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The purpose of this paper is to propose an evidence-based environmental scanning model that will provide a methodological framework for conducting community-engaged and community-focused research, with a particular emphasis on northern communities in Canada.

The study has adopted a multifaceted environmental scanning approach to understand the Inuvialuit Settlement Region communities. The research design is informed by various environmental models as discussed in literature from a broad range of domains such as business, library and information science (LIS), and a sophisticated multimethod data gathering approach that included field trips, observations, surveys, as well as informal methods of community engagement.

The paper proposes an environmental scan model as a novel approach to community-focused digital library (DL) development. The paper identifies both macro- and micro-environmental landscapes as applicable to the development of a DL for communities in Canada’s North. The macro-environmental landscapes include: geographical, historical and sociocultural, political and regulatory, economic, technological, competition, and human resource. The micro-environmental landscapes include: stakeholder and community, linguistic, information resource, and ownership.

The environmental scanning model and its key components presented in this paper provide a novel and concrete example of a project that aims to organize information for increased access and to create value through the design and implementation of an infrastructure for a cultural heritage DL. The environmental scan model will also contribute to both research and practice in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), particularly in the area of DL development for rural, remote, and indigenous communities.

Strategic Management.

The case is designed for a) MBA students b) Short-duration executive MBA courses.

The case refers to India’s leading steel company Tata Steel. Tata Tiscon, the steel rebar brand, is the organization’s leading retail brand. The case chronicles the period between the birth of the retail brand in the year 2000, its dramatic rise and dominance, to the end of 2013 when some of its initiatives had failed. Tata Tiscon was established as a pan Indian brand on the dint of a distribution network comprising 33 distributors and over 2000 retailers, many of them exclusive to the brand. The brand spawned a series of innovation in the category like “selling by piece”, fixed price concept and “free” home delivery. Together with its channel partners, the company achieved dramatic success which was reflected in its leading market share coupled with significant price premium in a category where price had traditionally being the only selling pitch. After 2010, the company saw an emerging challenge in the form of a new business model, where some companies were gearing to provide the complete portfolio of construction material including cement, steel, etc., and a turnkey construction solution for house builders. Tata Tiscon responded by attempting to enter the service space by launching a building design solution and later a construction supervision solution. Both of these initiatives failed. The protagonist of the case is Mr Keshav Viswanath (Chief of Marketing for retail business at Tata Steel), who is concerned with the failures of these key initiatives and is wondering how to ensure the “leader” status of Tata Tiscon in coming years.

The students are expected to understand how a core strategy like differentiation is implemented successfully in “practice”; understand the exploitation–exploration dichotomy in an organization; appreciate difference between radical innovation (based on new organizational routines, new business partners and new relationships) and incremental innovation based on fine tuning of existing organizational routines and relationships.

Rebar production: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6n9sci8j-8; Tata TISCON AV: www.youtube.com/watch?v=89kOUsbnaYQ; TQM – The Toyota Way: www.youstube.com/watch?v=qf3gdrIMxRw; Disruptive vs. Incremental Innovation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOOL_GiaLTo; Approach to innovation is dead wrong: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pii8tTx1UYM

CSS 11: Strategy.

The purpose of this paper demonstrate the strong branding correlation between tourism and the landscape, and show that good design can have a positive influence on both.

The relationship between a tourist destination's brand and its landscape is first established. Then the positive and negative correlations between a tourist destination's brand and its landscapes is examined, through realized examples. Finally, good practice is presented in the form of three main levels of study and planning, through case studies of the government-commissioned or internationally recognised work by our office.

There are specific cases of strong correlation between the image and brand of tourist destinations and their landscapes. This is especially true of Mediterranean destinations. Tourism not only uses the qualities of local landscapes but also strongly influences them. The economy of many Mediterranean regions depends on tourism, so a sustainable approach is required for a new equilibrium between tourism and the landscape. In some areas negative correlations have been identified and dealt with by local governments, while in other destinations positive correlations have been successfully exploited. Certain destinations go further: they create or add to positive landscapes.

The relationship of a tourist destination's brand to its landscape is often taken for granted. This paper shows the correlation between brand and landscape, especially in Mediterranean destinations, and provides original examples of good practice in landscape design and management.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast “doing more” and “knowing more” corporations. The paper sheds light on what makes a corporation competitive in the marketplace.

The paper discusses the concept of “doing more”, as exemplified in practice by Microsoft under the leadership of Steve Ballmer. The paper relies on recent debates on Microsoft to make its point.

Based on a survey of the current literature on Microsoft and its CEO, the paper demonstrates that only corporations that are innovative and shape the competition landscape are able to make a difference in the marketplace and significantly alter the competition equation.

The paper reflects on the state of Microsoft and what has led to its inability to recognize key shifts in technology and customers' expectations. The paper sets the stage for a better understanding of corporations that are about “doing more” and those which focus on reinventing themselves and their industry by being about “knowing more”.

Taiwan serves as a case study to investigate the association between the expansion and reform of higher education and the growth of science production. More specifically, what driving forces facilitated the growth of science production in different types of Taiwanese universities and other sectors, from 1980 to 2011.

The contribution charts differential contributions to overall production. Taiwanese data from Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is analyzed to show the expansion of the higher education system and its relationship to the production of science. The author uses sociological organization theories to facilitate our understanding of how and why the landscape of science production changed.

Results show that the growth of science production is associated with processes of isomorphism and competition within the higher education system. Findings also suggest that universities quickly seized upon external opportunities and turned themselves into what is known as the “knowledge conglomerate.” Unique organizational features bolster universities’ position as the driving force behind advancing national innovation.

