This thesis explores the derivation of the core skills curriculum prescription through the layered perspectives of globalism and its interpretation at national level. I critically examine the claims made in the government rhetoric around improving the core skills of young people through vocational education and consider the nature of core skills and the complexity inherent in the concepts of embedded knowledge, transfer, and learning styles. The introduction of core skills in GNVQs into a college of further education shortly after incorporation in 1994 was the setting to explore students and lecturers perceptions of core skills learning alongside the impact of the changes in education policy. Drawing on the data that my study provided I analysed core skills learning within the contextual complexities of a large college of further education. I report the students and lecturers perceptions of the nature of the core skills, the methods of learning established in the college, and their reactions to change. This thesis is partly about my journey which started with my accepting that the curriculum prescription for core skills in GNVQs was appropriate for my students and adopting a realist / empiricist approach to my research. As my research proceeded my journey was taking me from the simple to the complex and this led me to question this stance and adopt an interpretivist position as a way of coping with the complex messages I was receiving from lecturers and students. I analyse the lecturers and students perceptions and explain them through linking the literature relating to innovation and change to that on the nature of learning. I conclude that core skills learning and rhetoric mean little until they are linked with innovation strategies and the nature of teaching and learning. I suggest that core skills learning was unclear but was presented in the rhetoric as self evident and its implementation in the college was reduced to a learning design problem. This led to uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety and frustration for both students and staff. I explore three models relating to innovation, planned learning and fluid learning and demonstrate that oversimplified approaches to a whole range of complex social, organisational and interactive processes are unlikely to work and that innovation, planned learning and fluid learning are linked and interlocked.

In this paper I investigate if and how strengthening creditor rights enables firms to engage in more innovation activities, using the enactment of a new property law in China as a natural experiment. By using a newly constructed measure of land unavailability, I find that firms in cities where construction is more constrained by geography substitute short-term debt with long-term debt, hold less internal cash, invest more on intangible assets and eventually generate more patents after the enactment of the law. Moreover, this positive effect of the reform on innovation is more profound for firms that have more tangible assets, that are dependent on debt financing and that are more financially constrained. Those results highlight the importance of debt financing for innovation and shed light on the underlying mechanisms through which it takes effect. / <p>Lic.-avh. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2015</p>

This report focuses on three parts which are market research, marketing- and sales strategies, and product development for a start-up company in Italy called ARS Meccanica Dolomiti and their new product, Quikky. The main objective was to find a strategy which the company could use to attract customers. In the market research both potential customers and competitors were identified. Similar products that could be a threat for the product were also investigated. Most of the information came through own research via Internet. However, a visit to the CeMAT fair in Hannover was also helpful since potential customers, competitors and other partners were gathered at the same place. The main results from this research are that there are a lot of potential customers for the product. The reason for this is that it was discovered that the product could be used in different application areas, resulting in a broader market for the product. However, there are many competitors since the product is mostly directed towards the lifting industry which is already an attractive market. As for the product development it was early recognised that the product could be designed in many different ways. Both mini Quikky and symmetric Quikky, which are two new versions of the original Quikky, could be new products that the company could sell. By having several versions of the product, the company can more easily attract customers. / Rapporten fokuserar på tre områden som är att utföra en marknadsundersökning, marknadsförings- och försäljnings- strategi samt produktutveckling för ett nystartat företag i Italien, ARS Meccanica Dolomiti och deras nya produkt, Quikky. Målet med arbetet var att komma fram till en strategi som företaget kan använda för att locka till sig kunder. I marknadsundersökningen identifierades både potentiella kunder samt konkurrenter. Liknande produkter som kan utgöra ett hot undersöktes också. Det mesta av informationen kom genom egna undersökningar via Internet. Ett besök till CeMAT mässan i Hannover var även mycket hjälpsam, då en hel del potentiella kunder, konkurrenter och andra samarbetspartner var samlade på ett och samma ställe. Resultatet visar på att det finns en hel del potentalla kunder för produkten. Anledningen till detta är att produkten kan användas i olika tillämpningsområden vilket medför att en större marknad blir möjlig. Nackdelen är att det redan finns många konkurrenter då produkten främst är riktad mot lyftindustrin som är en attraktiv marknad. När det gäller produktutveckling blev det snabbt tydligt att produkten kan utformas på flera andra sätt. Både mini Quikky samt symmetriska Quikky, är två nya versioner av den ursprungliga designen. Dessa två kan vara produker som ARS Meccanica kan sälja. Genom att ha flera versioner av produkten, kan företaget dessutom attrahera till sig fler kunder.

This dissertation is composed of three essays looking at innovation at Academic Medical Centers. It tries to empirically explore the problem of translating knowledge from the laboratory bench to the clinic and from the clinic to the bench. Chapter 1, co-authored with Iain Cockburn, establishes the importance of inhouse complementary knowledge in firm decision to license an invention from an Academic Medical Center. By using patent data to describe the technology portfolio of firms who look at patents and then decide whether to license them or not we are able to provide a description of demand in Markets for Technology. We show that firms license inventions that are similar to own technology portfolio when such similarity is measured at a broad level using International Patent Classes. However, controlling for such broad level proximity, firms are less likely to license inventions that are similar when measured at a more granular level. Chapter 2 asks: “Are inventions by teams from Academic Medical Centers that combine cross-domain knowledge at a higher hazard of licensing than inventions by single domain teams?” Inventors’ educational background is used to assign them to the clinical (MDs) or the research domain (PhD). Contrary to our expectations, we find that inventions by cross-domain teams are at a lower hazard of licensing. Similarly, inventions by cross-domain integrated teams (at least one MD/PhD) are at a lower hazard of licensing than inventions by cross-domain distributed teams (MD and PhD on team but no MD/PhD). However, medical device inventions tend to be at a higher hazard of licensing if invented by cross-domain teams. Chapter 3, co-authored with Rob Huckman, looks at how the routine clinical work of cardiac surgeons at Academic Medical Centers can impact their innovative performance as measured by quantity and quality of academic articles that they publish. We use the procedures that these cardiac surgeons perform every year to create a measure of clinical focus to understand whether diversity of work impacts innovation. Using a panel data with surgeon fixed effects we find that early career surgeons benefit from work diversity but late-career surgeons do not.

