Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle and The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us about Innovation by Frans Johansson

As Ruediger Klein leads off in this group of reviews, "Innovation is everywhere—or so it seems." Most of these reviews center on idea generation and processing. It will be interesting to see if—as Klein forecasts—this is indeed the decade of innovation and creativity.
In the next issue, we will try to be more balanced—or we may get even more creative!
Books reviewed in this issue:

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  Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas
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  The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us about Innovation
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  Getting to Innovation: How Asking the Right Questions Generates the Great Ideas Your Company Needs
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  Hidden in Plain Sight
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  Human Factors in Project Management
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  The Fast Path to Corporate Growth: Leveraging Knowledge and Technologies to New Market Applications

     

Interdependencies in the Dynamics of Firm Entry and Exit

This paper investigates the interdependence between firm entry and exit from an industrial dynamics perspective. The paper discusses how entry and exit rates in industrial sectors are affected by previous exit and entry rates. Economic theory presents two different approaches to how entry and exit of firms are interrelated, the multiplier effect and the competition effect. This paper intends to investigate which force is the predominant one, for entry and exit patterns, respectively. The empirical analysis is based on data for 25 Swedish manufacturing industries at the 2-digit SIC level, during the period 1991–2000. In the estimation work the study applies a dynamic panel data approach as suggested by Anderson and Hsiao [Journal of the American Statistical Association, 76:598–606, 1981] and Arellano and Bond [Review of Economic Studies, 58(2):277–297, 1991]. With respect to entry, the empirical results support the multiplier effect such that entry stimulates future entry, but also a competition effect such that past exit induces additional entry. With regard to exit, on the other hand, the competition effect rules, implying that previous entry causes subsequent exit and previous exit reduces subsequent exit.      

Orthogonalized factors and systematic risk decomposition

In the context of linear multi-factor models, this study proposes an egalitarian, optimal and unique procedure to find orthogonalized factors, which also facilitates the decomposition of the coefficient of determination. Importantly, the new risk factors may diverge significantly from the original ones. The decomposition of risk allows one to explicitly examine the impact of individual factors on the return variation of risky assets, which provides discriminative power for factor selection. The procedure is experimentally robust even for small samples. Empirically we find that even though, on average, approximately eighty (sixty-five) percent of style (industry) portfolios’ volatility is explained by the market and size factors, other factors such as value, momentum and contrarian still play an important role for certain portfolios. The components of systematic risk, while dynamic over time, generally exhibit negative correlation between market, on one side, and size, value, momentum and contrarian, on the other side.     

专有交易集市:你不知道的B2B

随着公共电子集市的崩溃，专有交易集市兴旺起来。因为它能够改善现有的供应链，使之充满活力