I am interested in what I refer to as collaborative Knowledge-Building Environments (KBEs).These are software environments for supporting the construction of knowledge by groups of people. I consider this to be a paradigmatic task of CSCL (computer supported collaborative learning) because I assume that the notion of collaborative learning that CSCL practitioners strive to support is a construc...

The term ‘behavior’ is used ubiquitously in engineering. It refers roughly to the way technical artifacts ‘behave’ in a given or hypothetical situation, and plays a pivotal role in specific design methodologies since it allows connecting descriptions of the physical structure of technical artifacts to descriptions of their technical functions. However, behavior does not have a precise meaning: ...

1. Sources of funding: Support for this research was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. No industry funding of any kind was sought or received. McKitrick is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Guelph. His Senior Fellowship at the Fraser Institute is an unpaid position, and was completely unrelated to this project. Michaels contributed to ...

The paper validates the relations between the share of public and private R&D spending and the effectiveness of national R&D sector. It states that in order to implement effective and profitable “high-tech policy”, governments have to intensify the share of business sector in Gross Domestic Expenditures on R&D. At the same time it is necessary to preserve the definite “government share” in R&D ...

Given the growing importance of technology and innovation to high-tech firm competitiveness, there need propose an expanded research framework including the role of technology in driving mergers' decision, the impact of mergers on technology innovation, especially for Chinese high-tech companies. This paper studied the effect of M&As and technology-driven M&As on post-M&A technological innovati...

Recent advances in asset pricing|the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives|are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. We nd that credit spreads on both xed and oating rate subordinated debt provide relatively clean signals of bank risk and are not unduly in uenced by non-risk factors. Fixed rate debt with a put is u...

In the way of growing and developing firms especially high-tech firms, on many occasions manager of firm is mainly involved in solving problems of his business and decision making about executive activities of the firm, while besides executive measures, attention to planning of firm's success and growth way and application of long experience and sagacity in designing business model are vital an...