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The purpose of this empirical research is to identify the key success factors engrained in the new product development (NPD) practices of companies that belong to the Italian sport shoe cluster of Montebelluna.

Statistical analyses were undertaken on data collected through a questionnaire submitted to a conveniently selected group of the population of firms localized in Montebelluna. A series of one‐way ANOVAs was run on the NPD performance metric. We then measured the Pearson correlation between the degree of new product success and the factors that were found to be statistically significant. We converted the response variable into a dummy and then we tested the hypotheses with the normalized Cramer's V‐square to discriminate between the best performers and the rest. Finally, we performed a regression analysis to build a model that explains a large part of the variation in new product success.

Three macro factors have a positive influence on new product success: extended team approach (also cross‐company); customer orientation; and the use of advanced ICTs for new product development.

Further investigation is needed on the role of networking with suppliers in new product development.

Sport shoe manufacturers should: proactively develop close relationships with their customers aimed at NPD; integrate lead users in the NPD process; and implement strategies to overcome their inhibition from investing in advanced ICTs for NPD.

Some factors that have been found as being important drivers of new product success in other researches do not seem to play a relevant role in the companies we analyzed. The study highlights the strategic role of lead users in contributing to the enhanced performance of successful companies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine current patterns of international marketing activities of Italian gold firms with a special emphasis on the US market and to juxtapose them with those adopted by Indian gold firms.

A sample of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) from Italy and India served as the study setting. Data were collected via depth interviews from the owners/managers of four Italian and three Indian firms.

The paper finds that the competitive behavior of Italian SMEs is primarily reactive, whereas Indian companies strategically focus on the expanding Indian immigrant community.

This is a case study evaluating small companies based in two regions (Arezzo, and Hyderabad, India).

A strategic comparison of the competitive conducts of SMEs based in an old economy country and a new economy emerging market‐based firms.

This paper is based on empirical data of the IIUG project “Environment and the National Accounts”. A more extensive and detailed report on this project was recently published by Andreas Ryll and Sabine Wadewitz: “Zur Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung des monetären Umweltschutzes 1975–1985”, IIUG rep 87–8, 178 pp.

In comparison with other countries, the rise of Dutch socialism was slow and difficult, and it would be impossible to explain this without exploring the movement′s early history. Such an exploration immediately leads to the somewhat singular character of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846‐1919), who led the Dutch socialist movement in the nineteenth century. Gives a sketch of Domela Nieuwenhuis′ life and work; the political and social conditions under which Dutch socialism emerged; and the specific character of socialism in The Netherlands. Concludes by suggesting that the late industrialization and the opposing interests of confessionalism and modernism meant that the socialists were not able to organize a power structure for the workers on the basis of the conflicting interests of “capital” and “labour”. By the time the socialist power structure finally achieved significance, large parts of the total labour force had been assimilated into confessional cadres and, in this sense, socialism came too late to The Netherlands.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how a key meeting design characteristic, meeting size, affects the relationship between meeting effectiveness and task performance through employee engagement.

A three-wave time-lagged survey design was used to gather data concerning meeting experiences from employees for statistical model testing.

Using a moderated mediated path analysis, we found that effective meetings only translated into end-of-the-day task performance through engagement when the meeting size was small.

Although much research supports the current findings related to group size and meetings, meeting science has not investigated meeting design characteristics as levers to be pulled to enhance or detract from both meeting outcomes and organizationally desired outcomes. The findings, though are limited, due to potential common method bias, which was limited using methodological and statistical processes.

Managers and meeting attendees should consider how to maintain relatively small meeting size when possible so as to maximize both engagement and performance.

The current study is one of the few to look at meeting size directly as a moderator and helps demonstrate, once again, the importance of effectively designing meetings for success.

In many organizational settings, status hierarchies result in the conferral of privileges that are based on achievement. However, in the same settings, status may result in the bestowal of privileges that are unearned. We argue that these unearned privileges are often awarded based on ascribed characteristics, but are perceived to be achieved. We further argue that these misattributions occur because acknowledging that one has benefited from unearned advantages that are awarded in a meritocracy can be threatening to a person's self-identity. We propose that by studying unearned privileges in organizational settings, a more accurate assessment of status hierarchies may result.

The inherent linkages between climate and the habitability of the Earth are increasingly well recognized, and a convention could help to ensure that conserving the environment and developing the economy in the future must go hand in hand. Due to growing environmental concern, the United Nations General Assembly has set into motion an international negotiating process for a framework convention on climate change. One of the specific tasks in these negotiations is how to share the duties in reducing climate relevant gases, particularly carbon dioxide, between the industrial and the developing countries. The respective proposals could be among the most far‐reaching ever for socio‐economic development, indeed for global security and survival itself. While the negotiations will be about climate and protection of the atmosphere, they could lead to fundamental changes in energy, forestry, transport and technology policies, and to future development pathways with low greenhouse gas emissions. Addresses some of these aspects of a climate convention and a respective CO⊂2‐agreement, the Houston Protocol.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.