Realization of Open Innovation: A Case Study in the Manufacturing Industry

Continuous innovation is regarded as an imperative for most companies. In this regard, open innovation suggests a successful approach to new product development, wherein the emphasis is on external collaboration. Previous research has provided examples from some industries, whereas mature and traditional companies such as manufacturing firms have gained limited interest. Thus, this paper seeks to answer two critical questions: why should manufacturing companies shift toward open innovation approaches and how can they adopt open innovation for product development. Based on case study in two companies, a list of opportunities, challenges, and efforts for organizational change toward open innovation are discussed.     

Foreign Institutional Investment,Ownership, and Liquidity: Real and Informational Frictions

The literature widely documents the negative liquidity impact of foreign participation in firms that permit high foreign institutional ownership. This paper employs a unique setting for the limited participation of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) in China's A-share market and examines how this impacts on stock liquidity in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings in the literature, foreign investor participation helps enhance the liquidity of affected stocks by promoting trade activities and price discovery. The improvement in liquidity does not occur through the information friction channel, but rather the real friction channel. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue and the possible influence of the global financial crisis, industry effects and the stock exchange. Further, the liquidity improving effects of QFII are even stronger when the analysis is performed on a subsample of QFII firms.     

When More Poor Means Less Poverty: On Income Inequality and Purchasing Power

We show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality. As the number of poor increases, the market for products aimed toward the poor grows, and such products become more profitable. As a result, there are circumstances where an increase in income inequality associates with higher purchasing power of the poor. Using cross‐country data on the price of one kilogram of rice and the price of a Big Mac hamburger, we confirm a negative association between income inequality and the price of inferior goods, robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables. Results are also robust to a first difference specification and to a two‐stage instrumental variables approach. Examining economic well‐being, it is thus important to analyze not only the incomes of households, but also the prices of the products and services that they buy.     

Taking the Lab to the Field: Experimental Tests of Alternative Mechanisms to Procure Multiple Contracts

The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of the experiment is based on experiences from a public procurement auction of road markings in Sweden. Bidders are asymmetric in their cost functions; some exhibit decreasing average costs of winning more than one contract, whereas other bidders have increasing average cost functions. The combinatorial bidding mechanism is demonstrated to be most efficient. The second part of the paper describes how the lab experiment was followed up by a field test of a combinatorial procurement auction of road markings.     

Tenants' participation — A study of residential service planning

During recent years there has been a large interest in residential service in Sweden. Several experiments and investigations have been carried out concerning various service facilities in residential districts and attempts to let the tenants themselves participate in the planning of this service. One of the most comprehensive projects is the one that was conducted in the district of Högaholm in Malmö. This article reports from an evaluation of the planning procedure in this district, where opinions and wants of the tenants have been continually collected in order to make the residential service as good as possible. The article mainly comprises a presentation of how the tenants participated in the planning process, an analysis of the reasons why this planning failed in some respects and a comparison to other research in this field.

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Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit schwedischen Erfahrungen mit der Berücksichtigung von Mieterwünschen. Dem Versuch, Bewohner an der Planung ihrer eigenen Wohnumwelt zu beteiligen, war bereits eine Reihe von Untersuchungen gewidmet. Eines der umfassendsten Projekte ist im Gebiet von Högaholm in Malmö durchgeführt worden. Der Aufsatz berichtet über die Vorgehensweise bei der Planung in diesem Gebiet, bei der die Wünsche und Vorstellungen der Bewohner systematisch erfaßt wurden, um die Anlagen des Wohngebietes möglichst gut daran anzupassen. Er schildert vor allem, auf welche Weise die Bewohner in den Planungsprozeß einbezogen wurden, analysiert dann die Ursachen dafür, daß die Partizipation in mancher Beziehung fehlschlug, und zieht Vergleiche zu anderen Forschungsergebnissen.

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Jerker Nilsson is a Research Assistent at the Department of Business Administration, University of Lund, PO box, S-220 05 Lund 5, Sweden. He wishes to express his thanks to Britt Pedersen, who is a Lecturer at the Department of Building Function Analysis at the Lund Institute of Technology. Britt Pedersen has not only given valuable advice for this article, but she has also been deeply involved in the Högaholm experiment of residential service.     

CO2-Stabilization May Be a 'No-Regrets' Policy

Restricting CO₂ emissions requires changing today's consumption pattern away from energy and emission intensive commodities towards cleaner goods. The cost of stabilizing CO₂ emissions at the 1990 level by the year 2000, say, as compared to a business-as-usual trend, is estimated by several researchers to be on the order of 1% of GNP. We will argue that the cost may be overestimated because of a too simple model describing the working of the economic system and the evaluation of welfare. We demonstrate that by expanding a model to include the actual tax system and negative externalities, the cost to present generations from restricting emissions by a CO₂ tax may be negative. That is, some reduction may actually correspond to a 'no-regrets' policy. The reasons are inefficiencies in today's tax system and non-optimal handling of negative externalities. Our analysis suggests that a CO₂ tax and reduced emissions will lessen such inefficiencies.     

The effects of input tariffs on productivity: panel data evidence for OECD countries

Based on a panel of 16 OECD countries and 10 manufacturing industries over 1996–2007, this paper investigates the impact of tariffs on foreign intermediate goods on productivity growth in downstream manufacturing industries. The results show that imposing tariffs on imported intermediate goods is particularly harmful for industries that operate close to the global technological frontier. We also consider the possibility that input-tariff liberalisation may have different effects depending on the technological content of imported intermediate goods. Our findings suggest that protecting imports of high-technological goods is more harmful for productivity improvements in industries that operate close to global best practice.     

Intellectual structure of management innovation: bibliometric analysis

Management Review Quarterly - Due to the growing field of management innovation, there is a need to synthesise and reflect on the existing literature, inventory the work done and identify new...