Juan José Hernangómez Barahona

The effect of entrepreneurship education programmes on satisfaction with innovation behaviour and performance

Purpose – This paper attempts to shed light on the effect of educational programmes aimed at entrepreneurs on innovation and business success.Design/methodology/approach – We use as theoretical framework the theory of planned behaviour. We use a sample of 354 entrepreneurs from Castile and Leon, Spain. To estimate the model we use a path analysis (AMOS 7).Findings – Individuals who are concerned about further management education and entrepreneurship education show themselves to be more innovative. Moreover, indirectly, by means of the relationship between innovation and success, specific entrepreneurship education contributes to obtaining better business results. However, to have reached high levels of formal education makes entrepreneurs less conformist regarding the activity of innovation. The existence of a direct effect of innovative behaviour on business success is confirmed.Research limitations – The limitations which our study presents are principally related to the measurement of the variables. S...

Implicaciones de la organización interna sobre la eficiencia. La aplicación de la teoría de la agencia y la metodología DEA a las ONGD españolas

Resumen La teoria de la agencia postula que para que una organizacion pueda desarrollar su actividad y alcanzar sus objetivos eficientemente, requiere de una arquitectura organizativa equilibrada. Las entidades sin fines de lucro (ENL) estan sometidas a estos mismos requerimientos en su organizacion interna aunque la evaluacion de su eficiencia se muestra como una tarea de gran complejidad. El objetivo basico del presente trabajo es valorar la relacion entre el equilibrio de la arquitectura organizativa y la eficiencia, mostrando, al mismo tiempo, que el analisis envolvente de datos (DEA) es un metodo especialmente indicado para medir la eficiencia de las ENL teniendo en cuenta sus particularidades en terminos de objetivos, composicion y funcionamiento. Con este proposito, se ha utilizado una muestra de 37 ENL dedicadas a la cooperacion internacional al desarrollo, que se han analizado con datos obtenidos a partir de entrevistas personales en profundidad durante el ano 2003. Tal como la teoria pronostica, los resultados muestran que las organizaciones no gubernamentales para el desarrollo (ONGD) en las que existe un equilibrio entre sus niveles de delegacion, sistemas de incentivos y medidas de evaluacion del rendimiento son las mas eficientes.

Steps towards medication harmonization: A look at Europe and the United States

Abstract Countries with distinct institutional endowments are trying to reach drug harmonization. The explanation given for the beginning of this process is that the rising health concerns governments have about patients transcend their different visions of social welfare and increasing bureaucratic costs, for both pharmaceutical companies and governments. The underlying reasons are, on the one hand, the high transaction costs between the pharmaceutical companies and the patients of medication and, on the other hand, the differing pharmaceutical regulations increase bureaucratic costs. This situation pushed Europe, Japan and the US into initiating a process of harmonization of regulation for new drugs. Even though harmonization is an on-going process, global and simultaneous medication product approval is not easy (the final objective of harmonization). In this paper we present, from a transaction cost approach, the economic reasons why pharmaceutical transactions need to be under public control. At the same time, we evaluate the public policies related to pharmaceutical exchange – technical guidelines, funding and price policies – as elements of the institutional endowment of countries that could facilitate or slow down the harmonization process. We use two protagonists of the harmonization process: Europe and the United States.