asset transformation and the challenges to servitize a utility business model abstract the traditional energy utility business model is under pressure and energy services are expected to play an important role for the energy transition experts and scholars argue that utilities need to innovate their business models and transform from commodity suppliers to service providers the transition from a product oriented capital intensive business model based on tangible assets towards a service oriented expense intensive business model based on intangible assets may present great managerial and organizational challenges little research exists about such transitions for capital intensive commodity providers and particularly energy utilities where the challenges to servitize are expected to be greatest this qualitative paper explores the barriers to servitization within selected swiss and german utility companies through a series of interviews with utility managers one of them is asset transformation the shift from tangible to intangible assets as major input factor for the value proposition which is proposed as a driver for the complexity of business model transitions managers need to carefully manage those challenges and find ways to operate both new service and established utility business models aside policy makers can support the transition of utilities through more favorable regulatory frameworks for energy services and by supporting the exchange of knowledge in the industry

the implications of financial cooperation in israel s semi cooperative villages abstract financial cooperation through credit sharing and co signing of debts was a source of strength for israel s semi cooperative moshavim in the early decades of their development but such cooperation entails a potential free rider problem when farmers borrowings are uncoordinated and recent events in israel have demonstrated the severe implications it can have this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the externalities generated by financial cooperation and tests its conclusions empirically using israeli data simulation results indicate that the potential instability of financial cooperation is aggrevated when the moshav population is heterogeneous

the effects of human resource management practices on productivity a study of steel finishing lines the authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies the productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices which include incentive pay teams flexible job assignments employment security and training achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach which includes narrow job definitions strict work rules and hourly pay with close supervision their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices

managing the protection of innovations in knowledge intensive business services abstract how do knowledge intensive business services kibs protect their inventions from imitation by rival firms when choosing among various protection mechanisms data from the 2003 statistics canada innovation survey on services are used to investigate this issue by looking into complementarities substitution and independence among eight protection mechanisms a multivariate probit mvp model is estimated to take into account the fact that kibs simultaneously consider many alternative intellectual property ip protection methods when they attempt to protect their innovations results show that patents registration of design patterns trademarks secrecy and lead time advantages over competitors constitute legal and informal methods that are used jointly these complementarities suggest that ip protection mechanisms that are interdependent and reinforce each other to protect innovations from imitation by rival firms constitute a pattern on which firms rely to protect their innovations from imitation a second pattern is based on the fact that kibs rely on patents and complexity of designs as substitutes and tend to use registration of design patterns and complexity of designs as substitutes in protecting their innovations from imitation a third emerging pattern concerns protection mechanisms that are independent from each other and exhibit no synergy and do not reinforce each other to protect innovations from imitation by other firms

one cow one vote we study investment decisions in a farmers cooperative farmers sell their products through the cooperative before production takes place the cooperative has to decide on an investment we study whether voting on investment leads to efficient investment decisions the answer depends on how the number of votes and the cost of the investment are distributed among the farmers it is shown that in a variety of settings there is no reason to suppose that voting rules favoring large farmers one cow one vote rules are more efficient than simple majority rule

patenting in the shadow of competitors this article empirically examines the patenting behavior of new biotechnology firms that have different litigation costs i show that firms with high litigation costs are less likely to patent in subclasses with many other awards particularly those of firms with low litigation costs this pattern is consistent with the literature on costly litigation which suggests that firms that have high litigation costs will take greater precautions to avoid litigation these results are robust to a variety of control variables and modifications that seek to test alternative explanations

patents versus ex post rewards a new look abstract economic studies that aim at comparing the patent system social efficiency versus an ex post reward system rest on an outdated view of patents they assume that firms use the patent system only in order to be granted a short term commercial monopoly rent this assumption is convenient because it allows straightforward comparisons between patents and rewards but it is not confirmed by empirical studies which stress that in many industries most firms use patents as strategic devices to trade technologies and to ease r d collaborations this change leads to rethinking the framework of the patent reward debate

value creation and corporate diversification the case of sears roebuck co abstract we provide clinical evidence of corporate restructuring at sears roebuck co beginning with the firm s 1981 diversification into financial services by acquiring coldwell banker co and dean witter reynolds inc the initial purchases resulted in a wealth gain to shareholders of approximately 400 million anticipated synergies did not materialize however and sears retail performance deteriorated coincident with pressure from institutional investor activists in 1992 sears announced the divestiture of financial services and a refocusing on retail operations this led to a 1 113 billion gain for shareholders despite more than 1 5 billion in gains over the entire diversification divestiture period sears shareholders suffered a significant opportunity loss when compared with a portfolio of focused firms

