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This paper aims to provide suggestions for the identification of potential new applications for the existing products and/or technologies.

A nine-step method has been developed for extracting information about a product or technology, processing the international patent database (IPD) and extracting useful hints for potential new applications. An academic case study has been used to perform the first application of the proposal.

A novel approach for processing IPD aimed at supporting the identification of new opportunities for exploiting existing products/technologies. The case study application shows that the proposal allows to extract potentially useful and non-obvious suggestions for new product applications.

Although some limits inevitably affect this preliminary version of the proposal, important hints for future developments have been inferred for a more comprehensive exploitation of both the firm internal knowledge and the suggestions provided by the international patent database.

The achieved results can support firms in expanding market opportunities for their products or technologies.

The proposed approach offers a new structured path for stimulating idea generation for new product applications, by exploiting product information and the cooperative patent classification.

The task is to report what with more details was exposed in one of the author's recently published works, and consist in trying to develop a new approach to psychotherapy.

The method of this research is to employ Gregory Bateson's epistemological models to acquire new ideas to think and practise psychotherapy.

In the course of the work it was found that, in a Batesonian perspective, psychotherapy can be considered, at the same time, ethical and aesthetic: ethical because one type of the therapist's action is founded on a conscious purpose; aesthetic because another type of the therapist's action is “spontaneous”.

The practical implication of these reflections consist in the use of the Batesonian method of double description in psychotherapy.

The original value of the paper is that the ethical nature of Batesonian psychotherapy imposes two different types of responsibility on the therapist: the first concerns the actions he takes based on the extrovert purpose and the second concerns his actions with regard to the introvert purpose, which creates the conditions for the flow of “spontaneous” action.

This paper aims to study the effects of knowledge acquisition on innovation performance and the moderating effects of human resource management (HRM), in terms of employee retention and HRM practices, on the above-mentioned relationship.

A sample of 129 firms operating in a wide array of sectors has been used to gather data through a standardized questionnaire for testing the hypotheses through ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models.

The results indicate that knowledge acquisition positively affects innovation performance and that HRM moderates the relationship between knowledge acquisition and innovation performance.

With the increasing proclivity towards engaging in open innovation, firms are likely to face some tensions and opportunities leading to a shift in the management of human resources. This starts from the assumption that the knowledge base of the firm resides in the people who work for the firm and that some HRM factors can influence innovation within firms. Despite this, there is a lack of research investigating the link between knowledge acquisition, HRM and innovation performance under the open innovation lens. This paper intends to fill this gap and nurture future research by assessing whether knowledge acquisition influences innovation performance and whether HRM moderates such a relationship.

This chapter uses new data sets to analyze labor market integration between 1882 and 1936 in an area of Asia stretching from South India to Southeastern China and encompassing the three Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Malaya, and Thailand. We find that by the late nineteenth century, globalization, of which a principal feature was the mass migration of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia, gave rise to both an integrated Asian labor market and a period of real wage convergence. Integration did not, however, extend beyond Asia to include core industrial countries. Asian and core areas, in contrast to globally integrated commodity markets, showed divergent trends in unskilled real wages.

Research in Economic History, Volume 25, includes six chapters covering a range of geographic areas and tackling a range of issues in economic history. The first two address United States topics, one analyzing data from the eighteenth and the other from the twentieth century. Both have a macroeconomic focus. Peter Mancall, Josh Rosenbloom, and Tom Weiss consider growth in colonial America, while Gary Richardson examines the role of bank failures in propagating the Great Depression.

While controlling for supply chain effects, the purpose of this paper is to investigate if globalization and collaborative integration within a firm-wide manufacturing network have significant implications for the adoption of sustainable production (SP) and sustainable sourcing (SS) practices at the plant level.

The authors conceptualize SP and SS as process innovations with moderate degrees of innovativeness and apply “Organizational integration and process innovation” theory to build our conceptual model. Then, the authors use primary survey data from 471 assembly manufacturing plants operating in the US, Europe and Asia to test our hypotheses rigorously.

This research finds that the adoption of SP practices at the plant level is significantly and positively associated with globalization and integration of the firm-wide manufacturing network. On the contrary, the adoption of SS practices is more strongly affected by integration in the external supply chain and benefits from the manufacturing network only indirectly, through the association with SP practices.

Operations management literature devoted to sustainability has studied sustainable practices mostly from a risk management angle. Also, there exists contrasting evidence in the operations strategy literature about the positive and negative effects that globalization of a manufacturing network may have on the adoption of sustainable practices at the plant level. Moreover, several studies show how integration with supply chain partners helps manufacturing plants transition into more SP and SS practices; however, related literatures have neglected that collaborative integration within a firm-wide manufacturing network may also help to develop, or adapt to, new sustainable practices. This research represents a first attempt to resolve discordance and unveil the positive effects that manufacturing networks may have on sustainable innovations at the plant level.