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The aim of this paper is to argue for an explicit foundation of market exchange on person‐to‐person relationships as an alternative to the foundation on person‐to‐goods relationship underlying the exchange model inherited from neoclassical economics and classical contract law and used in a large significant share of marketing studies.

The paper provides a unifying theoretical framework to the analysis of transactions and relationships that links institutional approaches from economics, sociology, and law.

Relational contract theory provides a common ground for phenomena studied by both traditional exchange‐based and relationship marketing approaches. Relational contract theory conceives all types of market exchange as based on person‐to‐person relationships and provides an anchor for institutional, social and economic approaches in marketing.

The concept of transaction provides a common foundation for the analysis of marketing phenomena that holds in diverse environments, including arms‐length transactions and close‐linked relationships. It provides an interface between marketing theory on the one hand and institutional, social and economic disciplines on the other.

Contracts specify how the parties to a transaction can realize action options opened up by property rights arrangements. Contracting strategy is the vital backbone of an industrial service strategy. Sound design of business models starts with the identification of the optimal owner of a resource, i.e. the actor who is in the best position to manage uncertainties or take on responsibilities associated with resource use.

This is the first investigation of a contractual foundation of marketing theory. It embeds the concept of exchange in an institutional framework and adapts it to the evolving business reality shaped by co‐operating firms and the rising share of services in value creation.

For approximately a century and a half after their dramatic deflation, the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles of 1710–1720 had discredited finance. With the exception of government bond markets and a few chartered companies, the rapid rise and fall of fortunes associated with the South Sea Company, in Britain, and the Mississippi Company in France, had made the joint stock system of corporate finance almost synonymous with fraud and financial debauchery. (The most authoritative account of these schemes is given in Murphy, 1997.) The joint stock system of finance was seen as seriously flawed, and an indictment of the theories on credit money of the schemes’ instigator, John Law. During those one hundred and fifty years, classical political economy rose and flowered. Not surprisingly finance then came to be considered for its fiscal and monetary consequences. This pre-occupation left its mark on twentieth-century economics in an attitude that the fiscal and monetary implications of finance, eventually its influence on consumption, are more important than its balance sheet effects in the corporate sector. This attitude is apparent even in the work of perhaps the pre-eminent twentieth century critical finance theorist, John Maynard Keynes.

Responding to local, regional and international demands and initiatives, the government of Ecuador has rolled out an innovative program Sistema Integral de Tecnologías para la Escuela y la Comunidad (SíTEC) to place information, and communication technologies (ICTs) into the hands of students, teachers, and other educational institutions. SíTEC draws upon several elements of social entrepreneurship and has successfully reached some of the most regionally remote and culturally diverse communities in the country. The SíTEC program is emblematic of many of the criteria set forth regarding social entrepreneurship including the vision of leadership, the focus on a social mission and the importance of innovation in partnership and resource allocation. This study looks at survey and interview data from the Shiña community teachers and school leaders to determine the effects of the SíTEC program and the availability and use of ICTs in schools, SíTEC has equipped public schools with computers, projectors, digital boards, and Internet. Additionally, SíTEC organizes training courses on ICTs for public school teachers and provides schools with educational software available in Spanish, Kichwa, Shuar, and English. While there is still much work to be done, SíTEC and the associated partnerships and programs are beginning to have impact in their specified outcomes. Creative partnerships developed within the Ministry of Education, Office of Bilingual Education, Shiña community have allowed for communication and exchange of knowledge and resources across multiple partners. This chapter explores SíTEC as an innovative government-based program that meets targeted social outcomes in ICTs and education.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nature of the relationship between the entrepreneur and the banker, which is central to any analysis of business creation and innovation management. The author’s main purpose is to understand how this relationship has been studied by the pioneer economists of the entrepreneur and to highlight their contribution to the understanding of today’s reality.

To do so, the author proposes a sketch of an entrepreneur and banker economics based on the study of six economists (Cantillon, Smith, Bentham, Say, Schumpeter and Baumol) known for their works on entrepreneur theory. In their works, they explained how the (often difficult) relationship between the entrepreneur and the banker is built in a context of multi-uncertainty. They define the entrepreneur in different ways (a risk-taker, a prudent man, a projector, etc.), and put forward different behaviors facing uncertainty through social relations. The relationship between the entrepreneur and the banker can be read according to the grid of analysis of strong or weak ties (Granovetter, 1973).

This analysis demonstrates the importance of trust between the two protagonists. This contribution remains fundamental to study the behavior of financers and entrepreneurs today in the context of business eco-systems, clusters, science parks ‒ in other words, the main places of emergence of innovation.

