DECODING DEMAND OPPORTUNITIES

Classic marketing techniques, such as the use of focus groups or ethnographies, miss the enormous opportunities that can be leveraged once companies commit to understanding consumers in the context of life experiences. Erich Joachimsthaler and Markus Pfeiffer believe it's time to think about the ecosystem of demand.     

Technischer Fortschritt als Kostenfaktor

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Book Reviews

Review of World Economics -     

World dynamics

In this review of Jay W. Forrester's World Dynamics¹, the first model of the whole world system is described and its potential assessed. The background notion is that the rational revolution, for the first time in mankind's evolution, depends on anticipatory action, not on mere reaction to crises. Computer modelling has a powerful potential of increasing our awareness in areas where human thinking fears to tread ; so that by dealing with a multitude of pressures that may destroy the world systems, world policies might be introduced designed to cope with the pressures simultaneously.     

Long waves in world industrial production,energy consumption,innovations, inventions,and patents and their identification by spectral analysis

Long-term cycles have been much discussed in the literature since Kondratieff (1926). (“Cycles” is, of course, a quite arbitrary term for these time periods.) Spectral analysis was applied by the authors to long-time series of industrial production, energy consumption, inventions, innovations, and patents in order to reveal quantitative regularities in their behavior and or in their interdependence. An attempt was also made to identify logistics within those time series. In the long cycle of 50–53 years no significant autocorrelation could be detected. Logistics exist only in three special periods for innovations and inventions. Nondominant long cycles do appear in the interaction between innovations, production, patents, and energy consumption. The investigation shed light on the causal structure of the innovation system. In particular, it revealed a significant influence of industrial production on patents with a lag of 9 years.