When Does University Research Get Commercialized? Creating Ambidexterity in Research Institutions

We examine the tensions that make it difficult for a research‐oriented university to achieve commercial outcomes. Building on the organizational ambidexterity literature, we specify the nature of the tensions (between academic and commercially‐oriented activities) at both organizational and individual levels of analysis, and how these can be resolved. We develop hypotheses linking specific aspects of the organization and the individual researcher to the likelihood of their research projects generating commercial outcomes, and we test them using a novel dataset of 207 Research Council‐funded projects, combining objective data on project outcomes with the perceptions of principal investigators. We show that the tension between academic and commercial demands is more salient at the level of the individual researcher than at the level of the organization. Universities show evidence that they are able to manage the tensions between academic and commercial demands, through for example their creation of ‘dual structures’. At the individual level, on the other hand, the tensions are more acute, so that the people who deliver commercial outcomes tend to be rather different to those who are accustomed to producing academic outcomes.     

Open Innovation und Beziehungsmanagement bei Henkel

Eine Open-Innovation-Strategie greift auf externes Wissen zurück und steigert dadurch die unternehmensinterne Innovationskraft. Um auf externe Wissensquellen zurückzugreifen, stehen zahlreiche unterschiedliche Methoden zur Verfügung. Dieser Beitrag zeigt, zu welchem Zeitpunkt im Innovationsprozess bei Henkel welche Methoden eingesetzt werden und welche überlegungen dahinter stehen.     

Factors that Influence Children's Developing Perceptions of Technology

Two instruments designed to ascertain children's conceptions of ‘technology’ were given to 315 English children in Years 2–6. A subset of 81 children and their teachers were interviewed. Responses to the same instruments were collected from 745 Western Australian children in the same year groups. Subsequently their teachers and 164 Australian children were interviewed. The Australian and English children had a similar range of concepts to explain technology, but the frequency of concepts varied. The results suggest that the stages of developing an inclusive concept of technology are mainly chronological, but the rates vary with individuals depending on a number of inter-related factors including home and school influence, ability, gender and opportunity to discuss ideas. Examination of these factors suggests there is a need for specific curriculum provision in technology based on adequate in- service training of teachers, which should also clarify the differences between science and technology. Children also need to be enabled to clarify their ideas through focused activities. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bankers at the gate: Microfinance and the high cost of borrowed logics

In this paper we examine how the interaction between influences of commercial banking and poverty alleviation shaped the evolution of modern microfinance. Using institutional theory as a lens, we observe that the commercial banking logic increasingly displaced the microfinance field's foundational poverty alleviation and development principles over time. We argue that this process of displacement can occur inadvertently as organizations that embody multiple logics draw disproportionately on only one of those logics when developing legitimating accounts of their activity to stakeholders. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of permeability – the extent to which the elements of a logic are ambiguous and loosely coupled – to explain why some logics may be more or less open to the influence of other logics. We conclude by discussing implications for entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation more generally.     

Quantitative analyses of depth interviews

Prior research has relied on qualitative analyses of customers' responses during depth interviews. This article discusses how observational monitoring, subjective encoding, and automatic encoding can be used to quantitatively analyze depth interview data. It compares the benefits and costs of each method, and discusses computer software packages that assist in automatically encoding verbal data. In an innovative experiment, we compared observational monitoring and automatic encoding of customers' responses to open-ended questions about telecommunication services. We conclude that automatic encoding is a feasible method of analyzing depth interviews that provides detailed quantitative information about customers' responses.