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Politics matter for financial markets and financial markets matter for politics, and nowhere is this relationship more apparent than in emerging markets. This book investigates the links between politics and finance in countries that have recently experienced both economic and democratic transitions. It focuses on elections, investigating whether there is a “democratic premium”—whether financial markets and investors tend to react positively to elections in emerging markets. Special attention is devoted to Latin America, where over the last three decades many countries became democracies, with regular elections, just as they also became open economies dependent on foreign capital and dominated bond markets. The analysis draws on a unique set of primary databases covering an entire decade: more than 5,000 bank and fund manager portfolio recommendations on emerging markets. The book examines the trajectory of Brazil, for example, through its presidential elections of 2002, 2006, and 2010 and finds a decoupling of financial and political cycles that occurred also in many other emerging economies. It charts this evolution through the behavior of brokers, analysts, fund managers, and bankers. Ironically, while some emerging markets have decoupled politics and finance, in the wake of the 2008–2012 financial crisis many developed economies (Europe and the United States) have experienced a recoupling between finance and politics.

Discussions of the economic impact of open source software often generate more heat than light. Advocates passionately assert the benefits of open source while critics decry its effects. Missing from the debate is rigorous economic analysis and systematic economic evidence of the impact of open source on consumers, firms, and economic development in general. This book fills that gap, drawing on a new, large-scale database to show that open source and proprietary software interact in sometimes unexpected ways, and discussing the policy implications of these findings. The new data (from a range of countries in varying stages of development) documents the mixing of open source and proprietary software: firms sell proprietary software while contributing to open source, and users extensively mix and match the two. The book examines the ways in which software differs from other technologies in promoting economic development, what motivates individuals and firms to contribute to open source projects, how developers and users view the trade-offs between the two kinds of software, and how government policies can ensure that open source competes effectively with proprietary software and contributes to economic development.

When successful and well-managed firms fail, we call this disruption. In the almost two decades since Clay Christensen’s famous treatise mapping this phenomenon, such failure has continued, with companies such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Blockbuster, Nokia, and RIM all falling hard from positions of seemingly unassailable dominance. In each case, they either did not or could not respond to disruptive events that allowed new entrants to capture their markets. At the same time, however, other major firms have had sustained success, shielded from what could have been dominance-ending disruptive events. This book takes the experience of both the fallen and the resilient and identifies Disruption’s Shield, the principles and actions that can ensure great firms’ continued success. The headline theory of disruption is now known to all, but that has not alleviated the risks faced by major firms nor the litany of failures. This is because a good defense has to guard against all disruptive events. Up until now, only one set of disruptive forces – those coming from the demand-side – have been fully understood and driven into manager’s mindsets. But this single-minded focus has led many firms to neglect equally important supply-side forces. This type of disruption can occur when firms, focussing on developing new products based on current technologies quickly, find themselves inflexible and unresponsive when their greatest competitive threats come not from seemingly niche entrants but from technologies that re-write organizational rulebooks. Only by understanding both types of disruptive risk can business leaders understand, evaluate and deploy the full range of options to avoid disruption and continue to thrive. The Disruption Dilemma is the first book that puts all of these elements together. It identifies the system of choices that have allowed great firms to balance competitiveness and resilience.

Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague (1857–1934) achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs—from pioneering work in self-governing motors to developing the first full-scale operational electric railway system—all while commercializing his inventions and promoting them (and himself as their inventor) to financial backers and the public. This book tells his story, setting it against the backdrop of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of technology. In a burst of innovation during these years, Sprague and his contemporaries—Thomas Edison, Nicolas Tesla, Elmer Sperry, George Westinghouse, and others—transformed the technologies of electricity and reshaped modern life. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague started the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company; designed and built an electric railroad system for Richmond, Virginia; sold his company to Edison and went into the field of electric elevators; almost accidentally discovered a multiple-control system that could equip electric train systems for mass transit; started a third company to commercialize this; then sold this company to Edison and retired (temporarily). Throughout his career, the author tells us, Sprague framed technology as invention, cast himself as hero, and staged his technologies as dramas. He toiled against the odds, scraped together resources to found companies, bet those companies on technical feats—and pulled it off, multiple times. The idea of the “heroic inventor” is not, of course, the only way to frame the history of technology.

