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The purpose of this paper is to explore how Danish higher education institutions (HEIs) navigate the demands and expectations of accreditation procedures, and how the limited freedom posed by accreditation schemes is used by HEIs by way of translation.

Through document studies of policy documents and the institutional self-assessment reports, the paper follows the concept of quality from the international level to the Danish national level, and onwards into the individual HEIs, where the authors examine how notions of quality are constructed through the translation of national regulation, guidelines and procedures of accreditation into the self-narratives of the self-assessment reports.

The authors find that the national guidelines for accreditation represents a complex translation of supranational guidelines by minimizing certain aspects and enhancing others. This national translation is then analyzed as the frame for the institutional translations where the analysis reveals how HEIs exercise a great deal of agency, within a quite narrow frame constituted by regulations and guidelines.

By using the Olivers (1991) typology of organizational responses, the authors discuss how the HEIs not only imitate and abide to institutionalized norms and concepts of quality but also reformulate, edit, omit and enhance certain elements of quality. The authors demonstrate that when accreditation meets the HEIs, it is clearly the national agendas that are most pervasive and offer the most relevant vocabulary for the HEIs.

This study aims to examine the process of frugal innovation (FI) in micro- and small-enterprises (MSEs) at the base of the pyramid (BOP) through the analytical lens of business models.

A case study was conducted with 30 MSEs from three different industries in a very poor region in Brazil.

The findings indicate that, in cases where FI is intense and dynamic, the start of the FI process is based on the reinterpretation of fashion trends and influences from the business ecosystem while the consolidation of FI in MSEs occurs through the reconfiguration of resources. Additionally, this study shows that FI depends on conditions other than the production of frugal products for BOP consumers.

This study points out that the presence of end-of-life non-BOP raw materials distributed by large distributors in the case of fashion products, along with the interaction between MSEs at the BOP and these distributors, trigger FI and are profitable for both. For non-fashion products with long life cycles, there is no demand for innovation.

This study addresses the research void present in the literature on FI by presenting the process of FI and the conditions that leverage or stagnate FI in MSEs at the BOP, as well as how business models are shaped by these conditions.

The methodological discourse of mixed-methods research offers general procedures to combine quantitative and qualitative methods for investigating complex fields of research such as higher education. However, integrating different methods still poses considerable challenges. To move beyond general recommendations for mixed-methods research, this chapter proposes to discuss methodological issues with respect to a particular research domain. Taking current studies on the transition to higher education as an example, the authors first provide an overview of the potentials and limitations of quantitative and qualitative methods in the research domain. Second, they show the need for a conceptual framework grounded in the theory of the research object to guide the integration of different methods and findings. Finally, an example study that investigates transition with regard to the interplay of the individual student and the institutional context serves to illustrate the guiding role of theory. The framework integrates different theoretical perspectives on transition, informs the selection of the research methods, and defines the nexus of the two strands that constitute the mixed-methods design. As the interplay of individual and context is of concern for teaching and learning in general, the example presented may be fruitful for the wider field of higher education research.

Teaching executive courses always raises the challenge of how to deal with the tension between theory and practice. The present chapter analyses the use of experiments in practice as a pedagogical approach to deal with this tension in Master’s programmes.

The empirical data comprise eight qualitative interviews with former students, exam papers and participant observations during the course ‘Experimental Management Practice’ over a period of five years.

The course requires the participants to experiment with their (managerial) practice and make these experiments the learning material and stepping stone for formulating problems in new ways. We argue that it is fruitful to make a distinction between practical problems and knowledge problems, and that playful shifts back and forth between the two forms of problems can provide learning. We also argue that it is important to observe the distinction between the role of the manager and the role of the student in order to meet ethical challenges, inevitably raised by experimenting with practice. Finally we argue that the experimental teaching practice can be conceptualised as a monstrous pedagogy, as the pedagogy creates a liminal zone with hybrid characteristics.

The chapter provides new conceptualizations of the tensions between theory and practice based on our experiences from one degree programme. It would have been interesting to study other executive programmes and which pedagogy they use fort dealing with this tension.

Many Master’s programmes draw empirical data from the students’ own practice into the teaching. We argue that using experiments is highly useful to identify some of the general challenges inherent in analyses of one’s own practice. It does not solve the tension between theory and practice but creates new challenges, potentialities, dilemmas and insights.

We suggest using ‘monstrosity’ as an umbrella term for ‘hybrid’ and ‘liminality’ of the complex relations that are at play in further education of practitioners. We compare the idea of the monstrous to the notion of educating ‘reflected practitioners’, and we argue that in a situation where the public manager is expected to define his/her own role, we might be better off educating a ‘monstrous practitioner’ instead of a ‘reflecting’ one.

The purpose of this paper is to provide clarity to the concept of innovation and its various definitions.

The article reviews the innovation literature and proposes that innovation has been conceptualized either from a process or from an outcome perspective. Also, the authors show that there is a substantive difference between innovation seen in the traditional innovation literature and innovation as conceived in the knowledge management literature.

The paper proposes a general framework to categorize the existing views of innovation and show that innovation as an outcome has not been clearly defined from a knowledge perspective. To address this gap, the authors develop a new definition of an innovation outcome based on knowledge elements.

The research lays the groundwork for more comprehensive methods of measuring innovation and innovativeness, which is particularly useful for the study of service innovation.

The framework and definition expand the ability of managers to measure and understand the key factors of innovation.

The research contributes to the literature by developing a comprehensive knowledge‐based, outcome‐oriented definition of innovation.

The phenomenon of intellectual capital in the firm has been deeply researched and immensely debated in the management literature in recent years. After three decades of evolution, it has become established as a mature field of research. At this point, a review of its theoretical foundations and current and future evolution provides us with the state of the art of intellectual capital in the firm. The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative review of the existing literature on intellectual capital in the firm.

In this paper, the authors present a quantitative review of the existing literature on intellectual capital in the firm. To do so, the authors searched the JCR-SSCI database from 1990 to 2016 and identified 553 citing documents; these were split into three main periods in order to identify the interactions and path dependencies existing between different foundations of research. In addition, areas of current and future research connected with the theoretical foundations were identified. For these purposes, the authors used both co-citation analyses as well as bibliographical coupling.

In this paper, three main stages of IC evolution have been identified with the main topics and research frames, as well as their path dependencies. Additionally, four main areas of current and future development of IC have been identified: IC measurement, IC in new business models, IC disclosure, and its role in social capital and human resource practices.

The present bibliometric study is a quantitative review of papers published in the Web of Science database.

By its dimensions ‒ broad academic disciplines and longitudinal character ‒ this bibliometric study constitutes a new quantitative review of the IC discipline, both drawing its intellectual evolution in the last decades, and showing current and future research trends in IC and the firm.