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Objectives. To identify and review innovations relevant to improving access, quality, efficiency and/or effectiveness in the organization and delivery of health care services in rural and remote areas. Study design. Literature review. Methods. Key bibliographic databases that index health research were searched: MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL. Other databases relevant to Arctic health were also accessed. Abstracts were assessed for relevancy and full articles were reviewed and categorized according to emergent themes. Results. Many innovations in delivering services to rural and remote areas were identified, particularly in the public health realm. These innovations were grouped into 4 key themes: organizational structure of health services; utilization of telehealth and ehealth; medical transportation; and public health challenges. Conclusions. Despite the challenges facing rural and remote regions, there is a distinctly positive message from this broad literature review. Evidence-based initiatives exist across a range of areas - which include operational efficiency and integration, access to care, organizational structure, public health, continuing education and workforce composition - that have the potential to positively impact health care quality and health-related outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic theories of commercial nonprofits and mutuals usually emphasise the advantages of such organisational forms in reducing agency and monitoring costs in markets that suffer from information asymmetries in exchanges between firms and their customers. This article examines the ability of such transaction cost theories to account for historical variations in the ownership and governance of firms in the US personal finance industry between the early nineteenth century and the Great Depression. It focuses, in particular, on mutual savings banks and their role in the development of the intermediated market for savings accounts. While I find some evidence in support of transaction cost theories of organisational form, I also find that entrepreneurial and socio-political factors played crucial roles in the choice of ownership and governance structures; mutual savings banks predominated in the early years of the industry because the form offered entrepreneurial advantages over investor-owned corporations and because in some states they benefitted from regulatory and political advantages that joint-stock companies lacked. Their relative decline by the early twentieth century was the result of increasing competition in the market for savings deposits, the loosening of regulatory barriers to entry, and changes in public policy that reduced the transaction, innovation and regulatory advantages that the mutual savings bank form had once held. The article draws out the theoretical implications for our understanding of the historical role of nonprofit and mutual firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through creative imitation, this article aims to make the case for a more inclusive view on innovation related to gender. In entrepreneurship theory, innovation is usually associated with creativity as something extraordinary, followed by generalisations of how innovation is brought about, which are based upon dichotomies that lead to exclusion of those who are expected to innovate. Innovation policy tends to associate innovation with industrial, large-scale product development, to the neglect of other types of innovations. Therefore, policy and research both tend to disregard certain innovations that are pursued by certain actors in certain areas. In particular, women entrepreneurs are neglected, as are innovations within women-dominated industries. This marginalisation is, arguably, related to how innovation is conceptualised, which this article will scrutinise by means of gender theory and narrative theory. The article highlights the example of a businesswoman who has pursued innovation in the area of wedding arrangements, which represents one of the categories that have been marginalised in research and policy on innovation. The woman's story of one of her innovations is analysed based upon data collected at dialogue seminars. This illustrates how innovation--when regarded as a mediation between creativity and imitation--appears to be both extraordinary and everyday, as well as tied to the context in which it appears. This serves to bridge dichotomies and end up with an inclusive approach in terms of who is expected to innovate, where, and what. In so doing, this article challenges common assumptions regarding innovation and offers an original interpretation of how innovation is associated to imitation and gendered relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay undertakes a comparative review of radical innovation in the early Cold War, when UK jet propulsion development far outpaced any US efforts. British ingenuity created a series of jet engines which Americans adopted. One among these, which captures contrasting organisational formats for handling complexity and innovation, was the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a tough, reliable propulsion system. The USAF's licence assigned production to Curtiss-Wright, which had made piston engines for decades and which spectacularly botched the project, wasting millions. Eventually, the Pentagon shifted the J-65 American Sapphire to GM's Buick division, which finally fabricated adequate but obsolete engines in the mid-1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product and business innovation are integral to corporate growth. Insights into improving the design and development process can help achieve better innovation outcomes. We report the findings of a study of design firms--including IDEO and Continuum--that are recognized as standard bearers for innovation. We found that these firms use special approaches to innovation that include team structure, governance, and milestone