The Internet of Things: Are you ready for what’s coming?

Are you ready for what’s coming? As senior managers look to connect products, processes, and services to the growing field of the Internet of Things (IoT), this is an important preliminary question. Leveraging the IoT for firm benefit involves revisiting certain ideas that may have gone unquestioned for a long time. In this article, we begin by reviewing the complexity of the IoT, the complexities of an increasingly interconnected environment, and the increasing need to develop partnerships in order to create innovative solutions. We then offer practical insights from a case in which three actors with reciprocal specialties cooperated to create an IoT solution in the form of a connected appliance. While a shared spirit of optimism prevailed throughout the endeavor, reaching the finish line meant jumping a few hurdles along the way. Finally, we describe a number of fundamental issues related to business models, partnership strategy, data ownership, and technology diffusion that every enterprise should address before diving headfirst into the Internet of Things.     

WICKEDNESS IN SOCIAL CHOICE

In an article from 1973, Rittel and Webber distinguished between ‘tame’ or ‘benign’ problems on the one hand and ‘wicked’ problems on the other. The authors argued that wicked problems occur in nearly all public policy issues. Since different groups adhere to different value-sets, solutions can only be expressed as better or worse. By no means can they be viewed as definitive or objective. In this paper we consider, from this very angle, the theory of social choice which is about the aggregation of individual preferences with the aim to derive a consistent social preference. We show that collective choice offers wicked problems of various types which differ in their degree of severity. We hereby concentrate on welfare functions and voting schemes of different kinds and discuss these in the light of various criteria such as Arrow's independence condition, Condorcet consistency, monotonicity, manipulability, and other properties.     

Identifying new dimensions of business incubation: A multi-level analysis of Karolinska Institute's incubation system

Relying on an in-depth case study of the incubator related to the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute's (KI), this paper identifies new analytical and strategic dimensions of incubation. Departing from the current literature's prevalent focus on incubators as organizations performing a predefined set of activities for incubatees (facility renting, coaching, training and connecting), we perform a multilevel analysis embracing, next to the organizational and the project-specific levels, also the broader institutional and inter-organizational level. Our analysis relies on seven key components of incubation, namely its time, place, sources, resources, control/governance, activities/services and outcomes. Further, we view incubators as strategic actors engaged in value creation on a broader arena than the strict incubation context, even an international arena, where incubators' choices and interactions can be analyzed with the help of concepts from various streams in the business strategy literature. The specific strategic drivers of business incubation that we identify in the KI incubator's case are six: positioning in the value chain, risk taking/time perspective, revenue model, governance/control, internationalization, and cooperation/competition. The paper concludes with managerial implications urging incubators to take more of a strategic perspective rather than focussing only on the established components of their operations.     

Stochastic optimization for investment in facilities in emergency prevention

A coordinated approach is developed to integrate three preventive measures (i.e. building reinforcement, reinforcement of road networks, and facility location of relief supplies), with the objectives of minimizing budgets and risk-induced penalties. The Conditional Value-at-Risk is employed as a decision-making tool to evaluate diverse decisions of prevention based on the degree of risk aversion. Based on a real-world case of an earthquake, a series of scenarios were designed, and the applicability of the proposed model was studied. The coordinated approach for investing preventive measures is cost-efficient in helping reduce the impact of disaster on society.     

Crowded identity: Managing crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation

In this article, we consider crowdsourcing from the consumer perspective. Specifically, we examine the identity value (i.e., sense of self) that consumers accrue by participating in creative crowds. How can managers structure crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation and expression? We strive to answer this question first by examining the different types of crowdsourcing initiatives from a value co-creation perspective. Then we evaluate how consumers construct identities through consumption and review the literature on identity theory. Finally, we link the identity type—personal, extended, or social—to the management of crowdsourcing ventures and offer suggestions for practitioners.     

中央企业上市公司环境责任与公司价值的相关性研究

本文以中央企业上市公司为样本,讨论国有企业环境责任与公司价值之间的关系。文章在控制公司规模、行业竞争力等变量的条件下,回归结果发现：中央企业上市公司环境责任与公司价值之间存在正相关关系,但不显著。因此,很难认为公司承担更多环境责任能够促进公司价值的增长。     

企业价值评估贴现模型的比较分析

贴现模型是企业价值评估中应用较为普遍的模型,但在我国实践中使用贴现模型存在很多问题。本文利用自由现金流量贴现法、调整现值法、经济利润贴现法三种常用的方法,探讨贴现模型不同参数指标的原理、使用原则、使用条件及在我国实践中的适应性,希望讨论能够为企业价值评估实务提供指导和帮助。     

论我国税收强制执行制度之完善

税收强制执行是税收征管程序中最为严厉的程序,是税收强制性特征最突出的表现,是保证税收得以实现的最后的但是又行之有效的措施,在各国的税收征收法律制度中均有明确的规定。然而税收强制执行直接关系到纳税人的利益,因此在对进行的税收强制执行规定中应当充分考虑国家利益与纳税人利益。我国《税收征管法》中虽然也建立了税收强制执行制度,但是在实践中该制度存在许多困惑,本文试图通过比较研究,探讨税收强制执行制度的进一步完善。     

Which Way is “Up” in Upgrading? Trajectories of Change in the Value Chain for South African Wine

Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis uses the concept of upgrading to highlight paths for developing country firms to “move up the value chain,” usually through the lenses of four categories—product, process, functional, and inter-sectoral upgrading. The implicit normative expectation is that these firms move toward producing higher value-added products and/or take on more sophisticated functions along a value chain. In this article, upgrading is approached more broadly as “reaching a better deal,” including a balance between rewards and risk. The case study of South African wine shows that better product quality, improved processes, and some functional upgrading have co-existed with processes of “downgrading,” higher risks, and limited rewards, especially in traditional export markets. A reflection on further conceptual development and directions for empirical research is also provided.