This book integrates new theory and research findings into the framework of a “free innovation paradigm.” Free innovation, as the book defines it, involves innovations developed by consumers who are self-rewarded for their efforts, and who give their designs away “for free.” It is an inherently simple grassroots innovation process, unencumbered by compensated transactions and intellectual property rights. Free innovation is already widespread in national economies and is steadily increasing in both scale and scope. Today, tens of millions of consumers are collectively spending tens of billions of dollars annually on innovation development. However, because free innovations are developed during consumers' unpaid, discretionary time and are given away rather than sold, their collective impact and value have until very recently been hidden from view. This has caused researchers, governments, and firms to focus too much on the Schumpeterian idea of innovation as a producer-dominated activity. Free innovation has both advantages and drawbacks. Because free innovators are self-rewarded by such factors as personal utility, learning, and fun, they often pioneer new areas before producers see commercial potential. At the same time, because they give away their innovations, free innovators generally have very little incentive to invest in diffusing what they create, which reduces the social value of their efforts. The best solution, this book argues, is a division of labor between free innovators and producers, enabling each to do what they do best. The result will be both increased producer profits and increased social welfare—a gain for all.

We live in an “Information Age” of overabundant data and lightning-fast transmission. Yet although information and knowledge represent key factors in most economic decisions, we often forget that data, information, and knowledge are products created and traded within the knowledge economy. This book describes the information industry—the far-flung universe of companies whose core business is to sell information to decision makers. These companies include such long-established firms as Thomson Reuters (which began in 1850 with carrier pigeons relaying stock market news) as well as newer, dominant players like Google and Facebook. The book highlights the special characteristics of information and knowledge, and analyzes the unusual behaviors of the markets for them. It shows how technology contributes to the spectacular growth of this sector and how new markets for information change our economic environment. Research in economics, business strategy, and marketing has shown that information is different from other goods and services; this is especially true in competitive settings and may result in strange competitive market outcomes. For example, the book points out, unreliable information may be more expensive than reliable information; information sellers may be better off inviting competitors into their market because this may allow them to increase their prices; and competition may lead to increased media bias—but this may benefit consumers who want to discover the truth. The book explores the implications of these and other peculiarities for information buyers and sellers.

The health care industry has been slow to join the information technology revolution; handwritten records are still the primary means of organizing patient care. Concerns about patient privacy, the difficulty of developing appropriate computing tools and information technology, high costs, and the resistance of some physicians and nurses have hampered the use of technology in health care. In 2009, the U.S. government committed billions of dollars to health care technology. Many questions remain, however, about how to deploy these resources. This book uses diabetes—a costly, complex, and widespread disease that involves nearly every facet of the health care system—to examine the challenges of using the tools of information technology to improve patient care. The book focuses on the patient, charting the information problems patients encounter in different stages of the disease. Chapters discuss ubiquitous computing as a tool to move diabetes care out of the doctor’s office, technology and chronic disease management, educational gaming as a way to help patients understand their disease, patient access to information, and methodological and theoretical concerns. We need both technologists and providers at the drawing board in order to design and deploy effective digital tools for health care. This book examines and exemplifies this necessary collaboration.

Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.

In today’s competitive globalized market, firms are increasingly reaching beyond conventional internal methods of research and development to use ideas developed through processes of open innovation (OI). Organizations including Siemens, Nokia, Wikipedia, Hyve, and innosabi may launch elaborate OI initiatives, actively seeking partners to help them innovate in specific areas. Individuals affiliated by common interests rather than institutional ties use OI to develop new products, services, and solutions to meet unmet needs. This book describes the ways that OI expands the space for innovation, describing a range of OI practices, participants, and trends. The contributors come from practice and academe, and reflect international, cross-sector, and transdisciplinary perspectives. They report on a variety of OI initiatives, offer theoretical frameworks, and consider new arenas for OI from manufacturing to education.

Make it New studies the formation of a professional design practice in California’s Silicon Valley and its role in the region’s “ecosystem of innovation.” In 1980, about midpoint in the story, the San Francisco Bay Area was at best a marginal presence in the design world. Today there are, arguably, more designers working in Northern California than anywhere else in the world. Specifically, the book has three principal objectives: First, to show how design, no less that the region’s iconic technology companies, its legal and financial institutions, and its universities, became an integral component in the growth of the economic engine of the United States; Second, to trace the formation of a design community in the San Francisco Bay Area and describe the evolution of design practice; Third, to document the extension of design into a progressively larger field of industries and organizations and explain the dramatic rise in acceptance of design as an element of organizational strategy. Drawing upon corporate records, private collections, university and museum archives, and approximately 200 interviews with key figures from the 1950 to the present, Make it New is the first book to explore the role of design in the formation of the most powerful economic engine in the world.

