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The spread of bird flu outside of Asia, particularly in Africa and Europe, topped headlines in 2006. The migration of wild birds brought the virus to Europe, where for the first time it spread to productive livestock, bringing it closer to the Western world. Due to today's globalized and highly interconnected world, the consequences of a potential bird flu pandemic are expected to be much more severe than those of the Spanish flu, which killed 50-100 million people between 1918 and 1921. A vaccine for the bird virus is currently not available. As of July 2006, 232 cases of human infection had been documented, mostly through direct contact with poultry. Of those, 134 people died. The best medication available to treat bird flu was Roche's antiviral drug Tamiflu. However, Tamiflu was not widely available; current orders of government bodies would not be fulfilled until the end of 2008. Well aware that today's avian flu might become a global pandemic comparable to the Spanish flu, Roche CEO Franz Humer had to decide how Roche should respond. While the pharmaceutical industry continued its research efforts on vaccines and medications, Tamiflu could play an important role by protecting healthcare workers and helping to contain the virus---or at least slow down its spread. Due to patent protection and a complicated production process with scarce raw ingredients, Roche had been the only producer of the drug. Partly in response to U.S. political pressure, in November 2005 Roche allowed Gilead to produce Tamiflu as well. Even so, it would take at least until late 2007 for Roche and Gilead to meet the orders of governments worldwide. The issue was a difficult one for Roche: What were the risks; what were the opportunities? If a pandemic occurred before sufficient stockpiles of Tamiflu had been built up, would Roche be held responsible? What steps, if any, should Roche take with respect to patent protection and production licensing in the shadow of a potential pandemic?

Students will weigh the benefits of short-term profit maximization against the risks that a highly uncertain event could pose to a business and consider nonstandard approaches to mitigate these risks. Students will discuss the challenges of addressing low-probability, high-impact events; potential conflicts with the short-term view of the stock market and analyst community; and challenges of the patent protection model for drugs for life-threatening diseases.

Organizational change is a risky endeavour. Most change initiatives fall short on their goals and produce high opportunity and process costs, which at times outweigh the content benefits of organizational change. This paper seeks to develop a framework, offering a theoretical toolbox to analyze context‐dependent barriers and enablers of organizational change. Starting from an organizational identity perspective, it aims to link contingency‐based approaches, such as environmental scan, SWOT and stakeholder analysis, with insights from organizational behaviour research, such as knowledge sharing and leadership.

The framework is informed by long‐lasting field research into organizational change in an international policing environment. The theories in the framework are selected from the perspective of field validity in two ways; they were chosen because the topics covered by these theories emerged as relevant during the field research and therefore it can be expected they have applicability to the field. The authors' insights and suggestions are summarised in 13 propositions throughout the text.

The analysis provides a clear warning that organizational change is more risky and multifaceted than change initiators typically assume. It is stressed that the external environment and the internal dynamics of organizations co‐determine the meaning of managerial practices. This implies that cure‐all recipes to organizational change are bound to fail.

This paper makes an ambitious attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries in the field of organizational change research to contribute to a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of change processes by integrating perspectives that focus on the internal context and the external environment of organizations.

Numerical calculations have been carried out to investigate the in-cylinder transient flow structure of a controlled auto-ignition (CAI) engine running at speeds of 1,500rpm and 2,000rpm. The calculated turbulent flow structure and velocities are validated against published laser doppler anemometry (LDA) experimental data. The experimental data were re-processed to represent the time dependent mean velocities for all measured points. The actual geometry configuration of the engine is imported into the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code used in this study. The simulations take into account the movement of the inlet, exhaust valves and the piston. The CFD simulations replicate the experimental work where only air was inserted into a driven optical engine. Also, to simulate an engine in controlled auto-ignition (CAI) mode, the same valve timing that allows 36% internal exhaust gas recirculation (IEGR) was applied for the air intake. The calculated results are found to agree well with the LDA measurements with an overall agreement of 75.06% at 1,500 rpm and 73.42% at 2,000 rpm.