Entrepreneurial effectiveness of European universities: An empirical assessment of antecedents and trade-offs

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has received considerable attention over the last decades. An entrepreneurial orientation by academia might put regions and nations in an advantageous position in emerging knowledge-intensive fields of economic activity. At the same time, such entrepreneurial orientation requires reconciliation with the scientific missions of academia. Large-scale empirical research on antecedents of the entrepreneurial effectiveness of universities is scarce. This contribution examines the extent to which scientific productivity affect entrepreneurial effectiveness, taking into account the size of universities and the presence of disciplines, as well as the R&D intensity of the regional business environment (BERD). In addition, we assess the occurrence of trade-offs between different transfer mechanisms (contract research, patenting and spin off activity). The data used pertain to 105 European universities. Our findings reveal that scientific productivity is positively associated with entrepreneurial effectiveness. Trade-offs between transfer mechanisms do not reveal themselves; on the contrary, contract research and spin off activities tend to facilitate each other. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.     

Influencing citizen behavior: Experiences from multichannel marketing pilot projects

Information technology allows national and local governments to satisfy the needs of citizens in a cost effective way. Unfortunately, citizens still tend to prefer traditional, more costly channels, such as the front desk, phone and mail. Through pilot projects government agencies attempt to influence this behavior of citizens, directing them towards the online channel. With this paper we provide insight into the possibility to influence citizens’ behavior in the complex landscape of multi-channel service provision. The paper systematically compares five pilot projects using a framework that is based on organizational and marketing literature. The results show that socio-psychological factors are crucial in multi-channel management, much more than the technology itself. We conclude that citizens can be directed towards the online channel. However, not all projects are successful. Economic and legal instruments tend to sort more direct effects than communication or service instruments. Moreover, organizational factors such as bureaucracy often hinder eventual success. Choosing a smart and relatively small scope and strong project manager may help to evoke success in directing citizen online behavior.     

Fear and Loathing in the Fog: The Perceived (and Persistent) Vagaries of Tenure Standards Among Mass Communication Professors

Perhaps nothing strikes more fear into the hearts of all tenure-track professors than the process itself. Are four papers in this journal good enough? Are eight papers in another okay? What if someone doesn’t like me or my area of research? These issues have plagued academia since the first essay was penned by the first researcher hundreds of years ago. While personal bias and journal preference continue to infect honest tenure reviews, solutions exist. This does not mean we have a magic bullet to solve issues of bullying or elitism. However, if we are honest in our desire to improve the Academy, we should avail ourselves of every possible tool for improvement. This essay is based on a survey sent to 2,500 mass communication educators. Of the almost 500 respondents, roughly 10% took the time to express emotions that ranged from fear and confusion to outright rage and anger, all because what ought to be clear is not. The author offers 10 ideas of how academia can improve its evaluation of new faculty, as well as a few suggestions regarding the unnecessary inclusion of personal issues in a process that ought to be about creating better researchers and teachers.     

The Rise of Global Publishing and the Fall of the Dream of the Global Book: The Editing of Peter Carey

The article documents the editorial relationship between Peter Carey and his New York based editor for Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, who worked with Carey on his True History of the Kelly Gang. This account provides the basis for a discussion of how globalised publishing, while promising unity—a single text across all territories—has instead introduced a tension into the previously cohesive triad of author, editor, and the single authorized text. As Fisketjon’s experience lays bare, major contemporary texts that are published in multiple editions in different global centers may well proceed through competing or at least parallel editing processes with different presses, different editors, and in different publishing territories. The authorized single edition, even of major literary texts, has been replaced by competing editions. The single edit and editor have been replaced by competing “servant[s] of the writer” (to use Fisketjon’s phrase). Cohesion, while not quite giving way to disunity, gives way to multiplicity and plurality. The experience of the Kelly Gang book is cast against a longer narrative of Carey’s interactions with editors including the University of Queensland Press (UQP) from the 1970s and Faber from the 1980s.     

