A critical overview of privacy-preserving approaches for collaborative forecasting

Cooperation between different data owners may lead to an improvement in forecast quality—for instance, by benefiting from spatiotemporal dependencies in geographically distributed time series. Due to business competitive factors and personal data protection concerns, however, said data owners might be unwilling to share their data. Interest in collaborative privacy-preserving forecasting is thus increasing. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art and unveils several shortcomings of existing methods in guaranteeing data privacy when employing vector autoregressive models. The methods are divided into three groups: data transformation, secure multi-party computations, and decomposition methods. The analysis shows that state-of-the-art techniques have limitations in preserving data privacy, such as (i) the necessary trade-off between privacy and forecasting accuracy, empirically evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments based on solar data; and (ii) iterative model fitting processes, which reveal data after a number of iterations.     

Intuition and rationality in intrapreneurship and innovation outputs: The case of health professionals in primary health care

The aim of this article is to explore the role of cognitive styles and intrapreneurship in health professionals’ innovation outputs, as well the mediated effect of intrapreneurship between cognitive styles and innovation output. This study used the survey method of data collection, through a self-administered questionnaire. Partial least square structural equation modelling method was used to analyse the result of the sample of 209 professionals of primary health care providers in Northern Portugal. Our findings reveal that cognitive style plays a significant role in intrapreneurship and innovation outputs, which are mediated by intrapreneurship. In particular, health care professionals with the rational cognitive style are likely to be more of a intrapreneur and innovative as compared to those with a intuitive cognitive style. Promoting intrapreneurship is crucial for successful innovation outputs. This study reveals that an understanding of the cognitive style of the health care professionals can help managers allocate appropriate individuals to different healthcare tasks. Our primary contribution to theory has been to highlight the importance of cognitive styles in intrapreneurship and innovation within the context of primary health care organizations.

     

What are the antecedents of women’s entrepreneurial orientation?

This study seeks to identify the antecedents of women’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and exploring what possible relationships that may exist between them. The research focuses on women entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs in a quantitative perspective whose methodology consisted of the collection of primary data through a survey distributed to women in Portugal. After structural equation modelling was applied, the results suggested that recognition of opportunities influences EO. This influence is expressed both directly and indirectly through training in management and entrepreneurial skills. These findings led to the conclusion that policies promoting training for community members, in general, need to be rethought and policies need to emphasise training in management that enhances entrepreneurial skills, thereby increasing the proliferation of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education and training should be promoted from basic education onwards in order to develop entrepreneurial skills from an early age. Prior to this study, the relationships between opportunity recognition, management training and entrepreneurial skills have never been studied in relation to women.     

Behavioral agency and corporate entrepreneurship: CEO equity incentives & competitive behavior

Scholars have long studied drivers of entrepreneurial behavior among established firms. Yet little is known about how individual factors shape a firm’s choice to pursue entrepreneurship. We draw on behavioral agency theory to explore the role of equity incentives in driving corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest CEOs avoid corporate entrepreneurial behaviors as their option wealth increases. However industry dynamics also prove to be an important contingency when predicting the effects of both restricted stock and stock options on the likelihood that the CEO engages in corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings provide a theoretical platform for predicting dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior and highlight effects of CEO equity ownership.

     

Integriertes Innovationscontrolling

Die Kosten für Innovationen nehmen immer bedeutendere Ausma?e an, die immer weniger mit den erst in der Projektdurchführung ansetzenden traditionellen Instrumenten des Innovations- und Projektcontrollings in den Griff zu bekommen sind.     

Environmentally conscious consumption: The role of retailers and peers as external influences

Environmentally conscious consumption is one of the key concerns in modern society generally, and increasingly among the consumer population. However, consumers often overstate their willingness to purchase environmentally conscious products, with global purchasing of these products relatively low. Much research has considered the role of drivers internal to an individual in making such consumption choices; however there is less knowledge as to how external influences may impact environmentally conscious consumption behaviour. As retailers increasingly strive to adopt and communicate their environmentally sustainable business practices, and encourage parallel consumer behavior, the question arises: what role do retailers play in influencing consumers’ environmentally conscious consumption? In this paper we investigate this notion, specifically how external influences (the retailer and peers) impact environmentally conscious behavior. We investigate this behavior in terms of two outcomes; sustainable consumption (direct costs) and willingness to accept environmental taxes (indirect costs). Our research demonstrates that retailers can influence consumers to be more environmentally conscious in their consumption, with retailer influence a stronger mediator than peers in this relationship. One important implication of this research is that retailers have the opportunity to shape environmentally conscious consumption if they adopt sustainable business practices.