IAMOT and Education: Defining a Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Body-of-Knowledge (BoK) for graduate education (TIM BoK)

Whether it is called Management of Technology and Innovation (MOTI), Management of Technology (MOT), Engineering Technology Management (ETM) or Technology and Innovation Management (TIM), the TIM field is rapidly growing and diverse. This diversity is built upon disparate university locations of TIM programs; TIM’s emerging nature, its wide appeal as well as unique researcher and practitioner viewpoints. This has created a plethora of education materials, benchmark programs and pedagogical thought. Yet the field is growing so rapidly that no single source has yet been established which clearly identifies which topics and educational materials represents its basic Body of Knowledge (BoK). If this is so, then there is cause for concern.We review TIM pedagogy studies, TIM research, and the economic realities that initiated and continue to demand TIM education for managers. We leverage the five-year body of knowledge development activities of the International Association for the Management of Technology (IAMOT) education committee. We then develop a TIM BoK topic list and survey stakeholders that include: academics, industrial professionals and government policy makers. We found that there is a need for and convergence on a comprehensive TIM BoK source. The result is a TIM BoK source document that can be utilized to improve and monitor TIM educational programs around the world.     

Innovation and the Economy

Unemployment has remained at relatively high levels across most European countries for a generation now. There have been a number of suggested explanations for this, with correspondingly different policy implications. Two of the major hypotheses relate, first, to the impact on the European economies from increased international competition, and 'globalisation' more generally, and, secondly, to the effects of new technology and innovation. The effects of both globalisation and technology on growth and employment in Europe have been researched over the past two years through an EU-funded project, the results of which, relating in particular to innovation, are reported in this Special Issue of the International Review of Applied Economics. (The results relating to globalisation were reported in a Special Issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics , Volume 13.) It is clear from the empirical work reported that the effects of technological innovation have been mixed. There is no doubt that some innovation has had a negative effect on employment, without the compensatingly positive effects that new technology usually brings in its wake. However, in high technology manufacturing sectors there is scope for boosting both productivity and employment. But this requires an appropriate policy environment, conducive to increased investment in capital, R&D and the workforce itself.     

Multinational Firms and Labor Market Pooling

In the presence of increasing specialization of workers it becomes more and more difficult for firms to find the most suitable workers. In such an environment a multinational enterprise (MNE) has an advantage because it can exchange workers between plants in different countries. Recruiting from the home and foreign plant leads to a larger labor market pool for an MNE, reducing the mismatch of its workforce. This paper analyzes the consequences of this advantage for production, employment, prices and wages. In line with recent empirical results, we find that the additional ability to recruit workers from the home and foreign labor market leads to lower mismatch, higher average productivity of workers, lower prices, higher output, and higher employment of a plant of an MNE as compared with a national firm, while the wage‐effects depend on firm productivity.     

Which Vested Interests Do Central Banks Really Serve? Understanding Central Bank Policy Since the Global Financial Crisis

Inspired by Thorstein Veblen’s ideas, I analyze the behavior of central banks from the perspective of how institutions are captured by vested interests. Since the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been a shift in the conduct of monetary policy. Much like the behavior of asset holders themselves, who, in times of crisis, sought to trade off lower returns with more stable asset values, monetary policy changed from a de facto policy of stabilizing rentier income to one of preserving asset prices or rentier wealth. I analyze this particularly through the lenses of what happened with quantitative easing (QE) in the US, which coincided with a collapse of real interest rates, while asset prices were stabilized. This can also be seen in the way the banking sector was supported by QE where the market for mortgage-backed securities was sustained even as it actually meant a lower profitability for the overall U.S. banking sector during the QE interventions.     

Higher Taxes for Fiscal Consolidation? Expected and Unexpected Effects of Municipal Tax Policy

International Advances in Economic Research - During episodes of fiscal consolidation in public budgets, there are different instruments to choose from. The literature shows broad consensus that...     

Diversity in innovation and productivity in Europe

The diversity in innovation patterns across manufacturing and service industries and in their outcomes in terms of hourly labor productivity are investigated in this article considering six European countries. The Schumpeterian insights into the variety of innovation are developed in this work by identifying different innovation–performance relationships for industries and countries, relying either on the dominant role of product innovation, or on the diffusion of process improvements. Moreover, the “push” effect of innovation is combined with the “pull” effect of demand, by considering the impact of the dynamics of consumption and investment at the sectoral level. The results point out a “North-South” divide across EU countries, with the three countries of Northern Europe closely associated to the model of productivity growth based on product innovation, and the three Southern countries, mainly relying on the mechanisms by which process innovation is at the root of productivity improvements.     

R&D financing and growth

ABSTRACT

R&D investment are an important engine of growth and development. Yet economists have often claimed underinvestment, based on the consideration that these projects are more costly to finance, especially, due to the asymmetric information between inside and outside investors. Coherently, a recent empirical evidence has shown that firms intensively active in R&D are less leveraged and rely more heavily on internal finance. Motivated by this evidence, we study the effects of asymmetric information and financial frictions within a GE economy of Schumpeterian tradition. The model and equilibrium concept are rich enough to represent investment and innovation decisions, technology adoption/diffusion through patent licensing and, most importantly, firms' financial decisions. In this representation, R&D-intensive firms might effectively rely more on internal sources and equity than on debt financing, relative to what would happen in frictionless markets. Further, financial decisions affect aggregate investment and income dynamics.     

Dynamic common factors in large cross-sections

This paper develops a method to analyze large cross-sections with non-trivial time dimension. The method (i) identifies the number of common shocks in a factor analytic model; (ii) estimates the unobserved common dynamic component; (iii) shows how to test for fundamentalness of the common shocks; (iv) quantifies positive and negative comovements at each frequency. We illustrate how the proposed techniques can be used for analyzing features of the business cycle and economic growth.