This research leads to the proposal of the main basis of an economics of the entrepreneur and the banker; it can be further developed with the addition of other contributions of historical economists.

This research shows the importance of thinking about the ways to build trust within the relation between entrepreneurs and their funders (bankers, venture capital, crowdfunding).

The analysis of social ties (weak or strong) plays a major role in this relation.

The originality of the article is to come back to the works of pioneer economists and to show their contributions to the understanding of today’s reality.

Purchasing has emerged as a key source of competitive advantage. This paper aims to explore how different purchasing strategies are connected to complex supply relationships and to the goal of purchasing.

The study draws on the literature on industrial network theory and industrial buying behaviour.

The contribution describes six types of purchasing strategies that firms exert. These strategies depend on the complexity of supply relationships and the buyer's purchasing goal. Conventional products and services are bought through transactional exchange relationships, whereas strategically important items are purchased through intentional supply networks.

Purchasing strategies of a firm emphasise either efficiency or effectiveness of operation. The type of exchange varies according to the nature of supply relationships: it is either transactional or relational. A key implication for managers is that they should recognise the goal of buying, the strategic importance of the object of purchasing, and choose accordingly between the different types of supplier structures.

The paper shows that firms' purchasing strategies depend on the nature of their supply relationships and the motive for purchasing. Different strategies emphasise different aspects and events that ultimately manifest themselves in the firms' business models.

THERE HAS never been more than one good reason for the founding of the European Economic Community — the Common Market, as it has come to be called. That was to extend the boundaries of each member nation to encompass them all.

THE paper entitled Memomotion (page 32), delivered by Professor Mundel to a recent meeting organised by the Institute of Industrial Technicians, highlights the scope for this form of photography in work study applications.

Describes the experiences of an American professor who taught a graduate course in cross‐cultural management at a Portuguese university. Outlines the overall experience before detailing several pedagogic issues which were unforeseen/problematic. Proposes ten axioms to guide similar future internal exchange experiences. Emphasizes four areas of difficulty, preparation, expectations, conduct and relationships.

Smart spaces are open complex computing systems, consisting of a large variety of cooperative smart things. Central to building smart spaces is the support for sophisticated coordination among diverse smart things collaborating to accomplish specified tasks. Multi‐agent systems are often used as the software infrastructures to address the coordination issue in smart spaces. However, since agents in smart spaces are dynamic, resource‐bounded and have complicated service dependencies, current approaches to coordination in multi‐agent systems encounter new challenges when applied in smart spaces. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The paper presents Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents. Baton is designed as a complement to coordination approaches in multi‐agent systems with a focus on mechanisms for service discovery, composition, request arbitration and dependency maintenance. Baton is now deployed in our own smart spaces to achieve better agent coordination.

The effectiveness and efficiency of Baton is validated by its practical use in the designed scenario and some evaluation experiments.

An attempt at performing dynamic service composition in Baton is made by using semantic information in future work.

Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents is presented.

The democratization of invention is a long lasting desire for the advancement of society. Having access to education and the means of production appears as the major factors for the implementation of this goal. 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that has the potential to bring digital manufacturing to everyone. However, the rise of personal fabrication requires an increase in printing quality, a reduction on machine cost and an increase in knowledge shared by the open hardware community. The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of a new Open Hardware printer project to address these points.

The authors have designed and constructed a low-cost photopolymer-based 3D printer called BeamMaker. The printer is connected to a host computer and a digital-light-processing projector. This work details the design process and how improvements were implemented to reach good printing quality. The authors provide public access to the instructions, software, source code, parts list, user manual and STL and CAD files.

The BeamMaker printer can build objects with a high surface quality that is comparable to the quality obtained by industrial photopolymer-based 3D printers. When testing the ability to print a sample cylinder, the printer shows higher accuracy when compared to other personal 3D printers. These findings are encouraging considering the low cost of the system.

The printing failure rate of the system has not been measured to date. The system requires some improvements to produce large objects.

The printer cost is just USD380. This is five to eight times less expensive than popular personal 3D printers available today. The cost is 30 times less expensive than a personal photopolymer 3D printer produced by a main commercial company and yet producing results of similar quality. The authors expect good avenues for collaboration from the open-source community to continue improving these systems.

The high cost of current personal 3D printers prevents users from developing countries from entering into the open hardware trend. A dramatic reduction in printer cost such as that explored in this work might contribute to the real democratization of personal fabrication.

The authors report on the status of three other photopolymer-based personal 3D printer projects. To the best of the authors' knowledge, BeamMaker is the first fully open hardware 3D printer project which uses this technology.