Reading–writing connections: Discourse-oriented research

As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between these two psycholinguistic processes, particularly from a discourse and cognitive perspective. Argumentative texts were analyzed in the present investigation on reading–writing connections. Four tests were designed and tested on 439 eighth graders. The tests assessed psycholinguistic variables that account for the microstructural, macrostructural and superstructural levels of comprehension/production processing. Correlation results showed significant coefficients between reading and writing of argumentative texts in all the psycholinguistic levels analyzed. These results suggest that the processes involved in both activities share some common knowledge-based strategies.     

Gender differences in research collaboration

The debate on the role of women in the academic world has focused on various phenomena that could be at the root of the gender gap seen in many nations. However, in spite of the ever more collaborative character of scientific research, the issue of gender aspects in research collaborations has been treated in a marginal manner. In this article we apply an innovative bibliometric approach based on the propensity for collaboration by individual academics, which permits measurement of gender differences in the propensity to collaborate by fields, disciplines and forms of collaboration: intramural, extramural domestic and international. The analysis of the scientific production of Italian academics shows that women researchers register a greater capacity to collaborate in all the forms analyzed, with the exception of international collaboration, where there is still a gap in comparison to male colleagues.     

Individual research performance: A proposal for comparing apples to oranges

The evaluation of performance at the individual level is of fundamental importance in informing management decisions. The literature provides various indicators and types of measures, however a problem that is still unresolved and little addressed is how to compare the performance of researchers working in different fields (apples to oranges). In this work we propose a solution, testing various scaling factors for the distributions of research productivity in 174 scientific fields. The analysis is based on the observation of scientific production by all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences over the period 2004–2008, as indexed by the Web of Science. The most effective scaling factor is the average of the productivity distribution of researchers with productivity above zero.     

Coordinating innovation projects with high tech suppliers through contracts

This paper investigates the supply chain (SC) management and innovation strategies with the purpose to identify: 1) which commercial contracts are suitable to coordinate SC innovation projects; 2) which motivations push SC members to adopt contracts to pursue innovation projects; and 3) how contractual clauses differ in different stages of the innovation process. A comparative case study among five High Tech (HT) companies in the Netherlands uncovers the motivations for adopting certain contracts over others. The findings illustrate that contracts discussed in the literature (sales-rebate, buy back, revenue sharing, etc.) successfully work for commercial agreements but not at all for coordinating joint innovation projects. Motivations for adopting these contracts do not limit to general company characteristics but also stretch from historical reasons to future strategies. The findings help HT companies to setting up the basis of a contract to coordinate joint innovation projects within SCs.     

An Intellectual Capital perspective for Business Model Innovation in technology-intensive industries: empirical evidences from Italian spin-offs

Innovation and competition take place increasingly between Business Models (BM), and not just among products, processes, and technologies. Therefore, Business Model Innovation (BMI) becomes the key process to unleash value creation for both established and new companies, and, among these latter, particularly for technological spin-offs. For their constituent characteristics, it emerges that BMI in technological spin-offs appears to be related to the effective management of the Intellectual Capital (IC). Despite this, current research has paid little attention to decline BMI through the lenses of IC. This study aims to provide a contribution in this direction by investigating how technological spin-offs innovate their BM by leveraging their IC dimensions. A review of relevant literature on BMI has been carried out. Then, a case study methodology has been adopted to analyze seven technological spin-offs. The analysis highlighted three main trajectories of BMI, defined in terms of the BMI scope and the main exploited IC dimension. The discussion of findings from a research and practical perspective contributes to the debate on BMI, by providing a new interpretative key based on the relevance of the IC dimensions.     

Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development and Pre-Service Physics Teacher Education: A Case Study

This paper addresses the question of how to develop prospective teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in science teacher education. The main focus is on the knowledge transformation process and on the cognitive strategies used to shift prospective teachers' explanations within the domain of modelling thermal physical phenomena. This study investigates the development of PCK within a group of 28 pre-service physics teachers during the first semester of their two-year post-graduate teacher education program. It focuses on the central issue of the relationships between observable phenomena, like macroscopic thermal properties of matter and their interpretation and/or explanation in terms of corpuscular characteristics and/or thermodynamics theory. The strategy is based on the consideration that knowledge transformation is not a one-way process from subject matter knowledge to pedagogical content knowledge, as literature suggests, but a bidirectional process involving deepening of subject matter knowledge and increasing awareness of pedagogical issues.     

The managerial foundations of knowledge assets dynamics

The ability of an organisation to harness knowledge assets dynamics lies at the core of organisational value creation capacity. A key challenge both for researchers and for practitioners is to understand how to measure and manage knowledge assets dynamics. In this paper the managerial foundations of knowledge assets dynamics are introduced. For measuring and managing knowledge assets dynamics within organisations three processes are discussed as follows: knowledge assets identification, knowledge assets mapping and knowledge assets flow. The ability of an organisation to gain sustainable competitive advantages is related to the capacity of mastering these processes. Each process is analysed introducing the possible frameworks that can inspire both scholars investigating the microfoundations of organisational knowledge dynamics, and practitioners looking for approaches to leverage knowledge assets to improve business performance.

     

Revisiting size effects in higher education research productivity

The potential occurrence of variable returns to size in research activity is a factor to be considered in choices about the size of research organizations and also in the planning of national research assessment exercises, so as to avoid favoring those organizations that would benefit from such occurrence. The aim of the current work is to improve on weaknesses in past inquiries concerning returns to size through application of a research productivity measurement methodology that is more accurate and robust. The method involves field-standardized measurements that are free of the typical distortions of aggregate measurement by discipline or organization. The analysis is conducted for 183 hard science fields in all 77 Italian universities (time period 2004–2008) and allows detection of potential differences by field.     

A sensitivity analysis of research institutions’ productivity rankings to the time of citation observation

One of the critical issues in bibliometric research assessments is the time required to achieve maturity in citations. Citation counts can be considered a reliable proxy of the real impact of a work only if they are observed after sufficient time has passed from publication date. In the present work the authors investigate the effect of varying the time of citation observation on accuracy of productivity rankings for research institutions. Research productivity measures are calculated for all Italian universities active in the hard sciences in the 2001–2003 period, by individual field and discipline, with the time of the citation observation varying from 2004 to 2008. The objective is to support policy-makers in choosing a citation window that optimizes the tradeoff between accuracy of rankings and timeliness of the exercise.