组织学习、知识整合与核心能力的关系研究

主要探讨企业组织学习、知识整合、核心能力与组织绩效之间的关系,并选取我国华南地区的144家企业作为实证研究对象,对组织学习、知识整合、核心能力与组织绩效间的关系进行实证研究,研究结果表明,正确理解企业知识整合在管理实践中的作用有重要的价值。     

A new direction in search of ＂missing＂ carbon sinks

The sink-source imbalance in the global carbon cycle is a ＂hot spot＂ for scholars on the subject in the present-day world. So far, the CO2 sink＇s location, size, variation and the mechanism underlying its ever-changing trend are all controversial topics. Currently, the mainstream research in this aspect is concentrated mainly on the organic carbon＇s cycle while little, if not, attention is paid to the current status of the inorganic carbon sink.     

Modular exaptation: A missing link in the synthesis of artificial form

Exaptation, the cooption of existing technologies for emergent functions, is an important but neglected mechanism for innovation. Exaptation may enable an existing technology to (a) construct a new technological niche, (b) enter into a preexisting niche, or (c) transform the internal architecture of an artifact without changing its function.     

In search of the sea monster

The sea monster played an important part in launching the Danish Galathea Deep Sea Expedition of 1950-1952. Part scientific object, part media darling and part fundraising strategy, the sea monster brought scientists, journalists and politicians together in support of the expedition. The scientific leader of the expedition, Anton F. Bruun, contended the scientific reality of such a creature; the leader of the press section attached to the expedition, Hakon Mielche, dreamt of the grand headlines finding the sea monster would attract; and everyone involved used the 'poor little thing' to promote the expedition to sponsors and in public.     

In search of useful theory of innovation

This essay presents an overview of the prevailing theoretical literature on innovation, probes the adequacy of existing theory to guide policy regarding innovation, and sketches some directions for more fruitful theorizing. The focus is on the vast interindustry differences in rates of productivity growth, and other manifestations of differential rates of technological progress across industries. It is argued that the most important policy issues involve finding ways to make the currently lagging sectors more progressive, if in fact that can be done. Theory, to be useful, therefore must organize knowledge and guide research regarding what lies behind the uneven performance of the different economic sectors. In fact prevailing theory cannot do this, for two basic reasons. One is that theory is fragmented, and knowledge and research fall into a number of disjoint intellectual traditions. The second is that the strongest of the research traditions that bear on the differential innovation puzzle, research by economists organized around trying to ‘fit’ production functions and explain how production functions ‘shift’, neglects two central aspects of the problem; that innovation involves uncertainty in an essential way, and that the institutional structure supporting innovation varies greatly from sector to sector. The bulk of the paper is concerned with sketching a theoretical structure that appears to bridge a number of presently separate subfields of study of innovation, and which treats uncertainty and institutional diversity centrally.     

In search of the lost fossil record

The fossil record consists largely of the debris of innumerable skeletons. Very rarely, however, the soft-tissues that normally are subject to rapid decay are preserved. The mechanisms for such soft-part preservation are obscure, but often appear to involve early mineralization that is bacterially mediated. Spectacular examples of exceptional preservation include replacement by pyrite, phosphatization, and early growth of siderite nodules. Faunas such as the Burgess Shale and Solnhofen Plattenkalk give unique glimpses into past life.     

In search of query patterns: A case study of a university OPAC

A transaction log analysis of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) OPAC was conducted to identify query and search failure patterns with the goal of identifying areas of improvement for the system. One semester’s worth of OPAC transaction logs were obtained and from these, 641,991 queries were extracted and used for this work. Issues investigated included query length, frequency and type of search options and Boolean operators used as well as their relationships with search failure. Among other findings, results indicate that a majority of the queries were simple, with short query lengths and a low usage of Boolean operators. Failure analysis revealed that on average, users had an almost equal chance of obtaining no records or at least one record to a submitted query. We propose enhancements and suggest future areas of work to improve the users’ search experience with the NTU OPAC.     

In search of project classification: a non-universal approach to project success factors

In this study we attempt to answer two questions: Is there a natural way to classify projects and what are the specific factors that influence the success of various kinds of projects? Perhaps one of the major barriers to understanding the reasons behind the success of a project has been the lack of specificity of constructs applied in project management studies. Many studies of project success factors have used a universalistic approach, assuming a basic similarity among projects. Instead of presenting an initial construct, we have employed a linear discriminant analysis methodology in order to classify projects. Our results suggest that project success factors are not universal for all projects. Different projects exhibit different sets of success factors, suggesting the need for a more contingent approach in project management theory and practice. In the analysis we use multivariate methods which have been proven to be powerful in many ways, for example, enabling the ranking of different managerial factors according to their influence on project success.     

In search of a useful theory of the productive potential of intellectual property rights

Mainstream theory, which has informed the belief systems regarding the operation as well as the predicted social and economic effects of IPR systems, cannot explain why the IPR system generates different performance results and varying potential for growth across the firms, sectors and nations participating in the IPR system. This paper sketches a theory of the ‘productive potential of intellectual property rights’ which is able to do just that. Focusing on the ‘rules of the game’ embedded in the institutional IPR environment and the ‘play of the game’ within the alternative institutions of IPR governance, the paper emphasizes the importance of the nature or quality of the relationships among IPR stakeholders and the contribution of such relationships to the processes of financial and non-financial value creation and distribution from IPRs. The central role of cooperation, asymmetric relationships, and the effective resolution of conflicting interests amongst stakeholders is addressed. It is suggested that the proposed framework provides a better starting point for the design of IPR policy and management.     

