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This chapter establishes the conceptual and analytic framework for the book. It relates not only to much of the existing work in evolutionary and institutional economics, but also to work in cultural science and cultural semiotics domains as well as in media convergence and transmedia studies. The central concept it first deploys is ‘innovation systems’ as applied in national, regional, international and sectoral contexts. It then builds on the general theory of economic evolution by Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts and reviews the tools this theory provides to carry out a meso-level analysis of industries co-innovating and converging. It then proposes a new concept – ‘cross-innovation’ – to refer to the emergence of new structures and ‘rules’ at the boundaries of existing industries.

An NBM is a market form in that it is made of institutions and business models. It arises in a particular context where abundant novelty issuing from the producer side meets substantial search costs and evaluation difficulties on the consumer side. In a NBM consumers don’t necessarily know what they are searching for. These difficulties on the demand side are specifically caused by the fact that novel goods, which are experience goods, often require new “rules for choice” as new suites of evaluative criteria.

This paper examines how cultural holes that exist at the intersection of institutional fields influence the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Through an exploration of physician-founded ambulatory surgery centers in the United States, we examine how the presence of cultural holes presented doctors with alternative beliefs, values, and practices to overcome the cultural constraints around entrepreneurship within the medical profession. In doing so, this study extends cultural entrepreneurship research by bringing cultural holes to the forefront, empirically showing how they facilitate entrepreneurial action and proposing other contexts where cultural holes may affect entrepreneurial actions and outcomes.

This study aims to make explicit fundamental challenges, which includes children with disabilities and special educational needs in education in China, Hong Kong, and Indonesia under the current conceptions of Inclusion and Education for All (EFA). Based on extensive research and staff development work in these places, this chapter argues for uniting the aims of inclusive education and EFA in order to realize the goal of EFA in all countries. Such a transformative agenda will require a new model of looking at difficulties in learning and the concept of diversity in education. Unless a conscious effort is made to move our thinking and planning from EFA to Inclusive EFA, we will not achieve true universal education.

In “An Austrian Theory of Spatial Land,” Fred E. Foldvary addresses the disregard of spatial issues in basic Austrian economic theory as formulated by Carl Menger (1871) and elaborated upon by Ludwig von Mises (1940). Foldvary shows that Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1826) and Henry George (1879/1884), in particular, serve to fill these gaps in the classical Austrian theory of the market process. Moreover, a theory that incorporates spatial land leads to the conclusion that Austrian business cycle theory is incomplete: The “malspeculation” that accompanies urbanization whenever capital and labor rather than land are the main sources of tax revenue will have to be added to the malinvestment that is caused by expansionary monetary policies.