planning processes. We synthesize the findings into five lessons for the R&D manager: apply user-centered design. define the innovation opportunity space strategically, use agile prototyping, establish communities of practice, and avoid rigorously gated management processes. We offer strategies for implementing these lessons in the R&D organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW: Recessions are difficult times. Companies respond differently to them, especially in the ways that they manage R&D. Intel's recently retired chairman, Craig Barrett, has been an outspoken advocate for continuing investment in R&D, telling Fortune magazine, for example, that "you can't save your way out of a recession; you can only invest your way out" (May 25, 2009). Anxious to explore how the semiconductor giant has managed to accomplish this, RTM editor in chief Jim Euchner spoke with Barrett about innovation, investment, Intel, and international competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW: Although the world has changed drastically in the past year, the need for businesses to invent products that people want and are willing to pay for has not changed. At The Dow Chemical Company, this innovation is managed so as to create maximum value for the company. There are a number of key strategies that Dow uses to manage innovation. These include balancing the timing of investments versus cashflows, managing fads, prioritizing across the company, savvy portfolio management, and as system of metrics that measure real success. Ultimately, successful leaders will do whatever is necessary to stick to their long-term strategy, especially during tough economic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW. The multiple and often contradictory team dynamics that arise in diverse teams present organizations with major challenges. For example, while a team's functional diversity can help produce innovation, it also leads to detrimental team dynamics. This study of 28 innovation teams found that strategies to foster a team's innovation include increasing its functional diversity, reducing the team's tendency to think sequentially and increasing its tendency to engage in connective thinking. Team members should be encouraged to learn from each other and to voice divergent opinions. They should also be cautioned about relying on a single, shared mindset if they want to be better prepared to innovate and to achieve breakthrough innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature and geography of knowledge linkages in the Vienna software cluster. Empirical studies on the software sector have provided contradictory evidence of the relative importance of different sources of knowledge, the spatial dimension of exchanges of knowledge, and the relevance of different channels for the transmission of knowledge. Recent conceptual work on the geography of knowledge linkages has highlighted that the innovative dynamics of clusters rests on both local and global knowledge flows, that is, the combination of "local buzz" and "global pipelines." However, the buzz-and-pipelines approach fails to provide a precise understanding of the mechanisms by which actors in a cluster gain access to knowledge at different spatial scales. This article goes beyond the buzzand-pipelines concept and suggests a differentiated typology of knowledge linkages, distinguishing among market relations, formal networks, spillovers, and informal networks. Drawing on a survey of firms and face-to-face interviews with representatives of companies, we demonstrate that in the Vienna software industry, knowledge flows are informal. We found that spillovers and informal networks are highly significant at all spatial scales and are complemented by formalized research-and-development partnerships at the local and national levels. We also show that the character of knowledge linkages is dependent on the nature of innovation. The more radical the innovation, the larger the variety of sources of knowledge and the stronger the diversity of the mechanisms for transferring knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the regional distribution and economic effect of the "creative class" on the basis of a unique data set that covers more than 500 regions in 7 European countries. The creative class is unevenly geographically distributed across Europe; the analyses show that a regional climate of tolerance and openness has a strong and positive effect on a region's share of these people. Regional job opportunities also have a large effect on the size of a region's population of the creative class. The findings reveal some evidence of a positive relationship among creative class occupation, employment growth, and entrepreneurship at the regional level in a number of European countries. On the basis of the analysis, however, it is not clear whether human capital, measured by creative occupation, outperforms indicators that are based on formal education, or if formal education has the stronger effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information--Communications Technologies (ICTs) are no longer just for internal use. Rather, in the era of open and distributed innovation, they must be leveraged by businesses and organizations to reach, record and review ideas from internal and external sources ranging from vendors, suppliers and customers to employees. ICTs enable the entire innovation process, from idea generation and development to experimenting and testing, and, finally, to commercialization of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article links up with the debate in economic geography on "local buzz" and "global pipelines" as two distinct forms of interactive knowledge creation among firms and related actors and argues for a rethinking of the way social scientists should approach interactive knowledge creation. It highlights the importance of combining the insights from studies of clusters and innovation systems with an activity-oriented approach in which more attention