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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 paper aims to demonstrate the approach taken in Norfolk, UK, to engage patients and staff to develop and improve services by stimulating improvements in integrated working. The two year programme focused on making specific improvements that patients said they wanted to see by working with staff who volunteered to take part in the programme.

The “Integrating Care in Norfolk” pilot (ICN) was one of 16 national pilots. GPs from 32 practices worked with local community staff to redesign services to meet “patient pledges”. The impact of changes on patients, staff and services were evaluated locally using questionnaires and by analysing data combined in a performance dashboard. The ICN was subject to both national and local evaluations, which provided a basis for comparison.

The local evaluation showed that progress had been made towards meeting objectives, including patients and staff satisfaction and reducing unplanned admissions. GPs recorded improvements to joint working, and all staff concerned chose to continue the project beyond the pilot period.

The findings of the local evaluation contrasted with those of the national evaluation. The Norfolk study demonstrated the positive impact of integrating care on patients, staff and services. The national study concluded that there were minimal or negative impacts of integrating care, although the study amalgamated all 16 pilots, with very different clients, services and objectives.

The ICN was novel in the way that patients and staff were engaged. Patients were invited to set an agenda for change, and provided a mandate to staff from each organisation to redesign their services. This approach may provide a solution to sustainable integrated working. The ICN was evaluated locally as well as nationally as part of the DH ICP programme, enabling respective findings to be compared and validated.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an innovative paradigm for the future internet architecture. This paper aims to provide a view on how academic video lectures can exploit the ICN paradigm. It discusses the design of academic video lectures over named data networking (NDN) (an ICN architecture) and speculates their future development. To the best of author’s knowledge, a similar study has not been presented.

The paper is a visionary essay that introduces the background, elaborates the basic concepts and presents the author’s views and insights into academic video lectures that exploit the latest development of NDN approach and its applications.

The ICN paradigm is closely related to the levels of automation and large-scale uptake of multimedia applications that provide video lectures. Academic video lectures over NDN have: improved efficiency, better scalability with respect to information/bandwidth demand and better robustness in challenging communication scenarios. A framework of academic video lectures over NDN must take into account various key issues such as naming (name resolution), optimized routing, resource control, congestion control, security and privacy. The size of the network in which academic video lectures are distributed, the content location dynamics and the popularity of the stored video lectures will determine which routing scheme must be selected. If semantic information is included into academic video lectures, the network dynamically may assist video (streaming) lecture service by permitting the network to locate the proper version of the requested video lecture that can be better delivered to e-learners and/or select the appropriate network paths.

The paper helps researchers already working on video lectures in finding a direction for designing and deploying platforms that will provide content-centric academic video lectures.

The paper pioneers the investigation of academic video lecture distribution in ICN and presents an in-depth view to its potentials and research trends.

This study aims to determine the impact of innovation conviction, innovation mindset and innovation creed on the need for achievement and the success of women entrepreneurs. The study also investigates the impact of entrepreneurial education in moderating the relationship between the need for achievement and women’s entrepreneurial success.

The study used a structured questionnaire and a quantitative research design. Data were gathered from 304 women entrepreneurs in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The data were analysed using smart partial least squares.

The results showed that innovation conviction, innovation mindset and innovation creed have positive and significant impacts on the need for achievement. It was also discovered that the need for achievement and entrepreneurial education have a positive and significant impact on women's entrepreneurial success. Moreover, the results showed that entrepreneurial education had a positive and significant moderating effect on the nexus between the need for achievement and women's entrepreneurial success.

By comprehensively examining the impact of innovation conviction, innovation mindset and innovation creed on the need for achievement and women's entrepreneurial success, this study has valuable implications for academics.

This research will add to the corpus of information on women's entrepreneurship and small business management in Africa, which is generally overlooked by academics in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an industry policy implementation case involving around 30 manufacturing firms, where the intellectual capital (IC) lens, and especially the intellectual capital navigator (ICN) approach, was found to be very useful for evaluating alternative servitisation strategies. Servitisation is a form of business model innovation and as such involves restructuring the firm’s resource deployment system including its IC resources.

The ICN was one of several methods and themes used by a sample of manufacturing firms during a 12 month period. Data capture were through video filming, observation, and formal interviewing during and after the interventions.

The ICN is considered to be the third most valuable theme in a strategic and operational servitisation programme for manufacturing firms, primarily in the domain of effectiveness evaluation of alternative resource deployment strategies and as such should be one of the key dimensions in a business model template for manufacturing firms that aim to servitize. This research also illustrates the usefulness of the intellectual capital lens in the policy implementation process.

The findings of this study is limited to the servitization process of SME manufacturing firms in an Anglo-Saxon operating environment which very rapidly have gone from low to high cost.

The development of service-oriented business models for manufacturing firms suffers due to traditional business model frameworks not having a high relevance for servitising manufacturing firm. Consequently it is important to understand the potential contribution that the IC lens through the ICN can make in the servitisation process.

This article describes a government‐sponsored initiative to promote integrated working in health and local authority services for adults and children. It outlines the policy context for the initiative, its background, what it does and how local organisations can get involved. It particularly emphasises the need to bridge the gap between research and practice.

The World Health Organisation and the International Council of Nurses (WHO/ICN, 1991) broadly define addiction nurses' roles into eight domains that suggest a set of core competencies required to work effectively within this challenging area of nurse practice. This paper reports on a survey of addiction centres across eight European countries. The survey explored the role of the nurse specifically within methadone substitution therapy programmes, with the intention of mapping perceived key roles against the ICN/WHO domains. While many of WHO/ICN domains were evident (provider of care; educator; counsellor; advocate) significant limitations were revealed in other domains.

Networked information is viewed increasingly as a critical component to economic development and competitiveness, to essential improvements in our educational systems, and to public access to information in support of an informed citizenry in a democratic society. Iowa is a part of the changing environment affecting the creation and distribution of information. Iowa libraries use electronic information in a variety of unique ways as evidenced in the following reports.