public service innovation and multiple institutional logics the case of hybrid social enterprise providers of health and wellbeing public sector organisations are confronted with growing health and social care needs in combination with severe resource constraints prompting interest in innovative responses to such challenges public service innovation is poorly understood particularly where innovators must navigate between the norms practices and logics of public private and civil society sectors we contribute to the understanding of how innovating hybrid organisations are able to creatively combine co existing logics case study evidence from newly established social enterprise providers of health and wellbeing services in england is utilised to examine how innovations are shaped by i an incumbent state or public sector logic and two challenger logics relating to ii the market and increasing competition and iii civil society emphasising social value and democratic engagement with employees and service users the analysis shows how a more fluid and creative interplay of logics can be observed in relation to specific strategies and practices within organisations these strategies relate to the empowerment of staff to be creative financial management and knowledge sharing and protection the interplay of logics shaping social innovation is also found in relationships with key stakeholders notably public sector funders service users and service delivery partners implications are drawn for innovation in public services and hybrid organisations more broadly

emergent innovation systems and the delivery of clinical services the case of intra ocular lenses abstract this paper is an exploration of the dynamics of technical change in medicine we argue that innovation in medicine is a process that is distributed across time space and epistemic and institutional domains that it entails the entrepreneurial effort of creative individuals as well as the emergence of correlated understanding among heterogeneous agents whose rules of interaction are contingently instituted in socio economic systems along unfolding scientific and technological trajectories we illustrate our arguments through an in depth analysis of a major ophthalmologic innovation the intra ocular lens that has literally transformed the treatment of cataract in the developed world and has the potential to do so in many developing countries we investigate the advancement of clinical knowledge about the disease the development of effective technological capabilities and the co evolution of the supply capacity and demand of a micro innovation system emerged along a specific sequence of interrelated problems and associated solutions which engaged scientists technicians practitioners regulators and patients alike over a period of around three decades

cooperative income allocation in a multi output multi input setting abstract joint enterprises usually allocate returns among member firms in proportion to the value of resources which members have contributed unfortunately market valuations of such resources often are unavailable or poorly represent the resources contributions to enterprise profitability the present paper shows hedonic methods can be used to provide a general formulation of a resource s contribution to cooperative or joint income even when heterogeneous resources are commingled prior to final product sale the formulation is employed to allocate net returns among enterprise members such that no member subsidizes another

patents licensing and market structure in the chemical industry abstract the strategies of rent appropriation and industry structure are inter dependent how firms use patents depends upon industry structure and in turn affects industry structure in the 19th century market leaders in the chemical industry combined patents and secrecy to deter entry within cartels patents were used to stabilize cartels and organize technology licensing the role of patents changed in the less concentrated post world war ii markets in bulk organic chemicals and petrochemicals chemical producers use licensing as an important means of generating revenue from process innovations the increased importance of technology licensing is closely related to the emergence of a class of specialized process design and engineering firms that have played an important role in the development and diffusion of process innovations

profiting from business model innovation evidence from pay as you drive auto insurance the emergent business model literature revolving mainly around the mechanisms through which new business models create and deliver value has left the value capture challenge under explored this paper examines how an incumbent firm profits from business model innovation through the study of pay as you drive auto insurance although business models do not warrant formal intellectual property ip protection their constituent components e g business methods and brands often do drawing on the profiting from innovation framework we find that formal and strategic ip protection methods play complementary roles initially formal ip rights are used primarily as a defensive strategy as vehicles for packaging and trading know how and most importantly as a means of buying time to build specialised complementary assets long term competitiveness however depends on whether the innovator builds a strong position in specialised complementary assets and is capable of reconfiguring them over time in line with changes in the market environment thus we explicate the complex mechanism and dynamic capability for capturing value from business model innovation

testing for complementarities in reduced form regressions a note abstract in many cases it is important to know whether choice variables for a decision maker are mutual complements but a structural model cannot be estimated a unified framework for testing for complementarity through reduced form regressions is provided