is paid to the specific characteristics of the innovation processes and the conditions underpinning their organization. To illustrate the applicability and added value of such an alternative approach, the notion of embeddedness is linked with some basic ideas adopted from the literature on knowledge communities. The framework is then applied to a study of innovation activities conducted by firms and academic research groups working with biotechnology related applications in the Swedish part of the Medicon Valley life science region. The findings reveal that local buzz is largely absent in these types of activities. Most interactive knowledge creation, which appears to be spontaneous and unregulated, is, on closer examination, found safely embedded in globally configured professional knowledge communities and attainable only by those who qualify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Creativity is central in stimulating economic growth in cities, regions and advanced capitalist economies in general. There is, of course, no one-to-one relation of the number of firms in creative industries to economic growth. Innovation is a key mechanism explaining the relationship of creative industries with economic performance. Based on an empirical study in the Netherlands we explore the effect of creative industries on innovation, and ultimately on employment growth in cities. In the Netherlands the three specific domains of creative industries - arts, media and publishing, and creative business services - make up 9 per cent of the business population. Drawing on survey data we find that firms in creative industries are indeed relatively innovative. Yet substantial differences are found across the three domains: firms in the arts domain are clearly less innovative, most likely due to a different (less market-oriented) dominant ideology. In addition, firms in creative industries located in urban areas are more innovative than their rural counterparts. We go on to analyse how the concentration of creative industries across cities is connected with employment growth. With the exception of the metropolitan city of Amsterdam, we find no measurable spill-over effect from creative industries. The presence of the creative class (in all kinds of industries other than creative ones) appears to be a much stronger driver of employment growth than creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technometrics was founded in 1959 as a forum for publishing statistical methods and applications in engineering and the physical and chemical sciences. The expanding role of statistics in industry was a major stimulus, and, throughout the years many articles in the journal have been motivated by industrial problems. In this panel discussion we look ahead to the future of industrial statistics. Ten experts, encompassing a range of backgrounds, experience, and expertise, answered my request to share with us their thoughts on what lies ahead in industrial statistics. Short biographical sketches of the panelists are provided at the end of the discussion. The panelists wrote independent essays, which I have combined into an integrated discussion. Most of the essays were written as responses to a list of 10 questions that I provided to help the participants direct their thoughts. I have organized the discussion in that same fashion, stating the questions and then providing the related responses. Several discussants added remarks on the role of statistics journals, particularly of Technometrics, and I have added that as a final question. We see this article, not as the end of the story, but rather as the takeoff point for further discussion. To that end, we are initiating an open discussion forum; to participate, go to http://www.asq.org/pub/techno/ and click on Networking and Events. The American Society for Quality will host the forum and Bert Gunter has graciously agreed to serve as moderator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involving customers in the innovation process entails a host of new concerns, concepts and managerial decisions. Transitioning from older models of no or low customer involvement requires attention to the different types of customer innovation, organizational mission and organizational structure. This article provides a typology for customer innovation, describes how to involve customers in the innovation process, and offers guidelines for shifting organizational structure and emphasis toward customer-driven innovation in order to enable continual, sustainable innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impelled by a crisis in Dutch horticulture in the early 1930s, two Dutch food preserving companies, Hero and De Betuwe, decided to start producing non-alcoholic drinks made from fruits and vegetables. Different kinds of knowledge were needed for this radical innovation. Innovation trajectories were established and knowledge was incorporated, but the knowledge sources and 'knowledge filters' of the two companies were very different. Hero's Swiss parent played an important role in transferring Swiss knowledge of production techniques to its Dutch subsidiary company. De Betuwe, on the other hand, mainly relied on knowledge provided by the existing Dutch horticultural innovation network. While succeeding in the soft drink market was to a certain degree a competition between publicly available knowledge and private knowledge, in the end both companies succeeded in producing a comparable product, but their routes to success were different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iberian double-skinned square frame drum, known as adufe, or pandeiro quadrado (Portuguese) or pandero cuadrado (Spanish), is played almost exclusively by women, and is a legacy from the medieval period. While Spanish and Portuguese women play various round frame drums (as elsewhere in the Mediterranean), the focus of this article is on the square drum and its role in several aspects of secular, religious, and ritual life. The essay also explores the