Modelling the incentive to participate in open source biopharmaceutical innovation

The open source model provides a valuable framework for collective knowledge production and dissemination. Open knowledge networks and other cooperative strategies (classified as open source discovery initiatives) are enabling biopharmaceutical companies to access disembodied knowledge‐based resources critical to downstream drug development. The objective of these cooperative strategic alliances is to preserve the downstream technological opportunities for multiple firms. When upstream discovery research cannot yield commercial products and when the costs associated with excessive upstream competition are too high, companies jointly benefit from cooperative knowledge production and open knowledge dissemination. An analysis of 39 open source initiatives (consortia) provides us with information on: the likely participants in such initiatives, the focus of knowledge production activities, the characteristics of the knowledge generated, and the management of joint knowledge assets. Based on this analysis, we use game models to understand the decision to participate in such strategic alliances better. Our game models provide a simple but elegant framework for understanding the impact of changing knowledge structures on the payoffs associated with cooperation and defection in knowledge production, and therefore on behaviour.     

农村社会养老保险制度存在的问题及解决思路

随着我国人口老龄化进程加速.建立农村社会养老保险制度.是建设社会主义新农村发展的需要,是让农民享有国民待遇的具体体现,也是解决三农问题、实现城乡及经济和社会协调发展的一个重要途径.本文探究了农村社会养老保险制度中存在的主要问题,并有针对性地提出了解决的思路.     

Philanthropy, Integration or Innovation? Exploring the Financial and Societal Outcomes of Different Types of Corporate Responsibility

This article argues that previous research on the outcomes of corporate responsibility should be refined in two ways. First, although there is abundant research that addresses the link between corporate responsibility (CR) and financial performance, hardly any studies scrutinize whether the type of corporate responsibility makes a difference to this link. Second, while the majority of CR research conducted within business studies concentrates on the financial outcomes for the firm, the societal outcomes of CR are left largely unexplored. To tackle these two deficiencies, this article extends the different conceptualizations of corporate responsibility and elaborates both the financial and the societal outcomes of different types of CR.     

Fluidity of places in everyday food consumption: Introducing snackscapes

Snack consumption encompasses the repetitive habits of consumers in various everyday life spaces. Despite the pervasiveness of snack consumption worldwide, the phenomenon of snacking has not been given extensive attention, unlike other areas of food consumption research. Yet, snacking shows certain distinctive features, such as fluidity of places. This study leans on foodscape literature and introduces the concept of snackscape, which enables us to showcase the multiplicity of places in snacking culture. While prior foodscape studies are located in certain tangible places, such as urban surroundings, festival sites or particular geographical areas, snackscapes demonstrate how snacks may be consumed, for instance, on the move from one place to another, or in a variety of places that are not part of one's ordinary routines, such as on a picnic or a holiday trip to a foreign country. The findings show how places of habitual snack consumption vary from time to time—or are even on the move. This is a powerful demonstration of how a routine‐like consumption practice takes place in everyday life. This study also highlights important consumer policy issues, especially in regard to young consumers and their snacking habits. Thereby, the study brings forward the agentic capacity of snackscapes having implications on engaging in healthier snack consumption.     

Differential Market Reactions to Revenue and Expense Surprises

This study investigates investors' reactions to revenue and expense surprises around preliminary earnings announcements. Results show that investors value more highly a dollar of revenue surprise than a dollar of expense surprise. Results further show that these differential market reactions to revenue and expense surprises vary systematically for growth versus value firms and depend on (a) the proportion of variable to total costs, (b) the relative persistence of sales and expenses, and (c) the proportion of operating to total expenses. Results highlight the importance of interpreting the earnings surprise in the context of its sources—e.g. surprise in revenues or in total expenses.     

Understanding co‐consumption between consumers and their pets

Pets live with people; they participate in people's everyday life activities and are often seen as human‐like family members. Consumers in the industrialized countries are investing more money in their pets and spending more time with them than ever before. The pet and the owner can even be considered to form a unit that consumes together. In this article, we develop a conceptual understanding of co‐consumption by examining how pets act as co‐consumers in everyday consumption. The pet owner and pet have joint consumption experiences in which they interact with other actors such as service providers. The consumer (pet owner) consumes because of the pet, meaning that he or she constantly needs to take the pet into account in choices and activities beyond pet‐related consumption, such as what kind of car to buy, where to work, whom to marry and how to live. The co‐consumer (pet) also acts as an active agent who experiences, feels, suffers and likes the goods and services that the consumer buys for the pet. Reciprocally, the pet provides the consumer (pet owner) with companionship, support and a boost to wellbeing. As such, our research suggests that co‐consumption provides an understanding not only of consumption with pets but also of other contexts, especially those in which the aim is shared well‐being such as consumption together with children, the disabled or the elderly.     

Strategies for Integrating Stakeholders into Sustainability Innovation: A Configurational Perspective

Sustainability is a key driver of innovation for products, services, and business models. Sustainability innovations are aimed at improving the environmental, social, and economic performance of the innovated solution. Given the complexity of many sustainability challenges, leading innovators may seek to boost their innovation capacity by tapping into the ideas, knowledge, and expertise of their stakeholders. In doing so they need to consider how many and which stakeholders to integrate into new product development (NPD) processes, and at what stage. This study investigates stakeholder integration strategies associated with high sustainability performance of innovation. Building on the literatures of sustainability innovation and stakeholder integration in the context of NPD, this study developed a configurational model to analyze stakeholder integration strategies. The empirical data consisted of 80 interviews and documents from 13 medium to large companies and their stakeholders in Europe. Using the fsQCA method, it was found that there is not just one effective strategy but three stakeholder integration strategies for high sustainability performance of innovation. The results imply that deep organizational engagement with stakeholders is necessary for the achievement of high performance. Otherwise, the three strategies range from progressive openness, which allows stakeholders to exert a fundamental influence on the sustainability innovation, to limited openness toward stakeholder integration. With the early secondary strategy pointing to progressive openness, companies integrate secondary stakeholders early on and so maximize the influence of different views on the innovation. As to limited openness, companies following the selective strategy limit the number of stakeholder groups in NPD but are indifferent to the timing of these groups’ inputs. Finally, the fine‐tuning strategy is least open to atypical views as it restricts the share of secondary stakeholders and only allows external inputs after the fuzzy front end phase when key decisions regarding the innovation have been made.     

Mobile banking and consumer behaviour: New insights into the diffusion pattern

Technological advancement has challenged the providers of financial services; the very nature of selling and buying financial services has changed. Mobile devices are among the newest channels to conduct banking electronically. This paper focuses on studying diffusion and adopters of mobile banking services. Previous research has identified the typical characteristics of a potential adopter in the electronic services era; this paper explores some contradictory empirical findings drawn from a mobile banking survey. The results provide an indication of the characteristics of potential subsequent adopters of mobile banking, and of differences between user segments. Consequently, the authors are able to comment on the influence of certain demographic characteristics and the preferred communication mode of customers on the adoption and future usage of mobile banking services. The quantitative survey that sheds more light on this researched issue employed a traditional method of postal questionnaire. The data were collected in Finland during May–July 2002 and include 1,253 survey responses.