The Power Brokers tells the story of the electric power industry in the United States, using the diverse careers of seven influential individuals to create a narrative: Samuel Insull, David Lilienthal, Donald Hodel, Paul Joskow, Ken Lay, Amory Lovins, and Jim Rogers. The book explores the continuing tension between government regulation of an essential industry affected with a public interest and the private sector; reveals the critical developmental impact of the personal ambition, drive, and ideation of key players; and shows how private companies and the government have each tried to shape regulatory outcomes and power markets in order to determine the course of industry development and accommodate corporate interests.

The application of the monopolistic competition model to international trade by Elhanan Helpman, Paul Krugman, and Kelvin Lancaster was one of the great achievements of international trade theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Monopolistic competition models have required new empirical methods to implement their theoretical insights, however, and this book describes methods that have been developed to measure the product variety of imports and the gains from trade that are due to product variety. It first considers the consumer benefits from having access to new import varieties of differentiated products, and examines a recent method to estimate the elasticity of substitution (the extent of differentiation across products) and to use that information to construct the gains from import variety. The book then examines claims of producer benefit from export variety, arguing that the self-selection of the more productive firms (as the low-productivity firms exit the market) can be interpreted as a gain from product variety. It makes use of a measurement of product variety known as the extensive margin of exports and imports. Finally, the book considers an alternative approach to quantifying the gains due to product variety by comparing real GDP calculated with and without the extensive margin of trade.

Given links between innovation and production, how does an innovation economy maintain manufacturing? The authors in this volume use hundreds of interviews with firms in the US and abroad, a nationally representative survey of manufacturers, and analyses of start-up firms, business practices, and new manufacturing technologies to answer this question. Because today’s firms have turned away from vertical integration, many manufacturing capabilities rest in external “ecosystems” of suppliers, competitors, and labor market intermediaries. This volume argues that the development of institutions addressing gaps in production ecosystems can bolster manufacturing and, ultimately, innovative capacity. Chapters include analyses of new and mature firms’ experiences in the US and China, employer hiring practices, and production and the energy industry, as well as a conceptualization of product variety as a form of innovation and a forecast of new manufacturing technologies on the horizon.

The book is an inquiry into how the potentially disruptive character and the restructuring potential of new technologies interact with the inherently conservative nature of social practices. At the same time the book provides reflective insights on how the accomplishment of such primary research goal is contingent upon the researcher’s ability to reflect on his own methods and findings and reframe his own assumptions as the process of innovation unfolds. The book opens with a Prologue and is organized in four major Parts followed by an Epilogue. The leading idea is that in order to study innovation-in-practice as a phenomenon one must look at situations of discontinuity and rupture and explore them in depth, thus turning them into expanded worlds of meaning that offer unique possibilities for understanding and acting. The empirical base of the book is constituted by two extended field studies closely tracking design and innovation processes in distinct practice settings, music education and court trials. The research method is based on interpretive and reflective ethnography. The case analysis and findings are illustrated by means of theoretical narratives merging data and conceptual reasoning. Then, based on the interpretive analysis of the rich case study materials, and combining insights from organization studies, cognitive theory, phenomenology, information technology, design theory, philosophy and art, the book presents further inquiries into a variety of issues such as remediation, multiple representations, digital and visual objects, transient knowledge, tinkering, ontology, as well as the quandaries of the researcher when s/he engages in the practice of doing research.

The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the hidden network of relationships in corporate governance: who owes what to whom, who will stand by whom in times of crisis, what governs the provision of credit when no one seems to have credit. This book maps the influence of these types of economic and social networks — communities of agents (people or firms) and the ties among them — on corporate behavior and governance. The studies in the book are largely concerned with mechanisms for the emergence of governance networks rather than with what determines the best outcomes. The chapters identify “structural breaks” — privatization, for example, or globalization — and assess why powerful actors across countries behaved similarly or differently in terms of network properties and corporate governance. They examine, among other topics, the surprisingly heterogeneous network structures that contradict the common belief in a single Anglo-Saxon model; the variation in network trajectories among the formerly communist countries including China; signs of convergence in response to the common structural breaks in Europe; the growing structural power of women due to gains in gender diversity on corporate governance in Scandinavia; the “small world” of merger and acquisition activity in Germany and the United States; the properties of a global and transnational governance network; and the application of agent-based models to understanding the emergence of governance.