ways in which the songs women sing while playing the drum reflect their thoughts, concerns, and circumstances. Discussion also covers recent innovations, especially those involving men taking up the drum in performance contexts, and women's reactions to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the authors' experiences during a pilot year of an innovative core curriculum at a state research university and their attempts to create a "collaborative community" characterized by transformative pedagogy. It discusses their students' and colleagues' resistance to their inventive, albeit time-consuming and sometimes noisy, assignments. It analyzes the temptation to give in to bureaucratic inertia and return to an instruction paradigm that prioritizes the transmission of information over the more intensive goals of encouraging students to "claim their education." Finally, they suggest that the development of collaborative communities of like-minded teachers is an important resource in mediating the conflict between transformative pedagogy and bureaucratic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW: Innovation has always been a marriage of what's needed with what's possible. Originally, "what's possible" was about technology, but at Procter & Gamble today it's about creating and delivering a superior experience for the consumer. And that comes from truly understanding consumer needs. This requires a new kind of R&D leader, someone who combines imagination and worldwide knowledge with action, and, in addition, is an inspirational individual who exhibits curiosity and courage, practices collaboration, asks the right questions, and is able to "communicate the dream." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW: In setting R&D budgets, many companies compare their R&D intensity with that of the average intensity for global companies in their sector using an R&D scoreboard. However, it's important to define the sector or subsector for this purpose carefully since unduly broad sector definitions have led to misleading conclusions. Moreover, R&D is only one of the investments that should be compared in this way--both Capex and market development can be as or more important for some sectors. Competitive advantage can also be gained by increasing R&D at the start of a recession or downturn when competitors may be decreasing R&D; a number of companies have shown that this boosts the relative advantage of the company's products and services and hence leads to increased sales and market capitalization in the subsequent upturn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to demonstrate how regulation, markets and technology can be intertwined. It argues that the introduction of technology in a regulated market, such as that of international telecommunications, must be seen in terms of its impact on economic and political alliances in that regulatory market. It presents a case study of the first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT1 - a joint project between the US company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), the British Post Office (GPO) and Canada's Overseas Telephone Corporation - and a coaxial cable proposed by another US company, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). Both cables became part of a British attempt to alter existing British and US domestic regulation of international telegraph transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial research institutes used to be government-financed organizations with mandates to advance industrial technology and improve economic competitiveness. Good R&D people were assembled and expected to contribute to the welfare of industry and society without having any clear link to business needs and strategy. Today, institutes have evolved into market-driven hybrids paid for value delivered to industry while still receiving a portion of their funding from public sources. They are strongly networked to enhance the probability, of finding rapid and cost-effective solutions to technical problems brought to them by industry. The handling of technology transfer to industry and associated intellectual property rights has been facilitated by model contracts and master alliance agreements, and modern industrial institutes use web-based tools to speed identification of new technologies with high potential, to gauge potential value of those technologies to member companies, and to establish a project strategy that will lead to defensible IP. INSET: Connect with an Institute That Will Address Your Needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to the characteristic of Beidou Double-star positing system (for short: Double-star position), the optimal predication model of Double-star position/SINS integrated system is put forward, which can make use of the delayed position information from Double-star positioning system to predicate optimally for the integrated system, and then to correct SINS, and affords integrated results of some navigation parameters. In order to validate the consistency of the filter, the criteria for consistency of a filter is also studied, and the tested statistics are given, the experiment based on practical measured data shows that the filtering method is consistent with the integrated system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2007 is Research-Technology Management's 50th year of publication. To mark the occasion, each issue will reprint one of RTM's six most frequently-referenced articles. The articles were identified by N. Thongpapanl and Jonathan D. Linton in their 2004 study of technology innovation management journals, a citation-based study in which RTM ranked third out of 25 specialty journals in that field (see RTM May-June 2004, pp. 5-6). The article reprinted here was Number 1 on their list. Published in 1988 and updated now with its author's "reflections," the article surveyed what had been learned about the management of invention and innovation during the previous 50 years since the Industrial Research Institute's founding in 1938. Following a discussion of definitions of the invention and innovation process, it focused on three major dimensions of the process: staffing, structure and strategy. Taken together, their improved management was found to contribute critically to achieving successful institutionalized innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

