Innovation and growth are often regarded as mutually independent conditions for healthy business. Indeed, many regard the important process of innovation as being a necessary condition, although not sufficient, for a business to grow. However, the author claims that we know little about the concept of innovation and that much of the discussion of it lacks precision. this paper examines the concept of innovation, who performs it, and tends to place its importance within an organizational context.
This paper examines the development of an idea into an innovation and the important processes of screening which have to be undertaken in order to ensure that innovatory ideas which are relevant to a company can be developed and those which are likely to fail, can be rejected. Furthermore, the importance of recognizing the full implications of innovatory ideas is also examined and the author claims that many product failures are due to incomplete partial innovation. but finally, a company which it is claimed, has organized itself to encourage innovative new products is examined and the organizational structure and its relationship to innovation is explained. 相似文献
We use a national cross-sectional database, the 1880 Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, to examine aggregate patterns and individual-level estimates of chronic-disease morbidity and long-term disability in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Despite higher levels of urban mortality in 1880, morbidity prevalence rates were highest in the rural areas of the country, especially in the western and the southern regions. Equations using microdata show that the estimated risk of chronic disease and impairment was highest for males and females who were older, of lower socioeconomic status, or from rural areas. This era was marked by geographically uneven but significant levels of endemic chronic disease, likely the outcomes of prior episodes of infectious disease and exposure to conditions generated by human action, such as the Civil War and migration. 相似文献
Implicit in the operation of a toxic-gas pipeline is the possibility of an accidental release, which could have serious consequences if upwind of a nearby populated area. Concern for public safety leads to the establishment of isolation corridors or buffer zones to reduce and control the hazard to human settlements. Although "worst case" or "average case" are often used in the determination of safe distances, a probabilistic approach (risk analysis) is superior because it identifies important factors, it makes maximum use of available data, it allows comparison of alternatives, and it quantifies intuitive risk considerations. To illustrate the method, a risk model developed for sour gas pipelines in the Province of Alberta, Canada is outlined and an actual risk-distance curve is presented. The current zoning regulations in Alberta are summarized. 相似文献
This note discusses and demonstrates methods, both exploratory and confirmatory, for analysing data from friendship networks collected over time. The focus is on stochastic models for dyadic interaction designed to quantify the structural effect of reciprocity on arc changes. The networks studied were previously analysed by Hallinan (Social Networks 1: 193–210) who was concerned with stability of dyadic choices and the direction of change of asymmetric dyads to either mutual or null dyads. These aspects of the networks are really of secondary importance to the effect of reciprocated choices on the probabilities of dyadic change. Measures of this ‘reciprocity effect’ are presented, and comments on the rationale for continuous-time Markov chains as models for networks are given. 相似文献
Welfare is frequently seen as simply a question of providing aid to needy. In formulating welfare policy, however, the issue is not as clear cut, because with every handout comes a consequent loss to the dignity of the recipient. In this paper three such key paradoxes which confront the administrator, social worker or community agent operating in the field of Aboriginal welfare are discussed. 相似文献
Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this identifiable victim effect has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability—determining the victim without providing any personalizing information—increases caring. In the first, laboratory study, subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be. In the second, field study, people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list. 相似文献
This article examines the trauma of Sudanese refugee children living in a Midwestern city from a social constructivist view. From a qualitative perspective, the study explored how the Sudanese children, their U.S. foster parents, and social workers from an American child welfare agency described their understanding of the migration experience. Results point to the importance of placing the children's trauma in the context of their own cultures, as child welfare workers assist in the children's adjustment to the United States. 相似文献
Much of the literature on volunteer bias in sexual interest research has been limited to either identifying variables on which volunteers differ from nonvolunteers or examining how the intrusiveness of the measurement device affects volunteer rates. The present study was designed to examine whether stimulus content would affect volunteer rates and volunteer/nonvolunteer differences in a large sample of college students (206 men and 358 women). The study also sought to determine whether such findings could also apply to research that recruits from exclusively heterosexual samples. Students completed questionnaires in small groups and were asked whether they would be willing to volunteer for studies that would involve viewing and rating five different types of sexually explicit images (nude men, nude women, heterosexual behavior, male homosexual behavior, and female homosexual behavior). Results indicate that men and women differed in the types of images that they would volunteer to view, based upon the content of the images. Furthermore, volunteers for each type of image reported significantly greater self-monitoring as well as sexual and general sensation seeking than did nonvolunteers, while differences on other measures were less consistent. Discussion is given to specific ways in which the findings and generalizability of sexual interest study results can be affected. 相似文献
A method for combining multiple expert opinions that are encoded in a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model is presented and applied to a problem involving the cleanup of hazardous chemicals at a site with contaminated groundwater. The method uses Bayes Rule to update each expert model with the observed evidence, then uses it again to compute posterior probability weights for each model. The weights reflect the consistency of each model with the observed evidence, allowing the aggregate model to be tailored to the particular conditions observed in the site-specific application of the risk model. The Bayesian update is easy to implement, since the likelihood for the set of evidence (observations for selected nodes of the BBN model) is readily computed by sequential execution of the BBN model. The method is demonstrated using a simple pedagogical example and subsequently applied to a groundwater contamination problem using an expert-knowledge BBN model. The BBN model in this application predicts the probability that reductive dechlorination of the contaminant trichlorethene (TCE) is occurring at a site--a critical step in the demonstration of the feasibility of monitored natural attenuation for site cleanup--given information on 14 measurable antecedent and descendant conditions. The predictions for the BBN models for 21 experts are weighted and aggregated using examples of hypothetical and actual site data. The method allows more weight for those expert models that are more reflective of the site conditions, and is shown to yield an aggregate prediction that differs from that of simple model averaging in a potentially significant manner. 相似文献