In search of complementary assets: The determinants of alliance formation of high-tech start-ups

Why do new technology-based firms (NTBFs) cooperate? Starting from Teece's [Teece, D.J., 1986. Profiting from technological innovation: implications for integration, collaboration, licensing, and public policy. Research Policy 15, 285-305] conceptual framework and taking advantage of subsequent literature on alliance formation in the resource and competence-based tradition and in the social structure perspective, we derive an empirical model that aims at highlighting the inducements and obstacles that these firms face in alliance formation according to firm-specific characteristics and the nature of the alliance. In particular, a distinction is made between exploitative commercial alliances and explorative technological alliances. The econometric estimates, based on a large sample of Italian young high-tech firms that are observed from 1994 to 2003, provide strong evidence supporting two key intuitions of Teece's work. First, the “combination of specialized complementary assets” appears to be a key driver of the formation of exploitative commercial alliances by NTBFs. More specifically, patent holding affects positively the likelihood to establish commercial alliances, but this propensity is found to rapidly decrease with firm size, suggesting that as long as NTBFs become larger and possess specialized commercial assets their urge for commercial alliances diminishes. Second, following the parallelism set forth by Teece between search for alliance partners and access to external financing, the analysis indicates that potentially beneficial alliances may not take place because of the high transaction costs faced by smaller NTBFs. In this respect, our results clearly support the view that sponsor institutions as public research organizations, venture and corporate venture capitalists may sensibly reduce these costs and that their role crucially depends on both the identity of the sponsor and the type of alliance.     

In search of systemic innovation for sustainable development: A design praxis emerging from a decade of social learning inquiry

Processes of designing for systemic innovation for sustainable development (SD) through the lens of three long-term case studies are reported. All case studies, which originated from the SLIM (Social Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale) Project, funded within the EU Fifth Framework Program (2001–2004), constitute inquiry pathways that are explored using a critical incident approach. The initial starting conditions for each inquiry pathway are compared; significant pathway dependencies are identified which foster the development of social learning processes locally, but constrain their uptake and embedding across the wider system of interest. In the first case study, in England & Wales, promising developments in the application of social learning approaches to river basin planning over an initial 3-year period were subsequently marginalised, only to resurface towards the end of the 10-year period of study. In the second, South African case study, significant spaces for social learning and innovation in integrated water resources management were opened up over a five year period but closed down again, primarily as the result of lack of policy support by national government. The third, Italian, case study was designed to assess options for adapting to climate change by opening up new learning spaces between researchers, stakeholders and policy makers. A case for investing in local level systemic innovation through social-learning praxis design approaches and in learning processes around well contextualised case-studies is supported. However, concomitant investment by policy makers in social learning as an alternative, but complementary, governance mechanism for systemic innovation for SD is needed.     

Architecture of a grid-enabled Web search engine

Search Engine for South-East Europe (SE4SEE) is a socio-cultural search engine running on the grid infrastructure. It offers a personalized, on-demand, country-specific, category-based Web search facility. The main goal of SE4SEE is to attack the page freshness problem by performing the search on the original pages residing on the Web, rather than on the previously fetched copies as done in the traditional search engines. SE4SEE also aims to obtain high download rates in Web crawling by making use of the geographically distributed nature of the grid. In this work, we present the architectural design issues and implementation details of this search engine. We conduct various experiments to illustrate performance results obtained on a grid infrastructure and justify the use of the search strategy employed in SE4SEE.     

脚踏实地 稳步向前——成都山地灾害与环境研究所探索公益性研究所的发展模式

中国科学院成都山地灾害与环境研究所（简称成都山地所），是为加强西南“三线”建设、实现中国科学院在全国资源环境领域研究机构合理布局，于１９６６年成立的。数年前在中国科学院一年一度的研究所总体评价中，一直位列C类。曾一度举步维艰，在几届领导班子的带领下，充分发挥“山地人”精神，自力更生、自强不息、不等不靠、积极主动地迎着困难上，使科研工作出现转机，整体面貌有所改观，并取得一批重要科研成果，获得多项奖励。如今，通过结构调整和机制创新的成都山地所三年迈出三大步，１９９９年被评为B级，２０００年和２００１…     

Towards a model for spoken conversational search

Conversation is the natural mode for information exchange in daily life, a spoken conversational interaction for search input and output is a logical format for information seeking. However, the conceptualisation of user–system interactions or information exchange in spoken conversational search (SCS) has not been explored. The first step in conceptualising SCS is to understand the conversational moves used in an audio-only communication channel for search. This paper explores conversational actions for the task of search. We define a qualitative methodology for creating conversational datasets, propose analysis protocols, and develop the SCSdata. Furthermore, we use the SCSdata to create the first annotation schema for SCS: the SCoSAS, enabling us to investigate interactivity in SCS. We further establish that SCS needs to incorporate interactivity and pro-activity to overcome the complexity that the information seeking process in an audio-only channel poses. In summary, this exploratory study unpacks the breadth of SCS. Our results highlight the need for integrating discourse in future SCS models and contributes the advancement in the formalisation of SCS models and the design of SCS systems.     

Multimedia search capabilities of Chinese language search engines

This paper reports results from a study exploring the multimedia search functionality of Chinese language search engines. Web searching in Chinese (Mandarin) is a growing research area and a technical challenge for popular commercial Web search engines. Few studies have been conducted on Chinese language search engines. We investigate two research questions: which Chinese language search engines provide multimedia searching, and what multimedia search functionalities are available in Chinese language Web search engines. Specifically, we examine each Web search engine’s (1) features permitting Chinese language multimedia searches, (2) extent of search personalization and user control of multimedia search variables, and (3) the relationships between Web search engines and their features in the Chinese context. Key findings show that Chinese language Web search engines offer limited multimedia search functionality, and general search engines provide a wider range of features than specialized multimedia search engines. Study results have implications for Chinese Web users, Website designers and Web search engine developers.