Connecting technological capabilities with market needs using a cyclic innovation model

One of the key limitations of current models of innovation is that they still represent variations on the familiar pipeline architecture. In addition, they are not embedded in the strategic issues of company boards and therefore remain isolated entities. Equally, the activity of entrepreneurship, while long recognized as a key factor in firm innovation management, is not captured and is inadvertently understated or only implied at best. We find that there is incongruence between current theoretical models and innovation practice. We offer a socio‐technical framework that replaces the family of linear concepts by a cyclic alternative. It combines hard and soft sciences, bridges research and development and marketing communities and helps firms and policy makers to better understand the iterative nature of the innovation process.     

In the footsteps of Anne Frank,The Beatles and Vincent Van Gogh: a review and discussion of personal legacy trails

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a review and discussion of personal legacy trails. A detailed analysis and reconstruction of tourism in the footsteps of Anne Frank and the management of the involved sites form the main case study here. The short life of Anne Frank in perilous times has attracted the attention of millions of readers as well as visitors to the places closely associated with her life path: Frankfurt, her birth place in 1929, Aachen, Amsterdam (including her place in hiding 1942–1944), Transit Camp Westerbork, Concentration Camp Auschwitz and at last Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister Margot died in March 1945. A general discussion of the importance of personal legacy trails follows in the last third of the paper. This section examines cases of the popularized legacy of well-known artists and musicians in local/regional settings, such as The Beatles in Liverpool, and tourism in the search of Van Gogh’s Provence. Finally, the commonalities in the personal legacy trails of ordinary US citizens is discussed and shown for the visitation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall and for the Wall of Honor on Ellis Island.     

FISCAL EXPANSIONS,UNEMPLOYMENT, AND LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: THEORY AND EVIDENCE*

Structural VARs indicate that for many OECD countries labor force participation, employment, and the unemployment rate significantly increase following increases in government expenditures under a variety of specifications and identification schemes. Fiscal expansions also tend to increase real wages. Existing models have difficulties in generating such responses. We show that the empirical regularities can be reproduced with two additions into a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions: (a) a labor force participation choice and (b) workers’ heterogeneity.     

Predicting Corporate Failure in the UK: A Multidimensional Scaling Approach

Scaling techniques are proposed as a tool for the analysis and prediction of corporate failure. This approach, while keeping a strong theoretical basis, has the advantage of visualising the main features of the data in the form of statistical maps that lend themselves to intuitive interpretation. The maps contain directional statistics to help with interpretation. The methodology is demonstrated using a sample of UK industrial companies. A future‐dated holdout sample is also employed to illustrate how the Multidimensional Scaling technique can aid practitioners when assessing the financial health of a company.     

Stabilizing an unstable economy: Fiscal and monetary policy,stocks, and the term structure of interest rates

Monetary and fiscal policy measures have been applied in order to avert the financial market collapse and counteract the global recession. In this paper we present an integrated macromodel which in particular focuses on the financial markets. We use a Tobin-like macroeconomic portfolio approach, and the interaction of heterogeneous agents on the financial market to characterize the potential for financial market instability. We show that specific but unorthodox fiscal and monetary policies have to be used to stabilize such unstable macroeconomies.     

How formal performance evaluation affects trust between superior and subordinate managers

An important question in the control literature concerns the role of interpersonal trust in the design and functioning of formal control systems for collaborative settings. In this paper, we argue that subordinate’s trust in the superior depends on the formality of the performance evaluation procedure and that this relationship is mediated by managerial perceptions of justice and feedback. The findings confirm our predictions. Furthermore, we find that formality matters more for trust formation for those managers that are in functions with less contractible outputs.     

The Implications of the Home Bias in Equity Portfolios

Although the diversification benefits of international investment are well documented, many large equity portfolios remain heavily concentrated in their domestic stock market. The reason for this is sometimes given as a desire to hedge domestic inflation by holding domestic equities. The evidence is, however, that equities do not hedge inflation in this way for the types of investment horizon relevant to most portfolios. An alternative explanation is that there are costs, such as taxes, which prevent investors taking full advantage of international diversification. The magnitude of these costs necessary to explain the level of "home bias" is above the level of observable costs, such as withholding taxes. The implications of these results are that international capital markets are segmented not only by costs and restrictions, but also by other informational imperfections. They also imply that international corporate investment and financing decisions depend on the location of the investing company.