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In social theory, emergence is the process of novelty (1) creation, (2) growth, and (3) formation into a recognizable social object, process, or structure. Emergence is recognized as important for the existence of novel features of society such as new organizations, new practices, or new relations between actors. In this introduction to the volume on emergence, we introduce a framework for examining emergence processes and theories that have been applied or can be applied to each of the three stages. We also review each volume chapter and discuss their relation to each other. Finally, we make suggestions on the future of research on social emergence processes.

To explore the essential elements of a ‘green art of living’: an enjoyable, elegant, graceful and simultaneously low impact lifestyle.

The theoretical analysis is based on a critical reading and literature study of the texts of various prominent ecological utopian thinkers in the history of political philosophy.

In an ecologically sustainable society first priority must be given to re-examination of the proper ‘ecological limits’ of the current lifestyles and ‘arts of living’ in the Western world. The exact form or shape that people give to their lives is less important than their overall commitment to live within the ecological boundaries set by our earth.

A green, ecologically responsible society cannot do without a certain degree of moderation, self-restraint and simpler and less consumption-oriented lifestyles. However, in this chapter it is shown that such a society will not lead to impoverishment and austerity. An ecological society founded on voluntary simplicity will not be frugal or poor, but creates ample opportunities for its citizens to lead attractive, pleasurable, fulfilling and high-quality lives.

The task of this paper is to explore the interplay between fashion, consumer lifestyles and economic growth in the context of a world of technological change in which the menu of possibilities that consumers face is constantly changing and tending to increase in length. Our working definition of ‘fashion’ is simple, namely the tendency or behavioural norm of actors to adopt certain types or styles of customs or commodities nearly simultaneously, only to adopt a different type or style of custom or commodity in future periods. The demand spikes associated with fashion may pertain to newly introduced products or to products that have been around for some time; they may also occur in hybrid cases where a seemingly defunct product or genre is given a brief rebirth by being reincarnated in terms of a new technology.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents of business growth expectations and subsequent accumulated sales revenues and employment costs. Hypotheses are derived guided by the theory of planned behaviour.

The authors followed a sample of 207 incorporated businesses started in May/June 2002 over a ten-year period. The hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regression analysis.

The results suggest that the entrepreneurs’ need for social cohesion, subjective norm with regard to business growth and perceived self-efficacy with regard to opportunity recognition are positively and significantly associated with business growth expectations. These expectations, reported at the time of business registration, accurately predict subsequent short-term as well as long-term accumulated sales revenues and labour costs, but this is not the case for entrepreneurs with novel business ideas.

Since entrepreneurs’ attitude, subjective norm and self-efficacy are possible to change, the findings should interest policy makers and educators. Measures aimed at enhancing the antecedents of entrepreneurs’ growth expectations should be considered. The findings that growth expectations have a long-lasting effect on sales and employment stress the importance of entrepreneurs’ subjective expectations for outcomes in new businesses.

There is a lack of studies using a longitudinal design when investigating the link between initial business growth expectations and subsequent firm outcomes. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature in this regard by using high-quality secondary data to examine firm achievements.

This study aims to determine the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation at the related quadruple levels of commercialisation, including the idea, benchtop technical knowledge, prototype technical knowledge and commercialised technical knowledge, and then classify the factors by the valuation objectives.

The study method is descriptive-causal, and documentation tools of published scientific research articles in authentic local and international journals were used to extract the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation. Moreover, the Likert spectrum-based questionnaire is used to determine the weight of each determined component. On the other hand, hierarchical analysis is used based on the extracted results from the distributed classification questionnaire among scholars to determine the allocable weight of each component.

The results indicate that at the idea step, the highest ranks among the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation are for the indicators of innovation rate enhancement, novelty, creation of new products, profitability growth and dependence decline. In the benchtop technical knowledge step, the indicators of profitability growth, product quality enhancement, novelty, production risk drop, innovation rate enhancement, production costs drop, product price competitiveness and independence from rare machinery have the highest impact coefficients on valuation. Moreover, the prioritisation of factors in prototype technical knowledge shows that the indicators of productive risk decline, infrastructure, decrease in product delivery time, productivity growth and profitability growth are the most critical factors in technical knowledge valuation. Finally, profitability growth factors, production cost drop, productive risk drop, creating a new product, product price competitiveness and dependence decline determine the most valuable technical knowledge in the commercialisation phase.

The most salient innovation of the study involves the development levels of technical knowledge in the commercialisation cycle for determining the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation and using multivariate decision-making methods to classify the so-called factors. The major limitation can be the context of the study because the paper was carried out by Iranian assessors and specialists using the experiences, opinions and approaches of opinion leaders based on the dominant social, cultural and accounting background of a developing country, not a developed one.

This paper is applicable because it elucidates the technical knowledge valuation factors for managers and owners of technological and knowledge-based companies to facilitate value determination and register the technical knowledge of innovative products in financial statements for the logical presentation of available intangible assets in the economic unit. Besides, in the high-tech area, collecting information from the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation provides an opportunity to support intellectual property rights and facilitate transaction processes. Finally, in legal areas, in cases of breaching intellectual property rights relative to technical knowledge, the determination of technical knowledge value provides a solid basis for estimating the damage rate.

While the growth of emerging technologies like Blockchain has created significant market opportunities and economic incentives for firms, it is valuable for both researchers and practitioners to understand their creation mechanisms. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

Based on the knowledge search perspective, this study examines the impact of search boundary on innovation novelty and quality. Additionally, innovation targets, namely R&D innovation and application innovation, are proposed as the moderator of the knowledge search effect. Using a combination of machine learning algorithms such as natural language processing and classification models, the authors propose new methods to measure the identified concepts.