the role of the business model in capturing value from innovation evidence from xerox corporation s technology spin off companies this paper explores the role of the business model in capturing value from early stage technology a successful business model creates a heuristic logic that connects technical potential with the realization of economic value the business model unlocks latent value from a technology but its logic constrains the subsequent search for new alternative models for other technologies later on an implicit cognitive dimension overlooked in most discourse on the topic we explore the intellectual roots of the concept offer a working definition and show how the xerox corporation arose by employing an effective business model to commercialize a technology rejected by other leading companies of the day we then show the long shadow that this model cast upon xerox s later management of selected spin off companies from xerox parc xerox evaluated the technical potential of these spin offs through its own business model while those spin offs that became successful did so through evolving business models that came to differ substantially from that of xerox the search and learning for an effective business model in failed ventures by contrast were quite limited

the dynamics of technological change in uk retail banking services an evolutionary perspective abstract the purpose of this paper is to elaborate an evolutionary perspective on the process of structural change that has characterized the banking industry in the united kingdom uk for this purpose the evolution of retail financial services is contrasted against the backdrop of the implementation and development of information and communication technologies icts the paper delves into the sources and the effects of technological change in banking over a long term perspective 1840s 1990s to point out the significance of the opportunities and the constraints that have shaped the growth and development of this industry this is interpreted as a three stage evolutionary process driven by intertemporal coordination across several complementary domains including activities of production business organization consumption and the underlying regulatory setting it is concluded that the evolution of uk retail banking displays the characteristics of a distributed process of innovation in which developers of technologies service suppliers and customers contribute to the process of structural change of the industry

scope and patterns of innovation cooperation in spanish service enterprises abstract examining 2148 innovating service firms from the spanish technological innovation panel 2004 this paper utilizes latent class analysis to appraise the scope of innovation cooperation in services in the spanish economy in accordance with the growing weight of external information flows throughout innovation processes the empirical evidence indicates that the nature of the service activity affects both the partner chosen and the cooperation intensity the results lead to the creation of a typology of cooperation composed of three broad profiles service firms intensive in techno scientific cooperation intensive in interactions with clients and a profile with low intensity in cooperation called lonely innovators the probability that a firm belongs to the latter profile is 59 which makes it reasonable to affirm that innovation cooperation is not a common practice in spanish innovating service enterprises innovation output variables have been included in order to examine the relationship between patterns of cooperation and innovation performance the findings also underline the co existence of different cooperation patterns within the same industry

should central banks respond to movements in asset prices in recent decades asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in both industrial and developing countries in light of this experience how if at all should central bankers respond to asset price volatility we have addressed this issue in previous work bernanke and gertler 1999 the context of our earlier study was the relatively new but increasingly popular monetary policy framework known as inflation targeting see e g bernanke and frederic mishkin 1997 in an inflation targeting framework publicly announced medium term inflation targets provide a nominal anchor for monetary policy while allowing the central bank some flexibility to help stabilize the real economy in the short run the inflation targeting approach gives a specific answer to the question of how central bankers should respond to asset prices changes in asset prices should affect monetary policy only to the extent that they affect the central bank s forecast of inflation to a first approximation once the predictive content of asset prices for inflation has been accounted for there should be no additional response of monetary policy to assetprice fluctuations in use now for about a decade inflationtargeting has generally performed well in practice however so far this approach has not often been stress tested by large swings in asset prices our earlier research employed simulations of a small calibrated macroeconomic model to examine how an inflation targeting policy defined as one in which the central bank s instrument interest rate responds primarily to changes in expected inflation might fare in the face of a boom and bust cycle in asset prices we found that an aggressive inflationtargeting policy rule in our simulations one in which the coefficient relating the instrument interest rate to expected inflation is 2 0 substantially stabilizes both output and inflation in scenarios in which a bubble in stock prices develops and then collapses as well as in scenarios in which technology shocks drive stock prices intuitively inflation targeting central banks automatically accommodate productivity gains that lift stock prices while offsetting purely speculative increases or decreases in stock values whose primary effects are through aggregate demand conditional on a strong policy response to expected inflation we found little if any additional gains from allowing an independent response of central bank policy to the level of asset prices in our view there are good reasons outside of our formal model to worry about attempts by central banks to influence asset prices including the fact that as history has shown the effects of such attempts on market psychology are dangerously unpredictable hence we concluded that inflationtargeting central banks need not respond to asset prices except insofar as they affect the inflation forecast in the spirit of recent work on robust control the exercises in our earlier paper analyzed the performance of policy rules in worst case discussants robert shiller yale university glenn rudebusch federal reserve bank of san francisco kenneth rogoff harvard university

