where they interviewed the key actors involved in a new sustainability strategy. Translating strategy into performance measurement systems requires collaboration across organizational boundaries and considerations of financial goals and social and human aspects.     

Conceptualization and Integration of Marketing Intelligence: The Case of an Industrial Manufacturer

Purpose: The primary goal of this article was to conceptualize a systematic marketing intelligence process for industrial manufacturers because, up until now, such concepts have only been focused on consumer goods settings. Hence, this article investigates how marketing intelligence activities are developed and managed effectively in industrial markets.

Methodology/approach: The authors conducted a case study of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, a German based manufacturer of regulation technology for power transformers.

Findings: We found that a systematic marketing intelligence process should be based on the resource- and market-based view of strategy as well as on the market orientation construct. When implementing marketing intelligence, the integration of the sales force within the whole process is the crucial lever for an industrial company. The formalization of the process is necessary to ensure its continuity and acceptance; however, the varying intensity allows the necessary flexibility of the process.

Research implications: The constraints of the decisive process steps of marketing intelligence have to be further enhanced for industrial markets. It is important to find out how the integration of the sales force can best be designed to incorporate reward systems and motivation structures, and how to establish a corporate marketing-minded culture throughout the organization.

Practical implications: The important steps for a well implemented marketing intelligence process are a preparation phase, followed by the gathering, analysis, and dissemination of information. This article highlights the success factors for each process step. Above all, managerial and organizational commitment is necessary for the implementation of the whole process.

Originality/value/contribution: By focusing on the industrial manufacturing business, this study provides deep insights into a neglected area of research. Light needs to be shed on marketing intelligence in industrial markets, where the lack of traditional market research has to be compensated.     

Deutsche Konjunktur erholt sich — Ergebnisse der Gemeinschaftsdiagnose vom Frühjahr 2013

According to the recent Joint Forecast, the German economy is back on an upward trend in spring 2013. The situation in the financial markets has eased and the headwind from the world economy has tailed off somewhat. The institutes expect gross domestic product in Germany to increase by 0.8% this year and by 1.9% next year. The expansion will mainly be driven by domestic demand. The labour market situation is expected to improve further. With capacity utilisation rising, inflation is forecasted to edge up to 2.0% next year. The public budget will be almost balanced in 2013 and should show a surplus of 0.5% in relation to gross domestic product in 2014. However, risks will continue to remain until the euro crisis is resolved.     

TECHNOLOGY SHOCKS AND ROBUST SIGN RESTRICTIONS IN A EURO AREA SVAR*

We use a model‐based identification strategy to estimate the impact of technology shocks on hours worked and employment in the euro area. The sign restrictions applied in the vector autoregression (VAR) analysis are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and are robust to parameter uncertainty. The results are in line with the conventional Real Business Cycle (RBC) interpretation that hours worked rise as a result of a positive technology shock. By comparing the sign restrictions method to the long‐run restriction approach of Galí (Quaterly Journal of Economics (1992) 709–38) , we show that the results do not depend on the stochastic specification of the hours worked series or the data sample but only on the identification scheme.     

Corporate Ethical Values and Altruism: The Mediating Role of Career Satisfaction

This study explores the ability of career satisfaction to mediate the relationship between corporate ethical values and altruism. Using a sample of individuals employed in a four-campus, regional health science center, it was determined that individual career satisfaction fully mediated the positive relationship between perceptions of corporate ethical values and self-reported altruism. The findings imply that companies dedicating attention to positive corporate ethical values can enhance employee attitudes and altruistic behaviors, especially when individuals experience a high degree of career satisfaction.     

Principles for sustainability rating of investment funds

During the last decade, the idea of sustainable investments hit the market. Investors both private and institutional started to supplement financial considerations with social and ecological ones. Meanwhile the supply of mutual funds in the ‘green’ investment sector increased enormously. Currently in Europe about 300 mutual funds are available that are managed according to sustainability and social responsibility. Potential investors face the difficulty of keeping track of the various funds and choosing among them based on a reliable comparative assessment. This paper outlines the basic principles and methods on which such a comparative sustainability rating is based. The method was designed to be analogous to rating of the funds financially. The sustainability rating is based on assessment of the research processes in the fund management as well as investigation of the fund portfolio in terms of composition and sustainability performance. It should support investors in their investment choices by offering them a third party view. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

An extension of Mohring's model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Pol. Econ., 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the durability of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.     

Significant Issues for the Future of Product Innovation

What's happening in the world of product innovation? What are the tough issues that managers are facing? And what's going to happen in the remaining years of this decade? In this article, several members of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Product Innovation Management offer their ideas about where the important problems lie. This is the fodder for a good round table discussion and through the medium of this journal we'll engage in such a discussion in this and a subsequent issue.