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Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

Commercialization of research projects at the university, in particular, its efficiency and performance, have attracted little attention in the empirical literature to date. This despite the fact that commercialization of university knowledge is increasingly seen as a third task of universities and understanding of what enhances and what blocks the processes involved, is virtually lacking, particularly on the project level. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to identify factors that influence the performance of university-driven knowledge projects, including efficiency, in the context of commercialization of knowledge at universities. In this context, the study employs Data Envelop Analysis combined with Rough-Set Analysis on a sample of 42 projects in the Netherlands. The major factors influencing overall performance in commercialization turn out to be years of collaboration with large firms and efficiency in use of resources in the projects, but the affinity of the project managers at university with the market also plays a role. The best overall results in commercialization (introduction to market in a relatively short time) are gained with a longer period of collaboration with large firms (5–10 years) and a medium level of efficiency. There are also some contradictory trends. The chapter concludes with implications of the results, as well as some future research paths.

There has been a significant rise in the number of patents originating from academic environments. However, current conceptualizations of academic patents provide a largely homogenous approach to define this entrepreneurial form of technology transfer. In this study we develop a novel categorization framework that identifies three subsets of academic patents which are conceptually distinct from each other. By applying the categorization framework on a unique database of Swedish patents we furthermore find support for its usefulness in detecting underlying differences in technology, opportunity, and commercialization characteristics among the three subsets of academic patents.

Though KIBS constitute only a small proportion of all services, researchers frequently accord them a significance beyond that indicated by their share in employment or value added (Tether & Hipp, 2002; Gallouj, 2002). For example, KIBS are held to play ‘an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in ‘new’ knowledge-based economies’ (Howells, 2000, p. 4), as sources of important new technologies, high-quality, high-wage employment and wealth creation (Tether, 2004). Unfortunately, while much of the rhetoric seems intuitively reasonable, one inevitably encounters definitional difficulties in delimiting the specifics of innovation in KIBS, with a variety of, more or less operational, working definitions employed by the academic literature (Wong & He, 2005).