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Some of the great enterprises of Colombia, leaders in research, development and innovation, are located in the city of Medellin. However, to date, few studies have been made regarding the capacities for innovation underlying their good results in developing new and improved products. The objective of this article is to determine the maturity of the innovation capacities for five of these companies. The theoretical model of Essmann and Du Preez (2009) was used, which consists of three dimensions: a construct for innovation capacity, a maturity scale and an organizational construct. In terms of methodology, an index of innovative capacity was constructed and the ranges for three maturity levels were calculated, using the analysis cluster (Jung et al, 2009); this permitted classifying the companies under study. Results show that all the companies have a maturity level titled formalized and predictable. In conclusion, although the best practices associated with each innovation capacity have been identified and implemented, individuals have not appropriated them and do not use them in a systematic manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to literature, the long-maturity forward rates have information about the structure of the expected short-term returns. This paper finds that the conditional volatility factor also has information for predicting the term premium in the six-month expected returns with different maturities. That is, including conditional volatility allows capturing a risk factor consistent with the agent's expectations. A slow mean-reverting process is also found across different maturities, which is the case of the governmental fixed income securities. In fact, the power of forecasting changes from a six-month to a three-year forward period, at six-month steps according to the mean-reverting tendency which also implied that its predictive power improves at longer forecasting horizons. On the other hand, it presents evidence about the Colombian markets crash in May 2006, which generated special conditions that impacted the market's behavior and the agent's risk tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]