The empirical results of 3,614 Blockchain patents indicate that search boundary enhances both innovation novelty and innovation quality. For R&D innovation, the positive impact of search boundary on innovation quality is enhanced, whereas for application innovation, the positive effect of search boundary on innovation novelty is improved.

This study mainly contributes to the growing literature on emerging technologies by describing their creation mechanisms. Specifically, the exploration of R&D and application taxonomy enriches researchers' understanding of knowledge search in the context of Blockchain invention.

By examining the impact of product innovation on abnormal financial returns following the launch of new products, this study aims to test the explanatory power of a new compound measure of product innovativeness (Ganbaatar and Douglas, 2019).

It is a longitudinal study in which the authors used the compound product innovativeness score (CPIS) for the first time to measure product innovativeness. The abnormal financial returns are estimated through the event study design, where four different models are used. Artificial neural network analysis is done to determine the impact of the CPIS on abnormal returns by utilising a hexic polynomial regression model.

The authors find effect sizes that substantially exceed practically significant levels and that the CPIS explain 65% of the variance in the firm’s abnormal returns in market valuation. Moreover, new-to-the-market novelty predicts 83% of the variation, while new-to-the-firm (catch-up) innovation insignificantly impacts firm value.

This paper demonstrates how the CPIS, an objective and direct measure of product innovativeness, can be used to gain more insight into the innovation effect.

Implications for the business practice of this study include the necessity of relentless innovation by firms in contested differentiated markets, particularly where technological advance is ongoing. Larger and mature firms must practice corporate entrepreneurship to renew their products on a continuous basis to avoid slipping backwards in their markets. Innovation leadership, rather than following the leader, is also important to increase competitive advantage, given the result that innovation followship does not produce abnormal financial returns.

In this study, the authors focused on the effect of product innovativeness on firm performance. While the literature affirms a positive relationship between innovation and firm performance, the effect size of this relationship varies, due largely to the authors contend to simplistic measures of innovativeness. In this study, the authors adopt the relatively novel “compound” measure of product innovativeness (Ganbaatar and Douglas, 2019) to better encapsulate the nuances of both technical novelty and market novelty. This measure of product innovativeness is applicable to firms of all sizes but is more easily applied to entrepreneurial new ventures and SMEs, and it avoids the shortcomings of prior firm-level and subjective measures of innovativeness for both smaller and larger firms. Using a more effective analytical method (Artificial Neural Network), the authors investigated whether there is a “practically” significant effect size due to product innovation, which could be valuable for entrepreneurs in practice. The authors show that the CPIS measure can very effectively explain abnormalities in the stock market, exhibiting a moderate effect size and explaining 65% of the variation in abnormal returns.

We consider start-up companies that have been established for rapid growth and are active in the international market. In this study, we examine the conditions required for starting a start-up. We analyze how it is possible to add value to an idea that makes a business unique. First, we’ll show you when to talk about start-up. The starting point is that a start-up company is organized on a community basis. This much greater knowledge is coupled with high-level technological competences. In addition, there is a need for some “big idea,” innovation, which investors see as fantasy. A new niche market must be found where hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide can be served without any geographical constraints. The founder must have a high-risk appetite, and even naughtiness, because the novelty he invented will narrow the market of others and harm the interests of others. Here’s a look at the financing options for start-ups. At the end of this chapter you will find case studies on different start-ups.

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether or not the introduction of inflation targeting (IT) impacts on the mean-reversion properties of inflation and output growth.

Focusing on eight Asian countries of which four are inflation-targeters, the authors employ a two-state Markov-switching model which characterizes the behavior of inflation and output growth as regime-dependent based on periods of stationarity or non-stationarity.

In contrast to a literature that offers mixed findings, the authors find the presence of stationary inflation and output growth in one regime for all IT countries, except for South Korea which is characterized by stationary output growth in both regimes. In the cases of South Korea and Thailand, IT reduces the probability of inflation remaining in a non-stationary regime. IT increases the probability of South Korea remaining in a regime of low persistence output growth. While IT is important in understanding behavior, so are other considerations such as exchange rate volatility, as well as the Asian and global financial crises.

In contrast to other unit root tests of inflation and output growth, a novelty of the approach is that the authors obtain new insights in terms of two concepts of stationarity that allow for inflation and output growth to switch between stationary and non-stationary regimes (partial stationarity), or between stationary regimes of differing degrees of persistence (varied stationarity).

The paper explores the composition of employment in new innovative firms. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the mixture of job positions at the firm level measured by employees’ occupational position, their qualification and specialisation, as well as their origin. As there is little known about the structure and quality of employment in new firms, insights are helpful for policymakers who are engaged in regional development and job creation.

The database used for analysis comes from an interdisciplinary study on human-related success factors of business start-ups in the German state of Thuringia. Data were collected by means of 399 face-to-face interviews with the sole founder or the leading entrepreneur of a start-up firm. The findings are based on a multivariate data analysis using regression models.

The results indicate that temporary employment is more likely inherent in fast growing firms. Academic spin-offs prefer to hire people with a university education and scientific background. Furthermore, it is found that manufacturing firms have a relatively higher demand for staff with a professional education as well as a technical background. However, there is no support for the thesis that innovative firms contribute to combating structural unemployment at least in the short run.

Results are limited to a particular geographical region. Researchers are strongly encouraged to conduct further research on the topic.

The paper includes implications for policymakers in the field of unemployment reduction and employment creation.

The paper explores the link between innovation and the quality of employment in new business ventures. This approach is in contrast to the bulk of other studies dealing with new employment generation in terms of numbers.