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Innovating is essential to sustained industrial growth and profitability. But experience amply demonstrates how difficult innovation is, especially for large companies. The synthesis of valued offerings by aligning customer needs with technology possibilities lies at the heart of innovation. System architects working at the strategic level are ideally positioned, as a consequence of their experience and training, to play a key and even a leadership role in enabling, energizing, and leading this synthesis. The scope of the architecting effort must include the process architecture of the entire value chain as well as the more conventional product architecture to address all potential wellsprings of innovation. This paper outlines an architecture-centric approach to innovation, based on the concept of the system platform architecture. / Center for Innovation in Product Development, MIT

This thesis explores the reason why the region of Northern Ostrobothnia and in particular the city of Oulu became known as the High Tech capital of the Nordic countries during the 1980s and 1990s. After World War II, the region’s economy was dependent upon its traditional industries of forestry, wood processing, pulp and paper manufacturing and to a lesser degree on iron and steel manufacture. In common with other parts of Northern Finland, Northern Ostrobothnia suffered from high unemployment, low educational standards, outwards migration and below average standards of living and life expectancy. Aware of these problems, the national government in Helsinki embarked on a series of measures to improve this situation. First and foremost, a university was established in Oulu and its first three faculties were teacher training, medicine and engineering. The university was charged with the specific tasks of educating and conducting research to benefit the economy of Northern Finland. It was realised that economic changes were essential and attempts were made to build an electronics industry in the region to make it less dependent on natural resources. To facilitate economic developments, infrastructural improvements were made and branches of VTT and Tekes were established in Oulu. A key factor here was the government realisation that decision-making for improvements in the region should and would be devolved to the local authorities. That was the opportunity for the city of Oulu to seize initiative, and in concert with the University and a group of local entrepreneurs, to set up a Technology Park, Technopolis, in 1982 at Linnanmaa beside both the university and VTT. These small beginnings provided the foundations for sectors such as electronics, computer software, telecommunications and biotechnology sectors to emerge gradually, so that by the year 2000 there were nearly 12,000 high tech jobs in the area. A crucial addition to this development in the long term was the arrival of Nokia to Oulu. At first Nokia concentrated on cable technology and base stations, but once it diversified into telecommunications and built up partnerships with local firms a clearly-defined high tech cluster became visible. Within the cluster, there is significant cooperation between the relevant New Technology Based Firms (NTBFs), Nokia and the local educational and research establishments. The outcome, at the time of writing, is that Oulu has gained a world reputation as an innovative centre of high technology, and it is the circumstances behind this reputation that the remainder of this thesis seeks to investigate.

This thesis investigates to what extent coal prices differed globally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whether those differences mattered for economic development. The backbone of my empirical investigation is a new dataset of annual coal prices spanning the years 1840 to 1960 for, on average, over 30 globally distributed ports. This dataset is complemented by pithead prices for all major coal-producing countries. My analysis includes all major steam coals and I eliminate quality differences by accounting for differences in their carbon content. I construct my argument by examining two major drivers of differences in coal prices. First, I examine trade costs for Welsh steam coals, which were shipped to most regions of the world. Secondly, I estimate the effect of the spread of coal mining, for example to India, on local coal prices by initating competition between coals from different origins. While trade costs declined most during the late nineteenth century, the spread of coal mining led to continued price convergence in the interwar period. And yet, global coal price differences remained significant, especially between producing and importing countries. Arguably, my most interesting finding is on the effect of those coal price differences. More specifically, I calculate the ratio of coal prices to wages, and explore whether countries where this ratio was closer to the British ratio were in the best position to use the most advanced steam technology. My econometric results indeed show that countries with a low coal price/wage ratio experienced higher manufacturing output growth during the period 1870 to 1940. This finding of my thesis highlights one potential way in which different levels of coal prices may have contributed to varying degrees of technology adoption between countries and ultimately economic growth.

Aquesta tesis anal.litza les Clausules d'Acció Col.lectiva i les Clàusules de Precedència quan: 1) el repagament és endogen i depèn d'un esforç de lobbying dels creditors. 2) el litigi és purament redistributiu. Hi ha una externalitat positiva del esforç que interactua amb la distribució dels actius i les clàusules contractuals. Els litigis individuals no són desitjables socialment perquè redueixen l'incentiu al esforç. Les Clàusules d'Acció Col.lectiva bloquegen els litigis i maximitzen el repagament. La introducció de Clàusules de Precedència modifica els incentius al esforç. Aquest efecte pot ser positiu o negatiu.El capítol 2 explora la relació entre les crisis de deute sobirà i el creixement de les industries manufacureres. Les industries amb competició importadora intensa rendeixen relativament millor després del default. Les industries exportadores creixen més lentament al voltant del default. Les industries caracteritzades per alta intensitat del capital i tangibilitat dels actius sofreixen menys els effectes dels defaults. / This thesis analyzes Collective Action Clauses and Seniority Clauses when: 1) repayment is endogenous and depends on creditor lobbying effort; 2) litigation for full repayment is purely redistributive. There is a positive externality of effort that interacts with asset distribution and contractual clauses. Individual litigation is not desirable from a social point of view since it weakens the incentives to exert effort. Collective Action Clauses block litigation and maximize repayment. The adoption of Seniority Clauses modifies the incentives to exert effort and thus repayment. This effect can be positive or negative.Chapter 2 explores the linkage between sovereign debt crises and manufacturing industry growth using a difference-in-difference methodology. Industries facing tough import competition perform relatively better after a sovereign default. Export-oriented sectors grow more slowly around default times. Industries characterized by high physical capital intensity and asset tangibility tend to suffer less from default episodes.

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