OVERVIEW: Because innovation can be achieved in many ways, measuring innovativeness is difficult to do well with a single measure. One effective approach is to pair a 'fixed" with a "variable" measure, that is, Revenue from New Products with Revenue from New Platforms. The former reveals much about the overall rate of change and the latter about the quality of "newness" of the shift in revenue. The former focuses on product and the latter on any kind of relevant platform that leads to advantage through innovation: product, technology, manufacturing, operational, or business. By considering the accounting-based new product measure in concert with the more flexible measure of new platforms, a company can explore meaningfully the quality of its innovation and how sustainable is its innovativeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon research from a cluster and innovation systems perspective, we counter the argument that the food industry is a mature and dying industry and point to evidence of a vibrant, dynamic food sector that has made a substantial contribution to regional growth. Since the mid-1990s, the most dynamic component of the Toronto urban food economy has been the small- and medium-sized enterprises, comprised mainly of specialty, local, ethnic, and organic food-processing firms that are thriving in response to consumers' demands for high-quality, local, fresh ethnic and fusion cuisine. However, these newer firms face challenges, and our results raise the question about how a more stimulating innovative milieu can be created for them. In answer to this question, we suggest multiscaled approaches to cluster formation and policy and discuss the implications of our research for theories of innovation systems, firms, city creativity, and governance. We situate this ‘new food economy’ within the core literature of economic geography, seeking to relocate the ‘agrifood’ literature away from a traditional rural setting to a dynamic city-region context, underscoring the essential role of the consumption side of agrifood chains. Moreover, we use the food sector as a lens through which to argue that mature sectors and ‘ordinary’ activities in a city are every bit as important to the long-term health, viability, and sustainability of a city-region economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers for consideration four propositions about business, government, and innovation in the post-World War Two United States, points which may have a wider resonance as well. They concern the long term role of continuous innovation, technology–science relationships, state-led problem setting for innovation, and the ‘permanent uncertainties’ that arise from Cold War-era technological advance. Each of these has implications for the practice of business history, for conceptualizing innovation, and for our understanding of post-war science–technology trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The factors leading to variations in e-business use among U.S. firms are identified. Building on diffusion of innovation theory, an integrated model is developed that explains the relative influence of eight known determinants. Diversity and volume of e-business use are empirically investigated using a sample of 294 firms. The analysis demonstrates that (1) considering the diversity of e-business use, pressure from trading partners is the most important driver, (2) when e-business volume is investigated, government pressure emerges as the strongest factor, (3) government promotion may not have much effect on the diversity of e-business use by private companies, but does significantly influence the volume of e-business use by firms doing business with the government, and (4) the United States has a positive regulatory environment for supporting e-business. Taken together, these findings on the multidimensionality of e-business use show that diversity and volume are not only different measures of e-business use, but also have different determinants. The integrated model provides a more comprehensive explanation of e-business use and could serve as a foundation for future research on interorganizational systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the significance of the collaboration and integration of research and development management with its ecosystem of suppliers. Advantages of the innovative application of technology to a company; Role of standards and information technology in the ability to effectively integrate business processes to provide a service or product; Factor that will affect the success of research and development.

Nearly 4 ½ billion people, all over the world, earn less than three dollars a day. These are largely rural, largely uneducated but not stupid--individuals whom we do not understand and on whom corporations have never seriously tried to focus. The assumption has always been that this is a market for governments or the not-for-profit sector to worry about, sort of like an international division of labor. However, this base of the pyramid is where the biggest business opportunities lie. As technologists, it is the early market that we should be looking at. