International regulation and air transport

The future growth of world tourism is inextricably linked to the growth of the air transport industry. Trends in the industry will thus have an important bearing on tourism development strategies. This article reviews the past, present and likely future of the regulation of the air transport industry.     

Bayesian estimation of truncated data with applications to operational risk measurement

Data insufficiency and reporting threshold are two main issues in operational risk modelling. When these conditions are present, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) may produce very poor parameter estimates. In this study, we first investigate four methods to estimate the parameters of truncated distributions for small samples—MLE, expectation-maximization algorithm, penalized likelihood estimators, and Bayesian methods. Without any proper prior information, Jeffreys’ prior for truncated distributions is used. Based on a simulation study for the log-normal distribution, we find that the Bayesian method gives much more credible and reliable estimates than the MLE method. Finally, an application to the operational loss severity estimation using real data is conducted using the truncated log-normal and log-gamma distributions. With the Bayesian method, the loss distribution parameters and value-at-risk measure for every cell with loss data can be estimated separately for internal and external data. Moreover, confidence intervals for the Bayesian estimates are obtained via a bootstrap method.     

The Transformation of the Innovation Process: How Digital Tools are Changing Work,Collaboration, and Organizations in New Product Development*

Over the past several decades, digitization has invaded all areas of human activity, including innovation. The result of digitization of existing tools for design and collaboration, and the introduction of entirely new digital tools, is a far more substantive change of innovation than previous generations of tools enabled. It affects not only the quality of the output and speed of its generation, but it affects the innovation work itself, changes work content, collaboration patterns, decision authority, organizational set‐ups, governance structures, firm boundaries, and ultimately entire ecosystems. In this paper, the digitization of New Product Development (NPD), a subset of innovation, is studied to pursue two research questions: (1) How has the digital tool landscape in NPD changed over the past 15 years, and (2) how have these changes affected how firms innovate? This research uses a longitudinal multi‐method, qualitative approach to deep dive into actual use cases of digital design tools such as computer‐aided design CAD and new tools such as collaborative information technology (CIT). The changes in these tools and observations into how these tools are transforming the very nature of how things are designed is the research focus of this study. These tools have become increasingly more sophisticated while being easier to use and are integrated earlier in the design process. As a result, digital tools have a far broader reaching impact than previous generation of tools. Not only do they affect output and process efficiency, but they also increase depth and breadth of the work of individual innovators, they lead to rearrangement of the entire innovation processes, enable new configurations of people, teams, and firms, and rewrite the rules on how knowledge management acts as a critical competitive capability. The progression of digitization is laying the groundwork for changes to what firms are and do and points to different ways of organizing, specializing, and training for NPD professionals.     

THE BENEFITS OF LARGE-SCALE,MULTI-SITE INTERNATIONALLY FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS: An Example of New Academic Insights and New Funding Possibilities

There are a number of benefits to large-scale, multi-site, internationally funded urban research projects if they are operationalized in ways that acknowledge forms of knowledge incommensurability and allow for space to explore the commensurability of different forms of knowledge across different geographies. Such projects are especially important in the context of the precarity of research funding, as such projects can provide the space to explore new urban research avenues that may not have formed core components of the existing urban studies canon and may also bring with them significant and new funding possibilities. In this intervention I use the example of the GCRF-funded PEAK Urban programme to consider how new urban research questions related to sexuality and health were brought to the fore during the life of the programme, which offer not only new research avenues, but also potential access to significant new funding sources. Programmes such as PEAK Urban therefore have the potential to build the long-term resilience of urban research. Cutting funding to such programmes may therefore limit the efficacy of the programmes themselves and the long-term sustainability of urban scholarship.