Business Innovation (BFT 211/3)

Firms that operate in a market economy often depend upon innovations in order to achieve competitive advantages that sustainably secure their survival. Business ethics is thus largely concerned with questions about the decisional freedoms involved in innovation processes.Innovations oftentimes raise novel questions about the role of the state or the structure of society. Business ethics needs to provide a framework for balancing the different perspectives, values, and interests at stake. This balance must be achieved at the level of the firm in order to facilitate adequate long term decisions, but it should also be sought at higher, including regulatory, levels. Achieving this balance will require an ethical framework for entrepreneurial action.The particular disciplines engaged in generating innovations as well as all relevant fields of applied ethics should be involved in the balancing process. Business Ethics of Innovation is thus necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavour.This volume assesses general questions of how business ethics can help to structure innovations and specifically discusses pharmaceutical innovations as well as innovations in the IT sector.

The Geography of Small Firm Innovation offers a unique look at the importance of geographic proximity to the innovative activity of high-tech small firms. The book explores the concentration of innovation across metropolitan areas in the United States during the 1990s, by introducing a novel measure of small-firm innovation based on the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research Program, the largest federal R and D program for small business. The empirical evidence indicates the differing effects of technological infrastructure on the likelihood of innovation occurring in a metropolitan area, which has implications for public policy.

Analysing Practical and Professional Texts focuses on texts as constituents of human usage. Richly illustrated and theoretically sophisticated, this book will be of interest not only to those with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, but also to social scientists and anthropologists concerned with text analysis, textual sense and the 'linguistic turn' in the methods of their own disciplines.

This volume draws on both historical and contemporary European case-studies to offer a sophisticated account of the relationship between gender and well-being. The authors focus on key discussions of the changing conceptions of well-being from early twentieth century calculations of the relationship between income and the cost-of-living, to more recent critiques from feminist writers. Their findings will be of considerable interest to Sociologists of Health, Gender, Sexuality and Economics.

Modern economies depend on innovation in services for their future growth. Service innovation increasingly depends on information technology and digitization of information processes. Designing new services is a complex matter, since collaboration with other companies and organizations is necessary. Service innovation is directly related to business models that support these services, i.e. services can only be successful in the long run with a viable business model that creates value for its customers and providers. This book presents a theoretically grounded yet practical approach to designing viable business models for electronic services, including mobile ones, i.e. the STOF model and – based on it – the STOF method. The STOF model provides a ‘holistic' view on business models with four interrelated perspectives, i.e., Service, Technology, Organization and Finance. It elaborates on critical design issues that ultimately shape the business model and drive its viability.