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development has three broad goals: environmental stewardship, social responsibility and economic prosperity, for both the organization and its stakeholders. In a successful sustainability-focused business strategy, these three goals will he inter-related and supportive of each other. Developing such a strategy requires careful study and analysis to fully understand sustainability-related opportunities and threats. Battelle's consulting work with the cement industry, the State of Arizona and others, shows how innovation is a key element of sustainability-focused business strategies. Furthermore, such business strategies must be customized to meet an organization's core competencies, financial situation, skills, resources, and the sustainability challenges it faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving sustained organizational innovation has proved an almost insurmountable challenge for most firms, and is even more challenging in difficult economic times. Most firms are unprepared for hard times, and typically respond with draconian measures such as budget cuts and layoffs, short-term, finite actions that lead eventually to diminished returns. A review of the literature reveals little advice beyond exhorting firms to develop an enduring innovation culture a priori, before times get difficult. Once beyond finite actions, however, firms have an opportunity to examine other, more systemic and tactical practices for pursuing growth opportunities under austere financial conditions. These can address both the specific causes off he firm's economic distress, and achieve longer-term innovation that will help rebuild the firm and to some degree inoculate it against future turbulence. INSET: What You Can Do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumption that technological innovation constitutes an inevitable facet of something called ‘globalisation’ is called into question by comparative historical investigation. In the areas of biotechnology and genome research, for instance, the United States and Germany - two advanced industrial states - have demonstrated remarkably different historical trajectories. While the US was a driving force behind the explosion of biotechnology as an industrial sector, Germany was unable to muster much effort until the late 1990s. Explaining this difference, this article utilizes historical political economy to characterize these states and their relationship to capitalism. The lag in German efforts is understood as a function of the pre-capitalist vestiges of the state and their peculiar effects on capitalist social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space has always been more or less present in economic theories. Nevertheless, traditional approaches, as well as the so-called new economic geography, introduce space subsequently. Economic theories are first built independently of spatial and temporal contexts, for example, through costs varying according to distance. The innovative milieus approach is based on the ideas that space -- or, more precisely, territory -- is the matrix of economic development and that economic mechanisms transform space. This article describes innovative milieus as an ideal type that articulates three paradigms: the technological paradigm, which stresses innovation, learning, and know-how as the most important competitive advantages; the organizational paradigm, which emphasizes the role of networks, competition, and rules of cooperation, as well as relational capital; and the territorial paradigm, which accounts for the role of proximity and distance and stresses the idea that competition occurs between regions. The originality of the innovative milieus approach is that it considers these three paradigms as a whole, thus providing a stabilized set of concepts that allow for an understanding of economic development processes in their space and time contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the argument that governments can mitigate the political risks associated with significant liberalization of trade by suggesting that under certain conditions, rent-seeking opponents of trade liberalization may actually turn into critically important allies of governments attempting major policy shifts from protectionism to free trade. It argues that where domestic rent seekers are persuaded that the government cannot or will not provide sufficient rents, they may pursue a second-most-preferred strategy that entails attempting to secure access to cheaper factor inputs and access to foreign markets by actively supporting trade liberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some trade frictions are more important than others because they represent changes or possible changes in systemic economic leadership. Based on several strong assumptions about the nature of international political economy, a multivariate model that differentiates between political-economic challenges that lead to intense, militarized conflicts and those that do not is constructed. Ten iterations of challenges over the past millennium provide empirical support for the applicability of the model. Provided that the model's assumptions continue to hold, it also has clear implications for evaluating the long-term conflict potential of the ongoing US-Japanese commercial competition. While an intense challenge is quite possible, a militarized conflict between Japan and the United States over economic leadership some time in the twenty-first century is not the most probable scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Count-data models are used to analyze the relationship between patents and research and development spending at the firm level, accounting for overdispersion using a finite mixed Poisson regression model with covariates in both Poisson rates and mixing probabilities. Maximum likelihood estimation using the EM and quasi-Newton algorithms is discussed. Monte Carlo studies suggest that (a) penalized likelihood criteria are a reliable basis for model selection and can be used to determine whether continuous or finite support for the mixing distribution is more appropriate and (b) when the mixing distribution is incorrectly specified, parameter estimates remain unbiased but have inflated variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a demand for interventions aimed at adolescent girls with psychosomatic problems. In 2013, positive results were reported from a dance intervention programme addressing