Στην παρούσα εργασία διερευνάται η επίδραση της μεταβολής των παραγόντων που αλληλεπιδρούν σε ένα Σύστημα Περιφερειακής Καινοτομίας (Regional Innovation System, RIS) εφαρμόζοντας ανάλυση με χρήση Bayesian Networks. Από την ανάλυση, η οποία διαχειρίζεται την εγγενή πολυπλοκότητα και αβεβαιότητα του συστήματος, προκύπτουν συμπεράσματα για την ευαισθησία της επίδοσης ως προς την καινοτομία των περιοχών στη μεταβολή κάποιων παραγόντων, όπως επίσης και για την κατεύθυνση και την έκταση της διάχυσης της επιρροής λόγω μεταβολής σε κάποιο μεμονωμένο παράγοντα. / -

The relationships between competition, innovation, and regulation have long been studied in an attempt to understand and evaluate the effect of regulation on the wealth and growth of nations. Recent empirical work has emerged taking advantage of the still ongoing proliferation of ever more disaggregated data to shed more light on these relationships and at the same time uncover new puzzles in need of explanations. This thesis is an attempt to address the discrepancies between some of these newly discovered phenomena and current theory. In Chapter 1 I introduce an insight of Friedrich Hayek - that competition allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and discovers the best among them - into a conventional model of Schumpeterian innovation. I show how the model can account for two seemingly contradictory empirical phenomena, a positive relationship between competition and industry-level productivity growth, and an inverted-U relationship between competition and firm-level innovation. In Chapter 2 I extend the model to investigate the effects of patent protection on competition and innovation, and to understand the interaction between patent policy and product-market regulation. I calibrate the model to show that patent protection in the U.S. is depressing competition, innovation, growth, and welfare. Using patent and citation data, I further provide empirical evidence supporting the implications of the model. In Chapter 3 I investigate the impact of regulatory entry barriers to new firms on aggregate output and total factor productivity. Following recent work by Thomas J. Holmes and John J. Stevens, I extend a standard model of monopolistic competition to account for the existence of both niche markets and mass markets within industries. Calibrating the model using U.S. manufacturing data, I show this extension goes a long way towards explaining the large gap between empirical estimates of the impact of barriers to entry and the quantitative predictions of current models.

The relationships between competition, innovation, and regulation have long been studied in an attempt to understand and evaluate the effect of regulation on the wealth and growth of nations. Recent empirical work has emerged taking advantage of the still ongoing proliferation of ever more disaggregated data to shed more light on these relationships and at the same time uncover new puzzles in need of explanations. This thesis is an attempt to address the discrepancies between some of these newly discovered phenomena and current theory. In Chapter 1 I introduce an insight of Friedrich Hayek - that competition allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and discovers the best among them - into a conventional model of Schumpeterian innovation. I show how the model can account for two seemingly contradictory empirical phenomena, a positive relationship between competition and industry-level productivity growth, and an inverted-U relationship between competition and firm-level innovation. In Chapter 2 I extend the model to investigate the effects of patent protection on competition and innovation, and to understand the interaction between patent policy and product-market regulation. I calibrate the model to show that patent protection in the U.S. is depressing competition, innovation, growth, and welfare. Using patent and citation data, I further provide empirical evidence supporting the implications of the model. In Chapter 3 I investigate the impact of regulatory entry barriers to new firms on aggregate output and total factor productivity. Following recent work by Thomas J. Holmes and John J. Stevens, I extend a standard model of monopolistic competition to account for the existence of both niche markets and mass markets within industries. Calibrating the model using U.S. manufacturing data, I show this extension goes a long way towards explaining the large gap between empirical estimates of the impact of barriers to entry and the quantitative predictions of current models.

No description available.

Innovationsproduktiviteten har blivit allt viktigare i vårt samhälle och ses som en förutsättning för att skapa framgångsrika organisationer. Innovationer springer ur människors kreativitet och initiativförmåga och innebär att omsätta kunskap, kompetens och idéer till praktisk nytta.  Det förefaller som om innovation endast blomstrar under rätt organisatoriska omständigheter. Kärnan i den innovativa organisationen är en kultur som agerar vägvisande med en tro på människan. Nyckeln till innovation blir således organisationers förmåga att förhålla sig till förändring i en ofta kaotisk miljö med människan i centrum. Som ett led i detta arbete behöver organisationer kontinuerligt ta temperaturen för att tydliggöra både den nuvarande och den önskade kulturen.  Syftet med den här fallstudien är att utvärdera och analysera Eskilstuna kommuns med-arbetarenkät för att se om mätinstruments etablerade områden sätt att mäta kultur kan kopplas till kreativitet och innovation. Ett andra syfte är att bidra med förslag på kompletterande, vetenskapligt beprövade frågeställningar för att skärpa mätinstrumentet. En utvärderings- och analysmetod har utformats och vilar på Martins och Terblanches modell Influence of organizational culture on creativity and innovation med en förväntan att utmana mätinstrumentets befintliga områden. Studien visar en diskrepans mellan mätinstrumentets befintliga områden och det man önskar att mäta och uppmuntrar till fortsatta ansträngningar i utvecklandet av specifika instrument och åtgärder för att bättre kunna mäta och bedöma innovationskultur.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006