Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

R&D Policy In The United States: The Promotion Of Nanotechnology, Philip Shapira, Jue Wang

Philip Shapira

This case study reviews the evolution of nanotechnology policies and programmes in the United States with a particular focus on three thematic areas: governance, interactions among R&D policies, and interaction between R&D policy and non-R&D policies. Federal R&D policy in nanotechnology has moved through several stages, including initial exploration before the 1980s, the promotion of scientific and technological breakthroughs in the 1980s, policy development in the 1990s and multiagency national initiatives in the 2000s. Since 2001, the major federal R&D policy mechanism in nanotechnology in the US has been the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). NNI promotes policy deliberation and, most …

Defining A Research Domain In An Emerging Technology: Vaccine Research In The State Of Georgia, Shannon Barker, Jan Youtie, Philip Shapira

Philip Shapira

This paper presents an approach for measuring emerging technologies in the context of mature industries. In particular, this article focuses on vaccine-related research. Although vaccines comprise an established industry, new developments in biotechnology have led to emerging area in vaccine R&D, including therapeutic vaccines; subunit and DNA-based vaccines; advances in vaccine delivery; and new methodologies for vaccine design, manufacturing, and testing. Defining this field is challenging because it spans multiple disciplines, including biotechnology, public health, and epidemiology. To gain an understanding of the field as it is related to biomedical research, we focused our study parameters to concentrate on these …

Erps In Smes: Ex-Post Evaluation Of Success Factors, Tommaso Federici

Federici Tommaso

In the latest years, the offering of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) started to target in part the Public Administrations (PA's) and, above all, the Small / Medium Enterprises (SMEs), both by software multinational corporations and by local software houses. The introduction of ERPs into SMEs cannot be based on a sheer reproduction of the experiences with larger companies and represents a new challenge with significant peculiarities to be considered.

Therefore, it's of particular interest to analyze the operating implementations, in order to identify the success cases, the nature and measure of the benefits obtained and the context- and project-related …

Outsourcing The Packaging Function, Rihaz Z. Chughatta

Rihaz Z Chughatta

If you are currently working in the packaging department of a major corporation in the pharmaceutical, food or consumer products industry, you have probably been exposed to some form of outsourcing, which is a global trend that has emerged over the past decade, and continues to evolve, within the packaging field.

New Practice Creation: An Institutional Approach To Innovation, Michael Lounsbury

michael lounsbury

Neoinstitutionalists have developed a rich array of theoretical and empirical insights about how new practices become established via legitimacy and diffusion, but have paid scant attention to their origins. This blind spot has been reinforced by recent work on institutional entrepreneurship which has too often celebrated the actions of a single or small number of actors, and deflected attention away from the emergent, multilevel nature of how new kinds of activities emerge and provide a foundation for the creation of a new practice. In this paper, we examine the case of the creation of active money management practice in the …

Globalization, Regional Economic Policy And Research, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This paper considers two questions. First, are there unique implications of growing global economic integration for development planning and policy making at the city and regional level? Key issues include whether globalization is appreciably different today than it used to be and whether it means anything more, from the perspective of a given city or region, than heightened competition for resident industries and related challenges of more rapid macro-regional structural change and adjustment. Second, what kinds of spatial empirical research and model building would be most valuable to regional policy makers faced with designing programs and making specific allocative investment …

U.S. Regional Economic Fragmentation & Integration: Selected Empirical Evidence And Implications, Edward J. Feser, Geoffrey Hewings

Edward J Feser

The emergence of ten U.S. megaregions—increasingly contiguous spaces of high density development and population capturing a high share of U.S. economic activity—raises the question of appropriate scales for local, state and federal policy and how regional planning as a practice can adapt to an extended and, in some cases, almost continuous economic integration over space (RPA, 2006). Notions of cities as functional economic areas, more or less distinct spaces that operate as independent economic units, are less and less tenable as the basis for planning and policy making. At the same time, the megaregion phenomenon does not necessarily imply that …

Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

State governments that have elected to make investments to increase the availability of affordable broadband service in rural areas and low income urban neighborhoods should organize their efforts around a strategy that encourages and leverages locally-driven initiatives, rather than follow a top-down approach that seeks to identify and close all broadband service gaps in a comprehensive fashion. A bottom-up approach to state broadband policy has three major advantages. First, it is a conservative policy response in an economic arena in which the appropriate role of the public sector is highly contested and in which private sector deployment is proceeding rapidly, …