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The consensus view is that economists should observe consumer choices and abstain from investigating the psychological and physiological causes of wants, or the mechanisms governing the formation of preferences. This may be a correct procedure as far as ordinary functional goods are concerned. Problems tend to arise with creative goods (e.g. cultural goods) whose consumption (i) requires skills acquired through education and experience and (ii) generates positive and negative feedbacks and learning-by-consuming processes. This paper presents a simple model of local learning explaining the idiosyncratic accumulation of consumption human capital. Consumption generates local feedback mechanisms whose characteristics depend on the nature of goods and on the type of agent. The model provides some insights on the microeconomics of creative consumption and on the specific role of education.

Organizational cultures that facilitate collaboration are valuable, but little is known about how to create them. The authors investigate the microfoundations of this problem using computational models of dyadic coupled learning. The authors find that merely altering initial beliefs about the consequence of actions (without altering the consequences themselves) can under some conditions create cultures that promote collaboration. The results of this study show why the right initial “framing” of a situation – established for instance through persuasive rhetoric, an inspiring vision, or careful recruitment choices – may under the right conditions be self-reinforcing, instead of becoming empty symbolism.

We investigate the relationship between job complexity and skill development of adult workers in Europe using the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs Survey. ¹ The results suggest that challenging workplaces in which jobs are designed to include complex tasks that place high demands on workers’ skills also stimulate skill development. Increasing the degree of job complexity has positive and robust effects on the degree of skill development. Skill development is also positively linked to job tenure. The analysis stresses the importance of on-the-job learning and contextual workplace characteristics for adult workers’ skill development.

This chapter insists that evaluation of the process and results of cocreation is a precondition for continuous improvement and helps maintain support from external sponsors and funders. The main benefits of systematic evaluation of cocreation are learning and legitimacy rather than control and allocation. The chapter scrutinizes the two most common evaluation tools, formative and summative evaluation, and finds that they both fail to appreciate the emergent character of cocreation processes. The solution to this problem is to supplement formative and summative evaluation with developmental evaluation, which prompts the participating actors to engage in a critical interrogation of what they are doing, the reasons for doing it, and the results they achieve. Finally, the chapter explains how the commitment of developmental evaluation to using real-time data in the evaluation of change theories can be pursued through a collective impact strategy.

Evidence suggests habitual entrepreneurs (i.e. those with prior business ownership experience) are a widespread phenomenon. Appreciation of the existence of multiple entrepreneurial acts gives rise to the need to examine differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs (i.e. those with no prior business experience as a founder, inheritor or purchaser of a business). This paper synthesizes human capital and cognitive perspectives to highlight behavioral differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs. Issues relating to opportunity identification and information search, opportunity exploitation and learning are discussed. Avenues for future research are highlighted.

Innovation ecosystems consist of independent and yet interdependent enterprises and actors. This constitutes a challenge for innovation leadership to set the direction to pursue UN SDGs. Enhanced insights and understandings of how collaborative innovation leadership can be conducted in practice are revealed in two cases conducted using a participatory action research approach. Hereby theory and practice are linked by the ecosystem participant actions to reach competitiveness of the offshore wind energy ecosystem compared to traditional/other renewable energy sources pursuing UN SDG number 7 of ‘affordable and clean energy’. The two cases are situated in ports in offshore wind energy innovation ecosystems, respectively in the Baltic Sea and in the North Sea. The first case contains complementary ecosystem participants with both leadership and expert positions. The second case contains both complementary and competitive ecosystem participants with leadership positions. The findings note that both cases can use collaborative innovation leadership through the point of origin in the guiding star of the value proposition at ecosystem level to go beyond their own enterprise self-interest. Next, collaborative innovation leadership is based in heterogeneities of both knowledge domains and individual and organisational behaviours for the innovative imagination of future needed initiatives for collaborative design-based sensemaking. A short-term challenge is present from reduced revenue in own enterprise from future needed initiatives. This short-term impact needs to be addressed for enhanced long-term robustness. The findings are summarised in a model for dissemination of collaborative innovation leadership in ecosystems to pursue UN SDGs in practice.

Purpose. This chapter discusses the challenges and different strategies to increase skill development for the future workforce.

Methodology. Multiple sources on the topic were studied and reviewed in this chapter. The idea of skill and its development is discussed in the literature review.

Findings. Different nations’ governments have promoted human capital development by providing up-skilling and retraining programs to balance supply and demand. Skills gaps need to be brought to the attention of stakeholders, such as governments, businesses, and the educational system. Teachers, employers, and other stakeholders need to develop strategies and action plans to ensure that the skills gaps are appropriately identified and adequately addressed. These initiatives must be developed with input from various stakeholders.

Practical Implications. The research results would inform the curriculum, incorporating skill development processes tailored to various scenarios. These findings would aid business organisations in crafting skill development programs that address identified skill gaps. Challenges in skill development would be taken into account during course development, and relevant teaching–learning materials would be created. Key stakeholders, such as accrediting organisations, employers, and students, should exert more influence on academic institutions to prioritise societal demands for economic development.

Originality/Value. The uniqueness and significance of this chapter lie in its concise summary of the strategies to tackle the hurdles in skill development.

Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

How do organizations respond to negative feedback regarding their innovation activities? In this chapter, the authors reconcile contradictory predictions stemming from behavioral learning and from the escalation of commitment (EoC) perspectives regarding persistence under negative performance feedback. The authors core argument suggests that the seemingly contradictory psychological processes indicated by these two perspectives occur simultaneously in decision makers but that the design of organizational roles and reward systems affects their prevalence in decision-making tasks. Specifically, the authors argue that for decision makers responsible for an individual project, responses given to negative performance feedback regarding a project are dominated by self-justification and loss-avoidance mechanisms predicted by the EoC literature, while for decision makers responsible for a portfolio of projects, responses to negative performance regarding a project are dominated by an under-sampling of poorly performing alternatives that behavioral learning theory predicts. In addition to assigning decision-making authority to different organizational roles, organizational designers shape the strength of these mechanisms through the design of reward systems and specifically by setting more or less ambiguous goals, aspiration levels, time horizons of incentives provided, and levels of failure tolerance.