Student Attitudes and Behaviors Towards Digital Textbooks

The purpose of this article is to add to the collective body of knowledge on student behavior and attitudes relative to the adoption of digital textbooks. The article summarizes an ongoing research project that examines past, current and evolving behavior in the classroom related to digital textbooks and school. It includes students, faculty and administrative attitudes behaviors and perceptions. This research was undertaken at the Sawyer Business School of Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. Student attitudes and behavior toward their use of digital textbooks (eTextbooks) in higher education was examined in an ongoing longitudinal study over two years at Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University. Students in the class were divided into six teams. Five of the teams were assigned an eTextbook device and the sixth team was given a paper textbook for use through the semester. The digital technologies examined were: Amazon Kindle, Sony eReader Touch, Apple iPad, enTourage eDGe, and CourseSmart. Student attitudes and behaviors were examined pre and post class by survey each semester, and during the semesters through quizzes, journals and classroom discussion. Differential learning was measured between the six teams. Student attitudes and behaviors are becoming more receptive to and accepting of using digital textbooks each year. There was no significant difference in learning between the eTextbook devices teams or between them and the paper textbook team.     

One World Publishing,Brought to You by the Internet

The migration from print books to ebooks is more than a change of format; it is also the first step in an ongoing process, whose final outcome is hard to predict. Ebooks are likely to lead to a restructuring of the industry by enabling cross-border commerce. This in turn is likely to lead to difficult disputes over territorial rights. It appears probable that these disputes will be resolved by an assertion of the dominance of the American market and the publishers that already serve it well, as authors are likely to place their rights with practitioners in the largest markets. This in turn will lead to the acquisition of many smaller “national” publishers, which cannot compete on a world stage with truly global publishers. But rather than simply becoming sources of editorial product for American-based global marketing machines, smaller publishers operating in different regions will respond through innovation, both in product design (attempting to do electronically what cannot be done in print) and in developing new marketing plans that the giant publishers would be indisposed to pursue.     

In from the Edge: The Progressive Evolution of Publishing in the Age of Digital Abundance

The forces for change in the 600 hundred-year history of book publishing have never been more powerful and fundamental than in 2011. Barely 12 months ago, what publishers viewed as “innovation” was the creation of digitized versions of physical books to be ‘consumed’ on e-reading devices. As 2011 begins, that change is largely regarded as accepted business practice, and the edge of “innovation” is moving in more complex directions. Publishing finds itself in the midst of a ‘phase shift’ from the scarcity model of print to a complex, new world of digital abundance. The dimensions of change, moreover, its speed, and its extent are still unknown. While book publishing begins with the creative work of authors, digital technologies are turning the business models inside out. Among the forces for change acting on book publishing, this article examines several phenomena that are working their way in from the edge to the center of the industry, including complex interwoven considerations around container, context, and customer.     

The sum of its parts: reducing sparsity in click estimation with query segments

The critical task of predicting clicks on search advertisements is typically addressed by learning from historical click data. When enough history is observed for a given query-ad pair, future clicks can be accurately modeled. However, based on the empirical distribution of queries, sufficient historical information is unavailable for many query-ad pairs. The sparsity of data for new and rare queries makes it difficult to accurately estimate clicks for a significant portion of typical search engine traffic. In this paper we provide analysis to motivate modeling approaches that can reduce the sparsity of the large space of user search queries. We then propose methods to improve click and relevance models for sponsored search by mining click behavior for partial user queries. We aggregate click history for individual query words, as well as for phrases extracted with a CRF model. The new models show significant improvement in clicks and revenue compared to state-of-the-art baselines trained on several months of query logs. Results are reported on live traffic of a commercial search engine, in addition to results from offline evaluation.     

Variational bayes for modeling score distributions

Empirical modeling of the score distributions associated with retrieved documents is an essential task for many retrieval applications. In this work, we propose modeling the relevant documents’ scores by a mixture of Gaussians and the non-relevant scores by a Gamma distribution. Applying Variational Bayes we automatically trade-off the goodness-of-fit with the complexity of the model. We test our model on traditional retrieval functions and actual search engines submitted to TREC. We demonstrate the utility of our model in inferring precision-recall curves. In all experiments our model outperforms the dominant exponential-Gaussian model.