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Any kind of production flow is obtained not from individual production organizations but from a more or less widespread Production Network of interconnected production modules located in different places and times. All of these modules are, consciously or not, necessarily connected, interacting and cooperating in a coordinated way to combine and arrange, step by step, the factors, materials, components, manpower, machines and equipment to obtain flows of products’ final goods, in particular’ and to sell these where there is a demand for them. The purpose of this paper is to determine, in logical and formal terms, the minimum conditions that bring about the formation of production networks and to discover the laws that explain their dynamics over time.

At the global level, the continuous and accelerated economic progress of mankind is witnessed. There is an increase in the quantity and quality of satisfied and yet to be satisfied needs, of attained and yet to be attained aspirations. The increase in productivity and in quality has become unstoppable and appears to guide the other variables in the system. It is natural to ask who produces and governs these phenomena. It does indeed seem there is a Ghost in the “Production” machine whose invisible hand produces growing levels of productivity and quality, increases the quality and quantity of satisfied needs and aspirations and reduces the burden of work, thus producing increasingly higher levels of progress in the entire economic system. This conceptual framework gives a simple answer: there is nothing metaphysical about this evolution towards unstoppable and irreversible progress, and it is produced by the spontaneous genesis and activity of selfish nodes and governed by the rules and laws of the production networks.

The author has identified ten “rules of selfish behavior” on the part of the nodes, whose application necessarily and inevitably produces three evolutionary dynamic processes “which refer to the network as an entity” which the author has called the “rules of the production networks” to emphasize their cogency: continual expansion, elasticity-resiliency and continual improvement in performance. The cognitive and creative processes that characterize the nodes do not allow us to predict the actual evolution of production networks; nevertheless, if it is assumed that nodes “consciously or not” follow the 10 “rules of selfish behavior”, then several typical trends, or behavioural schema, can be deduced which the author has called as the “laws of networks”, to highlight their apparent inevitability and cogency.

More than any other structure, Production Networks display Holland’s features and Arthur’s properties as their modules, viewed as autonomous entities with cognitive functions, represent a collectivity of agents that interact and exchange information with their environment to maintain over time their internal processes through adaptation, self-preservation, evolution and cognition, making individual and collective decisions as part of a network of micro behaviours.

This new conception of production through production networks, which takes into account the “rules” and “laws” regulating their behaviour, also sheds new light on the development of networks and their natural tendency to become globalized.

Although the concept of a network is becoming more popular in economic and business studies, it is yet to see an interpretation of production as deriving exclusively from the actions of increasingly larger networks. This paper presents an integrated view of production that does not discard the notion that production is carried out by organizations and companies but introduces the broader concept of the integration among organizations, which must be interpreted as nodes of a broader network that produces the flows of all the components needed to obtain the flow of a specific product. This represents an innovative view that will help us in understanding the difficulties policymakers encounter in governing production and controlling the basic variables that characterize it, specifically productivity, quality, quantity, prices and value. This perspective also allows to derive rules and laws for the behaviour of production networks that appear to be cogent and unvarying over time.

Because of short life cycle and fluctuating greatly in total sales volumes (TSV), it is difficult to accumulate enough sales data and mine an attribute set reflecting the common needs of all consumers for a kind of experiential product with short life cycle (EPSLC). Methods for predicting TSV of long-life-cycle products may not be suitable for EPSLC. Furthermore, point prediction cannot obtain satisfactory prediction results because information available before production is inadequate. Thus, this paper aims at proposing and verifying a novel interval prediction method (IPM).

Because interval prediction may satisfy requirements of preproduction investment decision-making, interval prediction was adopted, and then the prediction difficult was converted into a classification problem. The classification was designed by comparing similarities in attribute relationship patterns between a new EPSLC and existing product groups. The product introduction may be written or obtained before production and thus was designed as primary source information. IPM was verified by using data of crime movies released in China from 2013 to 2017.

The IPM is valid, which uses product introduction as input, classifies existing products into three groups with different TSV intervals, mines attribute relationship patterns using content and association analyses and compares similarities in attribute relationship patterns – to predict TSV interval of a new EPSLC before production.

Different from other studies, the IPM uses product introduction to mine attribute relationship patterns and compares similarities in attribute relationship patterns to predict the interval values. It has a strong applicability in data content and structure and may realize rolling prediction.

