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Organizations facing issues related to growth, innovation, and strategy are embracing design thinking, a problem-solving process. This study explores 40 design thinking initiatives and identifies operational practices emerge and empirical categories across various contexts. Quantitative analyses of the initiatives and qualitative interview data are used to distinguish four configurations of action analogous to races: training, emphasizing learning-by-doing; marathons, capturing personal reflection over a long project; relays, highlighting team collaboration; and sprints, reflecting fast-paced product innovation. The initiatives are differentiated as designer-led versus team-driven and, low-urgency versus high-urgency. Implications of practicing design thinking in Organization Development and Change are discussed.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Herbert A. Simon and Alan Newell won the Turing Award jointly in Computer Science for foundational work on Artificial Intelligence. Simon also won the Nobel Prize in Economics for the concept of “bounded rationality.” In both cases, the same heuristic was deemed fundamental: “Search till a satisfactory solution is found.” We argue that behavioral strategy can learn a great deal from the Theory of Computational Complexity and Artificial Intelligence. These fields can provide a sounder theoretical grounding for bounded rationality and for the necessity and usefulness of heuristics. Finally, a concept of “organizational intractability” based roughly on the metaphor provided by the Theory of Computational Complexity may be useful in determining what analytical decision technologies are actually intractable in real organizations with constraints on time and managerial attention.

I survey applications of Markov switching models to the asset pricing and portfolio choice literatures. In particular, I discuss the potential that Markov switching models have to fit financial time series and at the same time provide powerful tools to test hypotheses formulated in the light of financial theories, and to generate positive economic value, as measured by risk-adjusted performances, in dynamic asset allocation applications. The chapter also reviews the role of Markov switching dynamics in modern asset pricing models in which the no-arbitrage principle is used to characterize the properties of the fundamental pricing measure in the presence of regimes.

This chapter fills a significant gap in the intelligence literature and the knowledge sciences literature by aligning definitions and characterizations of knowledge capital as an essential intelligence source. The chapter also explains how knowledge capital might be leveraged in each of the four capabilities. The chapter presents a well-researched characterization of knowledge capital drawing from international scholars and practitioners’ work. The value of human capital, structural capital, and relational capital in intelligence work is explored.

The place of G. H. Mead’s works in symbolic interactionism is both central and paradoxical. It stands at the very foundation of Hebert Blumer’s initial invention of symbolic interactionism with respect to Mead’s social behaviorism and has been discussed and debated ever since because of the problems caused by such a presumed direct filiation. Returning to Mead in order to broaden the perspective offered by Blumer is a must and has to face some fundamental issues raised in this context. This article starts by examining the ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes involved in Mead’s concept of society, in order to show the multiple dimensions involved in significant symbols. An illustration of Mead’s wider perspective is given in reference to the feminist movement as analyzed first by Mead’s student, Jessie Taft, and goes back to the origin of the movement with Mary Wollstonecraft. This leads to the analysis of the debate about the place of power in symbolic interactionism, initiated by Peter M. Hall, and addresses the alternative between domination and emancipation. This alternative has been worked out by Lonnie Athen’s radical symbolic interactionism analysis of domination on the one side, and by Kathy Charmaz and Norman K. Denzin on the other side of emancipatory symbolic interactionist practices. Another solution is proposed to this alternative, with the analysis of power being intrinsically constituted by domination and emancipation, in their respective contribution to the understanding of the symbolic dispositions of autonomy – a concept that remains relatively undeveloped in Mead’s works.

This chapter presents several approaches for identifying and dating the speculative bubble on real estate market. Using the real estate price index (IPAI), statistical and structural approaches were combined in order to detect the existence of a bubble on the Moroccan real estate market. The results obtained affirm that the Moroccan real estate market experienced a speculative bubble during the period 2006–2008 explained mainly by the boom of credit during the same period. The use of the Markov switching model affirmed that the speculative bubble on Morocco is cyclic and consequently corroborates the critic formulated by Evans (1991) concerning the traditional approaches for the detection of financial bubbles. Thus, the analysis of the series of the bubble, extracted using the Kalman filter, affirms the existence of two regimes, namely an explosive regime and a normal regime. The first regime describes the periods of explosion of the bubble and lasts for about 9 quarters, while the second, lasting for 14 quarters, describes the periods of return to the average cycle.