monetary policy and dividend growth in germany long run structural modelling versus bounds testing approach this study examines the long run relationship between monetary policy and dividend growth in germany for this purpose cointegration is tested for between both variables in the period 1974 to 2003 however problems related to spurious regression arise from the mixed order of integration of the series used from mutual causation between the variables and from the lack of a long run relationship among the variables of the model these problems are addressed by applying the bounds testing approach to cointegration in addition to a more standard long run structural modelling approach in principle both procedures are capable of dealing with the controversial issue of the exogeneity of monetary policy vis a vis dividend growth however the structural modelling approach still leaves a certain degree of uncertainty about the integration properties of the interest rate and the dividend growth hence one feels legitimized to refer to the bounds testing procedure and to conclude that in the longer term short t

reorganising global value chains and building innovation capabilities in brazil and india abstract this paper is concerned with global shifts in innovation power it shows that brazil and india are accumulating significant innovation capabilities most explanations concentrate on factors within these rising powers this paper concentrates on explanatory factors which have their origin in the old powers europe and usa in order to understand the build up of innovation capabilities in brazil and india it examines their linkages with firms in europe and usa concentrating on the value chains which connect them it shows how the organisational decomposition of the innovation process emanating from the old powers contributes directly and indirectly to the build up of innovation capabilities in the new powers the empirical evidence comes from the brazilian auto and the indian software industry and the value chains which link them to the united states and germany two very different industries show a core of common findings on processes which contribute to building advanced innovation capabilities in india and brazil

the temporal development of strategy patterns in the u k insurance industry much writing in the field of strategic management remains an exercise in comparative statics cross sectional research designs are combined with the static metaphors of contingency thinking to analyse the fit between the positioning and resource base of the firm and its performance in differing environments however the inadequacies of this tradition are increasingly recognised even by scholars who have created it porter 1991 strategy can no longer be conceived through the static language of states or positions and must now be understood as an innovation contest where the bureaucratic and inflexible will not survive this paper takes up the challenge to explore the dynamics of industry and firm strategy development the empirical focus of the paper is the u k insurance industry in a period of upheaval between 1990 and 1996 by means of an innovative cross correlational time series analysis we are able to show the ebb and flow of strategic change in the industry and the patterns of initiation and imitation as certain firms lead areas of strategyand others follow these findings are interrogated and inter preted by drawing on and developing theoretical ideas from three literatures which historically have not talked to one another these are the literatures on innovation institutionalism and contextualism the empirical results show firms pursuing multiple strategies at one point in time and also altering the strategic agenda over time a cross correlational analysis of nine firms in the u k insurance industry reveals the existence of leaders and laggards in the development of a variety of strategic initiatives theoretically the paper examines the mixture of external conditions and internal context and processes which contribute to the development of early and later adopters of strategies in an industry over time

complementarities between obstacles to innovation evidence from france abstract this paper investigates obstacles to innovation faced by french manufacturing firms using cis2 data we distinguish between obstacles in postponed projects and obstacles in abandoned projects first we highlight the most important barriers to innovation faced by firms and find that lack of skilled personnel is one of these second based on descriptive analysis correspondence analysis and multivariate probit models we explore factors explaining the perception of obstacles and study complementarities between those obstacles we show that while adopting a package of policies increases the pace of innovation a more targeted choice among policies is needed to encourage firms to persevere in their innovative efforts

a robust r d project portfolio optimization model for pharmaceutical contract research organizations pharmaceutical drug research and development r d outsourcing to contract research organizations cros has experienced a significant growth in recent decades and the trend is expected to continue a key question for cros and firms in similar environments is which projects should be included in the firm s portfolio of projects as a distinctive contribution to the literature this paper develops and evaluates a business support tool to help a cro decide on clinical r d project opportunities and revise its portfolio of r d projects given the existing constraints and financial and resource capabilities a new mathematical programming model in the form of a capital budgeting problem is developed to help revising and rescheduling of the project portfolio the uncertainty of pharmaceutical r d cost estimates in drug development stages is captured to mimic a more realistic representation of pharmaceutical r d projects and a robust optimization approach is used to tackle the uncertain formulation an illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach

