Todd A. Watkins

A technological communications costs model of R&D consortia as public policy

Abstract For complex technologies, the process of innovation and diffusion often requires close cooperation among people, for learning what one another know. The social and political context of those links among researchers is an important determinant of their efficiency. Where there are social and political barriers to those links, free-market structures are not well suited to minimizing the costs of the communication of technological information. The paper develops a technological communications costs market failure model of R&D results as impure public goods. It shows how the design of the European R&D consortia-promoting public policies, Esprit and Eureka, helps firms overcome the market failures described by the model. The analysis expands the traditional market failure justifications for a government role in industrial R&D. Governments can play a positive economic role by helping firms overcome social and political barriers to negotiations and technological communications. Yet, market failure arguments are not alone sufficient for policymaking. So, the paper considers the Esprit and Eureka policy designs in a political context as model policy tools for organizing public support for industrial R&D.

In from the Cold: Prospects for Conversion of the Defense Industrial Base

At the end of the Cold War, the manufacturing operations involved in making military equipment and commercial goods are commonly believed to intersect hardly at all. Our analyses of 1991 survey data from a large sample of establishments in the machining-intensive durable goods sector show that there are few technical and competitive conditions separating the defense and commercial industrial spheres. Commercial-military integration of production is now the normal practice among the majority of defense contractors in this sector. Moreover, we find little difference between defense and commercial producers in the competitive conditions they face or in the diversity of their customers. However, defense contractors have an advantage over their strictly commercial counterparts because of their greater use of productivity-enhancing technologies.

Beyond guns and butter: managing dual-use technologies☆

Abstract This paper notes an international convergence towards explicit dual-use policies among a wide variety of technological systems. It explains that convergence as a response to three trends: market globalization; the increasing international division of labor; and the fact that developments in civilian technologies are leading military applications in many industrial areas. Yet, most commonly used models of technological diffusion do not provide policymakers with tools or language adequate to address the complex problems posed by dual-use technologies. The most important dual-use investments are those that increase industrial capacity to absorb or share technologies from other industrial sectors. A capacity for this ‘creative technology absorption’ has as much to do with social and cultural aspects of industrial structures and the organization of work as it does with technical artifacts. Policy debate should shift away from a focus on specif technology programs towards a focus on making the structures and culture of the civil and military technology systems more similar.

Can students in technology entrepreneurship courses help foster start‐ups by the unemployed?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Lehigh Universitys demonstration program integrating technology entrepreneurship courses with state and federal employment and economic development agencies. The article aims to detail program goals, activities, resources and structure.Design/methodology/approach – The demonstration involved three stages over 30‐months in the context of Lehighs Integrated Product Development Program. IPD engages students and faculty from business, engineering and design arts. Multidisciplinary student teams worked with unemployed clients with entrepreneurial new product ideas. The authors report results of several surveys and lessons learned from a comprehensive assessment process.Findings – One year after participating, compared to a control group of non‐participants, clients with student teams had made statistically significantly more progress in launching businesses and generated more economic activity. Family support and market knowledge were the strongest predictor...

Learning Across Functional Silos

Faculty, students and industry partners at Lehigh University are fundamentally restructuring and rethinking curricula across three of Lehigh’s colleges, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business and Economics, and the College of Engineering and Applied Science. The catalyst is the new Integrated Product Development (IPD) Educational Program, which President Peter Likins has called “one of the most profound curricular changes in Lehigh’s history.” IPD is a sequence of experiential product design courses that complement and enrich—rather than replace—existing disciplinary majors. The program stresses a handson approach to prototype and product development. Teams of business, engineering and design arts students work together on real industry-sponsored projects to produce technical and business feasibility studies, mockups of design ideas, working prototypes and business plans. The students come to understand the interdependencies and multidisciplinary, team-oriented nature of work and decision making in today’s global business enterprise. This actively engages them in developing the skills necessary for a lifetime of learning and leadership.

Manufacturing scale, lot sizes and product complexity in defense and commercial manufacturing

Almost no systematic empirical analyses exist directly comparing defense and commercial manufacturing processes. A unique survey of nearly 1000 US manufacturing establishments allows a comparison of similar manufacturing processes in the machining intensive durable goods industries, which account for more than half of all defense purchases of durable goods. Organizations with and without defense contracts do not differ statistically in several measures of scale. Neither are production volumes or lot sizes different on average in machining operations, though defense production does tend more to concentrate where flexible manufacturing technologies are well suited. However, defense related machining products in this sector are more complex to manufacture.

Why are Quit Rates Lower Among Defense Contractors

This paper presents empirical evidence of lower quit rates at small manufacturers with defense contracts and examines whether this is associated with differences in their human resource policies and organizational practices and strategies. We take advantage of an original data set to compare labor quits, workforce skills, and occupational structure between defense‐contracting and noncontracting small manufacturers in eastern Pennsylvania. We find that the remarkably large defense contractor advantage in quit rates - 7 percentage points - is almost totally explained by differences in skills, operational strategies, and workforce management and training practices, suggesting a mediation effect through these HR practices. Defense‐contracting status emerges as an important overlooked variable in HRM studies.

A framework for innovation roadmapping in microfinance information systems

Despite the remarkable expansion of microfinance over the past several decades, the industry remains in a developmental period of experimentation and rapid growth, exploring which approaches work best under different circumstances. Widespread diffusion and local adaptation of techniques and innovations from pioneering organizations such as ACCION International, Grameen Bank, FINCA, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, BancoSol, and many others fostered the emergence of a global industry that by most counts now serves more than 100 million clients. Yet along many dimensions of the industry – for example, client methodologies, information technologies and infrastructures, transparency and performance monitoring, product and service portfolios, funding structures, human resource management, health and environmental amelioration, and regulations – significant barriers remain to achieving the broad vision of microfinance as a major contributor in fighting global poverty.

Introduction to Microfinance

The inequality of wealth distribution across the globe is no secret. One out of every three people in the world live on less than

Breakthrough Technology or Breakthrough Solution: What Are We Really After?

3.10 per day. Nearly one in 10 lives in extreme poverty, which according to the World Bank is an income of less than