girls with internalizing problems. The research team behind the intervention immediately received requests from municipalities and county councils interested in using the intervention. From an implementation point of view it is unclear what made the intervention spread without an active plan. The aim of this study was to explore adopters' experiences about the diffusion and initiation of a public health intervention targeting adolescent girls with internalizing problems. Interviews were conducted with 12 people who were engaged in initiating the intervention in different settings. Data were analysed using conventional content analysis, yielding three categories: perceived appeal and trustworthiness, convenient information, and contextual factors. The results reflected that the participants found that there was a need for an intervention and found the dance intervention to be evidence based and not too complex to perform. Further, there was available information on the project which could easily be distributed to decision makers and others. When initiating the intervention, factors related to economy, possibility for collaboration and recruitment were of importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finnish regions increased their exports in special industries from 1999 to 2013. This internationalization of industries in regions is measured by the adjusted Balassa's revealed comparative advantage index. It has been shown that innovation potential has not increased, even though R&D drives specialization and leads to an increase in exports and an improvement in trade balance. The growth of other intangible capital, such as organizational capital (management and marketing capital) and information and communication technology (ICT), has concentrated in the greater Helsinki area, but products and services are also targeted to domestic markets and depend on imports rather than promoting exports. The physical capital investment among the physical intensive firms has substituted imports rather than affecting exports. In a small open economy such as Finland's, all these trends, together with foreign firms not being more export-oriented than domestic firms, call for a new industrial policy to promote R&D on a wide scale and continue regional specialization, thereby maintaining competitiveness and export growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose:The technocratic and medicalized model of healthcare is rarely optimal for patients. By connecting two different studies we explore the possibilities of increasing quality of life in cancer care. Methods: The first study captures survival strategies in a historically isolated Arctic village in Norway resulting inMomentary contentment theory, which emerged from analysing four years of participant observation and interview data. The second study conceptualizes everyday life of cancer patients based on in-depth interviews with 19 cancer patients; this was conceptualized asNavigating a new life situation. Both studies used classic grounded theory methodology. The connection between the studies is based on a health design approach. Results: We found a fit between cancer patients challenging life conditions and harsh everyday life in an Arctic village. Death, treatments and dependence have become natural parts of life where the importance of creating spaces-of-moments and a Sense of Safety is imminent to well-being. While the cancer patients are in a new life situation, the Arctic people show a natural ability to handle uncertainties. Conclusion: By innovation theories connected to design thinking,Momentary contentment theorymodified to fit cancer care would eventually be a way to improve cancer patients’ quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Participants from as far afield as Australia and North America convened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands between 9 and 11 November 2016 to attend the Ninth European CME Forum (ECF). The meeting combined panel discussions with a range of presentations on topics such as high quality learning, current challenges in CME and future trends. However, the bulk of the forum was taken up with interactive workshops under three different track headings: Development, Educational Design and the CME Environment. Attendees also heard from a group of CME pioneers in a pre-conference session on the history of CME on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agricultural extension is perceived as the primary mechanism through which farmers expand their ability to adopt and adapt new technologies and ideas. The use of Information and Communication Technology like videos in extension is being fronted as an alternative to the conventional Face-to-face extension approach (F2FEA). A comparison of effectiveness of the Video-mediated extension approach (VMEA) and F2FEA among rice farmers in two districts of Uganda challenges the independent use of the two approaches. A cross-sectional survey of two non-equivalent groups subjected to VMEA in Kamwenge and F2FEA in Hoima districts was conducted with 196 farmers. The results indicate greater potential for integration of VMEA and F2FEA as the two are complementary in the various stages of the farmer learning framework developed. VMEA is significantly better in awareness creation and sharing of knowledge and experiences while the F2FEA is significantly better at enhancing knowledge acquisition and retention and application. The relative strengths of VMEA and F2FEA can best be harnessed through integration of the approaches. The integration will not solve the problem of large farmer to extension ratio common in developing countries but will rather make the extension workers more effective. The integration however calls for rethinking of institutional arrangement, roles of the extension worker, and pragmatic retooling of the extension worker to embrace social learning principles that empower farmers to be more self-directed learners and innovators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]