This study extends previous research by examining multiple sectors of higher education, using longitudinal and recent data, and highlighting themes that have been ignored or overlooked, such as competition and collaboration among universities and industry partners.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the long‐term impact of the current financial and economic crisis on competition in the European Union (EU) banking sector.

The article first discusses the long term role of competition in the banking sector, commenting on policy developments prior to the crisis. Then the impact of the crisis is discussed focusing on two main areas of policy state: aids and bank regulation and supervision. The article culminates with the conclusions.

The main findings about state aids are that the efforts of the Commission to ensure that aided companies would not use the government support to distort competition seem to be working. However, given that the full impact on competition of these aids may take years to be felt, the Commission should be prepared to take action where necessary to ensure that competition will be protected. The provision of state aids could not have been avoided due to the grave systemic risks associated with bank failures. In respect of regulation and supervision, the article concluded that there is a lot of work to be done in this area to ensure that mistakes that led to the crisis will not be repeated but also that there is need for the Commission to ensure that the reforms to the regulatory and supervisory architecture do not occur at the expense of competition.

The article contains proposals about policy adjustments, thus contributing to the ongoing debate about the role of competition policy in the efforts to address the impact of the crisis.

The chapter studies the role of Financial Technology (FinTech) in disrupting the existing traditional banking system. It identifies FinTech’s evolution in Asia across Deposits & lending, Capital Raising, Investment Management, Market provisioning, Payments, and Insurance. This technology revolution allows us to have a banking system based on values that serve customers better, reduce risk to the society and improve returns for the shareholders. Data on unbanked population, smartphone penetration, and Internet penetration has led to retail side innovations such as Mobile Wallets, P2P Payments, and Real-time Payments in the most of Asia (except China). A total of 49% of Global Investments in FinTech are in Asia and the Chinese dragon alone accounts for 46%. India is witnessing a strong amount of FinTech deals in 2017 and it is being driven by payment and lending solutions. ASEAN FinTech industry is dominated by m-wallets and online payments; this is followed by retail investment and financial comparison. The chapter dives into the challenges Asian banks are facing because of this disruption. Now more than ever, is the important role governments and central banks of each nation play to assess the path these start-ups are headed on and this will unfold the landscape of banking in Asia a few years down the lane.

This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper is to offer food for thought to scholars in other fields of international trade law facing challenges from divergent national regimes.

Taking inspiration from political science literature on institutions, this paper crafts a broad analytical lens which captures various organisational forms (including networks), codes (including soft law) and culture (including epistemic communities). The strength and shortcomings of traditional “bricks and mortar” institutions such as the European Union (EU) and General Agreement Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation are first examined. Then, the innovative global network of International Competition Network (ICN) is analysed.

It highlights the value of the global antitrust epistemic community in providing a conducive environment for extensive recourse to “soft law”. Examples from the EU and the ICN include measures which find expression in enforcement tools and networks. These initiatives can be seen as experimental responses to the challenges of divergent national antitrust regimes.

It is desktop research rather than empirical field work.

To raise awareness outside the antitrust scholarly community of the variety of experimental institutional initiatives which have evolved, often on a soft law basis, in response to the challenges experienced by national enforcement agencies and businesses operating in the absence of a global antitrust regime.

It offers some personal reflections on the ICN from the author’s experience as a non-governmental advisor. It draws attention to the ICN’s underappreciated range of educational materials which are freely available on its website to everyone. It submits that the ICN template offers interesting ideas for other fields of international trade law where a global regime is unrealisable. The ICN is a voluntary virtual network of agencies collaborating to agree ways to reduce clashes among national regimes. Its goal of voluntary convergence is portrayed as standardisation rather than as absolute congruence. Even if standardisation of norms/processes is too ambitious a goal in other fields of international trade law, the ICN model still offers inspiration as an epistemic community within an inclusive and dynamic forum for encouraging debate and creating a culture of learning opportunities where familiarity and trust is fostered.

This study provides a bibliometric analysis of bank efficiency and competition over the past years (from 1993 to 2022) to (1) discover the past and current state of knowledge on bank competition and efficiency, (2) identify leading and authoritative journals and scholars who made significant contributions to the distribution of knowledge and impact, (3) identify nations that made a significant contribution and impact to the literature and (4) identify the structure of collaboration that exists between scholars in the areas of bank competition and efficiency and key thematic areas.

A total number of 868 documents made up of articles, reviews, book chapters, book and conference papers from the Scopus database were gathered. This study used a bibliometric analytic approach.

The number of documents on bank competitiveness and efficiency has increased significantly, as have their total publications, citations and national output. Additionally, the most esteemed and prestigious academic journals of eminent academics who have had a significant impact on the dissemination of knowledge on bank efficiency and competition literature champion papers on banking efficiency and competition. In terms of citation performance and collaborative efforts, the United States tops the developed countries, led by China, which is also the most productive. Additionally, single-country publications predominate in the literature, with China ranking first among the top five countries with corresponding authors. While the Lerner index, H-statistic, concentration index and market power were used to measure bank competitive behaviour, the data envelopment analysis approach predominates efficiency estimation techniques that are linked to cost, profit or revenue, scale, technical and productivity indexes.

This study is one of the first to offer bibliometric evidence of both bank competition and efficiency. It also offers proof of the distribution of knowledge and intellectual structure of the concepts and concerns in bank competition and efficiency.