This study presents a model and a practical tool for measuring and managing small network-firm competitiveness. This model, which has three concentric circles, goes beyond the value chain. The first ...concentric circle represents a small network-firm's results. The second represents the four elements of the firm value. The third represents the set of environmental activities affecting the value elements. In addition, ten working assumptions are present. The findings suggest that the small network-firm competitiveness is manageable through a set of twenty-five entrepreneur or indicators that managers perceive; five for each value element (human resources and work organization, operations and marketing, infrastructure, and innovation) and five for small firm performance. A ten-point Likert scale rates each of these indicators. An empirical analysis corroborates the model and the practical tool. This information system could be especially useful to small firms that do not have practical tools for managing better competitiveness in global knowledge environments.
The new interpretation of a university functional model in the form of “tetrahedron” is suggested. Innovator being the main university’s “product” is situated at the top of the tetrahedron. The ...tetrahedron demonstrates the unique competitive advantage of a university, as well as the unique position of the whole higher education system among other competitors on the global market of knowledge. It is shown that innovations are much more successfullyproduced by high-tech corporations, and universities should be primarily focused on raisinginnovators. Consequently, the competition among universities takes a form of struggle for quality of innovators’ training.
This article analyses recent World Bank interventions aimed at improving higher education and local research capacity in low-income countries. Our empirical entry point is a critical analysis of the ...Development and Innovation Grant (DIG) scheme the Bank rolled out in Cambodia (2010-2015), a virtual carbon copy export of its Academic Initiative Fund in Bangladesh. Offering a rare insider perspective, we argue that the DIG scheme ultimately failed because the Bank so glaringly misunderstood the Cambodian context. We use this case to contemplate the deeper flaws in how the Bank 'thinks', highlighting how the world's most powerful development institution manages to maintain faith in its own infallibility despite failure.
In a structuralist reading, the hegemonies of the global economy are perceived as threateningly fixed. We suggest understanding the global knowledge economy as an always unfinished project of ...ordering socio-spatial relations. To better communicate the struggles of peripherally located places/companies associated with this process of spatial ordering, we provide a simplified visualization of the global knowledge economy.
There is a tendency to think in primarily economic terms (e.g., economic and financial opportunities) when considering how major science, technology and business spaces, also known as science parks ...(e.g., Silicon Valley, USA; Science Vale, UK), attract international knowledge migrants (IKMs) from the global knowledge economy. However, other elements that make places attractive for IKMs to achieve desirable standards of living are often not sufficiently addressed in the recent literature. Using a single case study of the Dutch science park Novel-T, this paper investigates how science parks can deliberately be created to attract and retain IKMs using a new multidimensional model for understanding the attractive effects of science parks on human capital. The fieldwork element involved 20 semi-structured face-to-face interviews, which were analyzed using a narrative analysis technique. The results of the case study show that science parks should be understood as multidimensional networks that trigger both a social attraction effect for IKMs as well as regional economic development and growth. The importance of the spatial design of science parks as well as the creation of a highly international atmosphere were found to be two influential factors in attracting IKMs to a particular science park in a peripheral region. Moreover, the results show that the deliberate construction of a science park with four intended operational effects is not a simple and controllable process, since some operational effects (e.g., external recognition) appear to be more controllable than others (e.g., internal social dynamics).
The global ascent of the knowledge economy has opened an unprecedented opportunity to value the earth’s evolutionary and ecological fabric as a transnational reservoir of latent scientific knowledge ...that could define this emerging economy as profoundly as oil has shaped the industrial economy. It has also uniquely positioned the international resort enterprise to bring science into the heart of a business model in which quality and prestige grow along with investments in geographically unrestrained scientific discoveries and which delivers formidable legacy dividends in its defiance of monopoly over the funded research. The article expands on these original assertions, the accomplishments they ignited, and the academic credentials that fortify them, with an emphasis on the business model’s capacity to build novel economic foundations for global conservation and to empower basic science at the most challenging scale above national jurisdictions where it merits designation as common heritage of mankind. It discloses how the resort sites’ label as premier real estate wastes many of these sites’ worth as crossroads of wonder-packed connections among variously distant ecosystems, geological formations, and other pillars of the earth’s architecture. It translates this disclosure into a blueprint, for new-generation resorts, of the power to align a private enterprise system with appreciation of knowledge as a precursor of future knowledge and, in the process, to chart a transformative course for the global knowledge economy. An island portfolio in the Gulf of Panama and the Hawaiian island of Lanai are profiled in their distinctive potentials to emblematize the rewards.