interrelation between patenting and standardisation strategies empirical evidence and policy implications abstract this paper analyses the relationship between strategies to protect intellectual property rights and their impact on the likelihood of joining formal standardisation processes it is based on a small sample of european companies on the one hand theory suggests that the stronger the protection of own technological know how the higher the likelihood to join formal standardisation processes in order to leverage the value of the technological portfolio on the other hand companies at the leading edge are often in such a strong position that they do not need the support of standards to market their products successfully the results of the probit models to explain the likelihood to join standardisation processes support the latter theoretical hypothesis the higher the patent intensities of companies the lower is their tendency to join standardisation processes

collective choice pareto optimality and the organization of cooperatives the case of agricultural credit associations abstract the internal allocation of costs and benefits in a cooperative association is regulated by allocation rules selected by the membership through majority voting the paper examines the class of rules allowing distribution free pareto optimal dfpo choice of parameters a sufficient condition for such rules and the derivation of dfpo values by means of a bergson samuelson social welfare function are presented since the values of such parameters are unanimously adopted regardless of members distribution the power to make parametric choices can be profitably delegated to the professional management the findings are illustrated for the case of agricultural credit associations

analysing distributed processes of provision and innovation the vast majority of products i e goods and services are provided to the consumer through several co ordinated and contributing agents acting together this paper is concerned with improving our understanding of processes of provision and innovation that involve several contributing and co ordinated agents firms or organizations the distributedness of provision and innovation varies in scale and takes a variety of dynamic forms or modes and their analysis brings to the fore the significance of dependency and asymmetric power relations between classes of economic agent the approach thereby opens up considerations on distributed innovation beyond those addressed by the systems of innovation perspectives

should central banks burst bubbles some microeconomic issues anti bubble policy is examined in a finite horizon greater fool bubble model with rational agents asymmetric information and short sales constraints this permits the use of standard tools of welfare economics to analyse bubble policies policy is modelled as deflating overpriced assets by revealing information about this overpricing if the central bank is following such a policy then the market interprets inaction as an implicit endorsement of asset prices which raises these prices also the central bank can deflate overpriced assets even if it has no informational advantage over any investors about this overpricing however unless it has such an informational advantage a bubble bursting rule may only make things worse

inter capital relations and the network organisation redefining the work and employment nexus the blurring of organisational boundaries associated with networks of organisations suggests the need to reconsider how work and employment are shaped by shifting inter capital relations traditional theories of the internalised employment relationship understate its inter relationship with both the form of inter capitalist competition and the type of inter capitalist production relations also existing theories of inter organisational contracting do not adequately address how these are shaped by employment relations both within and between organisations an alternative approach provides a new perspective for considering forms of countervailing power to protect workers interests in a capitalist system continuously shifting from integrated to non integrated forms copyright 2005 oxford university press

entitlements and distributive equity in cooperative marketing pools abstract inter member allocation of marketing pool income is contingent on the rule used for valuing members raw product contributions such valuations depend in turn upon forecasts of the raw product s resale net returns an entitlement based notion of a pool s distributive equity which generally differs from a welfare based notion is expressed weakly in the expectations domain or more strongly in expectations and variance domains valuing raw products according to unbiased unit return forecasts may or may not guarantee weak form equity if weak equity is not guaranteed strong equity is assessed only in reference to a loss function in any event improved equity may involve increased information cost

the monetary policy implications of behavioral asset bubbles i introduce behavioral asset pricing rules into a wider dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework asset price bubbles emerged endogenously within the model i find that in this model monetary policy rules that target the mispricing of the asset have a destabilizing effect however a monetary policy rule that targets deviations in the price of the asset from its trend can be welfare enhancing such a rule would also have the benefit of being straightforward to implement

the paradox of openness appropriability external search and collaboration a b s t r a c t to innovate firms often need to draw from and collaborate with a large number of actors from outside their organization at the same time firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas this gives rise to a paradox of openness the creation of innovations often requires openness but the commercialization of innovations requires protection based on econometric analysis of data from a uk innovation survey we find a concave relationship between firms breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation and the strength of the firms appropriability strategies we show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search there is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors we explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy 2013 the authors published by elsevier b v all rights reserved