Subversion, Conversion, Development explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies, encounters that counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption. We include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, ‘DIY cultures’, and other non-mainstream models of technology production and consumption. The contributors—leading thinkers in science and technology studies, anthropology, and software design—pay special attention to the specific inflections that different cultures and communities give to the value of knowledge. The richly detailed accounts presented challenge the dominant view of knowledge as a neutral good—that is, as information available for representation, encoding, and use outside social relations. Instead, we demonstrate the specific social and historical situation of all knowledge forms, and thus of the technological engagement with and communication of knowledges. The chapters examine specific cases in which forms of knowledge and cross-cultural encounter are shaping technology use and development. They consider design, use, and reuse of technological tools including databases, GPS devices, books, and computers, in locations that range from Australia and New Guinea to Germany and the United States. Contributors: Laura Watts, Gregers Petersen, Helen Verran, Michael Christie, Jerome Lewis, Hildegard Diemberger, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Alan Blackwell, Dawn Nafus, Lee Wilson, James Leach, Marilyn Strathern, David Turnbull, Wade Chambers.

Consumers create a data trail by tapping their phones; businesses can tap into this trail to harness the power of the more than three trillion dollar mobile economy. According to this book's author, this two-way exchange can benefit both customers and businesses. Drawing on extensive research and on a variety of real-world examples from companies including Alibaba, China Mobile, Coke, Facebook, SK Telecom, Telefónica, and Travelocity, the book describes some intriguingly contradictory consumer behavior: people seek spontaneity, but they are predictable; they find advertising annoying, but they fear missing out; they value their privacy, but they increasingly use personal data as currency. When mobile advertising is done well, the book argues, the smartphone plays the role of a personal concierge. The book identifies nine forces that shape consumer behavior, including time, crowdedness, trajectory, and weather, and examines how these forces operate, separately and in combination. It highlights the true influence mobile wields over shoppers, the behavioral and economic motivations behind that influence, and the lucrative opportunities it represents. In a world of artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, wearable technologies, smart homes, and the Internet of Things, the future of the mobile economy seems limitless.

This book analyses the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis. Adapting the subsistence and capitalist sectors characterized by Lewis, the American dual economy contains a low-wage sector and a FTE (Finance, Technology, and Electronics) sector. The transition from the low-wage to the FTE sector is through education, which is becoming increasingly difficult for members of the low-wage sector because the FTE sector largely abandoned the American tradition of quality public schools and universities. Policy debates about public education and other policies that serve the low-wage sector often characterize members of the low-wage sector as black even though the low-wage sector is largely white. The model of a modern dual economy and the American history of race relations explain difficulties in both current politics and governmental actions in criminal justice, education, infrastructure and household debts.

Why do some companies have better corporate reputations than others? And why do some companies that are not seen as particularly socially responsible have a good reputation? This book explains why both these phenomenon occur. In essence, the companies that win the reputation game are those that are seen by their key stakeholders as being ‘best at something’ and/or ‘best for somebody’. Being best at something means that they offer better quality and value than their competitors. Being best for somebody means that they serve the needs of their stakeholders better than competitors. The book also examines why the advice of scholars is often not implemented by companies.

Computing remains a heavily male-dominated field even after twenty-five years of extensive efforts to promote female participation. The chapters in this book look at reasons for the persistent gender imbalance in computing and explore some strategies intended to reverse the downward trend. The studies included are rigorous social science investigations; they rely on empirical evidence — not rhetoric, hunches, folk wisdom, or off-the-cuff speculation about supposed innate differences between men and women. Taking advantage of the recent surge in research in this area, the book presents the latest findings of both qualitative and quantitative studies. Each section begins with an overview of the literature on current research in the field, followed by individual studies. The first section investigates the relationship between gender and information technology among preteens and adolescents, with each study considering what could lead girls' interest in computing to diverge from boys'; the second section, on higher education, includes a nationwide study of computing programs and a cross-national comparison of computing education; the final section, on pathways into the IT workforce, considers both traditional and nontraditional paths to computing careers.