Policies to repurpose universities as drivers of a global knowledge economy are often inspired by formal economic models based on marketable knowledge. Their rationality calls for transactional ...leaders to impose organizational models on universities to reshape their relationships both internally and with a plethora of stakeholders in the 'field' of the global knowledge economy. Polanyi's 'substantive economy' and Tsing's 'liveable landscape' provide alternative ways of conceptualizing this field as an 'ecology' where universities are embedded in a tissue of social relationships, which all have to be carefully configured to sustain the university's principled existence. The article uses 'anthropology of policy' as an approach and Denmark as an example to trace how policy-makers' top-down, 'authoritative instrumentalist' approach to university reform involved reworking the concept of 'freedom'. In contrast, an anthropological and 'democratic' approach treats policy as a process in which people from many different sites in society engage in contesting top-down ideas and shaping the kinds of institutions and policy worlds they wish to inhabit. Academics, and especially senior women, contested the new meaning of 'freedom' for their research, teaching and public engagement, and the principles on which to organize boundaries and relations with surrounding society. In these contests, the exponents of a more ecological approach were defeated, cast out, abjected.
There is a shortage of senior African social scientists available to lead or manage research in Africa, undermining the continent's ability to interpret and solve its socio-economic and public health ...problems. This is despite decades of investment to strengthen research capacity. This study investigated the role of individually commissioned consultancy research in this lack of capacity.
In 2006 structured interviews (N = 95) and two group discussions (N = 16 total) were conducted with a fairly representative sample of Ugandan academic social scientists from four universities. Twenty-four senior members of 22 Ugandan and international commissioning organizations were interviewed. Eight key actors were interviewed in greater depth.
Much of Ugandan social science research appears to take the form of small, individually contracted consultancy projects. Researchers perceived this to constrain their professional development and, more broadly, social science research capacity across Uganda. Conversely, most research commissioners seemed broadly satisfied with the research expertise available and felt no responsibility to contribute to strengthening research capacity. Most consultancy research does not involve institutional overheads and there seems little awareness of, or interest in, such overheads.
Although inequalities in the global knowledge economy are probably perpetuated primarily by macro-level factors, in line with Dependency Theory, meso-level factors are also important. The current research market and institutional structures in Uganda appear to create career paths that seriously impede the development of high quality social science research capacity, undermining donor investments and professional effort to strengthen this capacity. These problems are probably generic to much of sub-Saharan Africa. However, both commissioning and research organizations seem ready, in principle, to establish national guidelines for institutional research consultancies. These could develop both institutional and individual research capacity, improve output and accountability, and facilitate academic research funding and indigenous research agendas.
•Much social science research in Africa is conducted in the form of small, individual consultancy projects.•A survey of Ugandan social scientists found most believed this system limits individual and institutional research capacity.•Interviews with Ugandan research commissioners found little sense of responsibility to strengthen research capacity.•This system illustrates how global inequalities in knowledge production are perpetuated at meso- as well as macro-levels.•National guidelines for institutional consultancies incorporating institutional overheads could strengthen research capacity.
This article examines what it means to be an academic in the knowledge economy, using auto-ethnographic writing or storytelling as its starting point. Although academic mobility has been researched ...for about a decade, deep listening and deep reading in the context of ethnography have not been utilised in analysing what it means to move in this global space. To conduct this exercise, fellows from the European Union-funded Universities in the Knowledge Economy project who were all mobile academics, were invited to participate in ethnographic writing workshops and explore the personal, subjective elements of narrating their experiences of being mobile and being migrants. I aim to not only present the narratives of colleagues who populate the global knowledge economy but also analyse them and ask if certain ideal forms of narrative habitus support academic mobility.
PDF