In the knowledge economy, greater togetherness is the prerequisite for innovating and having more: selflessness extends scope while selfishness increases limitations. But human beings are not automatically attracted to innovation: between the two lies culture and cultural values vary widely, with the egoistic accent or the altruistic intonation setting the scene. In the representations of open innovation we submit to the reader’s attention, selfishness and selflessness are active in the cultural space.

Popularized in the early 2000s, open innovation is a systematic process by which ideas pass among organizations and travel along different exploitation vectors. With the arrival of multiple digital transformative technologies and the rapid evolution of the discipline of innovation, there was a need for a new approach to change, incorporating technological, societal and policy dimensions. Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2) – the result of advances in digital technologies and the cognitive sciences – marks a shift from incremental gains to disruptions that effect a great step forward in economic and social development. OI2 seeks the unexpected and provides support for the rapid scale-up of successes.

‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come’ – this thought, attributed to Victor Hugo, tells us how a great deal is at stake with open innovation. Amidon and other scholars have argued that the twenty-first century is not about ‘having more’ but about ‘being more’. The promise of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is that they enable us to extend and amplify human intellect and experience. In the so-called experience economy, users buy ‘experiences’ rather than ‘services’. OI2 is a paradigm about ‘being more’ and seeking innovations that bring us all collectively on a trajectory towards sustainable intelligent living.

This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.

By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).

This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.

It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.

Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

This conceptual paper seeks to develop hypotheses to explain a process of involvement of highly skilled members of diaspora to improve badly functioning institutions at home.

To arrive at the hypotheses, the paper relies on four diaspora pilots (in Armenia, Chile, Mexico and Argentina) that were designed and launched with the participation of the author.

A three‐stage process of diaspora involvement is identified: starting from first movers (individuals with longer planning horizon and higher tolerance to risk), to informal search networks, and to institutionalized search networks. Examples of this sequence are given from Taiwan, Chile and Mexico.

The hypotheses of the paper need qualifications which can be done with time, as more evidence and diversity in outcomes become available. The hypotheses are not rigorous, in a sense that no counterfactual information has been identified to prove them.

The paper examines dynamics of diaspora knowledge networks from “outside”, from a perspective of economic development, rather than migration of skills or network dynamics.

We develop elements of Network Exchange and Expectation States Theories to explain the relationship between power and status. While power and status are highly correlated, demonstrating that power can be used to attain high status has proven difficult, perhaps because negative reactions to power use limit power users’ influence. We propose three ways to reduce negative reactions to power use. One of them, philanthropy, suggests a solution to the “free-rider” problem in collective action. If philanthropic contributions increase status, then contributing to a public good may also. Thus, status attainment may be an incentive motivating public goods contributions.

In the platform era the informal employment in China is tremendously huge in quantities. This paper sets out the changes of traditional regulatory rules status, the new web of rules and, with a particular focus on, the impacts of main actors’ interacts, from an industrial relations ‘web of rule’ perspective. The subjects involved in this paper are multiple, including labour law, collective labour relations institution, enterprise human resources management, CSRs and NGOs in production supply chains. It argues the inappropriate impacts on the perseverance of right and interests of workers are consequences of the current national labour law and collective labour relations institutions. It witnesses the emerging innovative methods, employment relations system in a self-dependent economic transaction, the rule of production supply chain in a multi-stake-holder context and the new intervening method of NGOs. It is in scrutiny of the commence of such a transformation in China, nevertheless, transforming from the authoritarian regime to a more fair market establishing via the intervention of multiple social forces, and consequently the transformation from informal employments to formal ones in a comprehensively complex domestic and global context.

Conceptualizing trust alone or as the starting point for understanding both trust and distrust is insufficient. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the construction of phenotypic trustscapes and distrustscapes that permit an abstract exploration of the concepts of trust and distrust using societal and dyadic relationships and perceptions of the individual as the units of analysis. For theoretical understanding of trust and distrust, it uses social and evolutionary biologic multi-level theory. This chapter builds on the existing trust literature in three ways: (1) by triangulating on trust and distrust through the use of a number of research methodologies; (2) by placing trust and distrust in value orientation theory and models; and (3) by extricating trust and distrust from reciprocity constructs, and placing them into separate phenotypes: trustscapes and distrustscapes. These efforts show that both trust and distrust are naturally occurring phenomena, with one or the other predominant in specific contexts. The chapter includes scenarios in Japan, Bulgaria, and Indonesia to demonstrate how micro- and macro-level examples of trustscapes and distrustscapes function.