Innovation is about doing useful things differently: converting novel ideas and methods into solutions that meet new needs, or adding significant value to established products and services. In engineering education, new technological and practice requirements necessitate curriculum innovation, while innovation in educational practice can improve students’ learning and faculty productivity. Most...

This special issue of EM — Electronic Markets on ‘Innovative Auction Markets’ illustrates the increasingly pervasive and diverse applications of online auctions. From auctions for keywords tied to search engines, to B2B and financial auctions, or the use of auctions to generate predictive information for decision making — online auctions are becoming more widely applied in practice. Since the l...

Unmet need. It is beyond dispute that human population is ageing. For the first time in history, people age 65 and over will outnumber children under age 5. This trend is emerging around the globe, and will bring several challenges for health technologies. For instance, in a few decades, the loss of health and life worldwide will be greater from chronic diseases than from infectious diseases an...

Departments of Cell Physiology, Cardiology, and Biochemistry II, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan; Department of Physiology II, Nara Medical University, Kashihara, Nara, Japan; Department of Medical Engineering, Faculty of Health Care Sciences, Himeji Dokkyo University, Himeji, Japan; and Cardiovascular Physiology, Okayama University Graduate School of Medicine, Dent...

Since the advent of social media, human-internet interaction has changed dramatically towards greater individual characteristic-based services. Since personality traits are the most stable behavioral dispositions of an individual, it is surprising that the digital service industry has not focused its attention on personality-based services. Consequently the value creation potential of personali...

a r t i c l e i n f o Tacit knowledge affects the trade-off between entrepreneurship and technology transfer. I present a formal model in which an inventor and the existing firm engage in a strategic innovation game by choosing whether to compete or to cooperate through technology transfer. The model highlights how the problem of tacit knowledge affects the inventor's R&D investment and the exi...

Addressing the increasingly globalised determinants of many important problems affecting human health is a complex task requiring collective action. We suggest that part of the solution to addressing intractable global health issues indeed lies with the role of new legal instruments in the form of globally binding treaties, as described in the recent article of Nikogosian and Kickbusch. However...

In knowledge-based economy, knowledge has a public good and non-rivalry nature. Firms build their own knowledge stock not only by means of internal R&D and collaboration with partners, but also by means of previously spilled over knowledge of other firms and public research laboratories (such as universities). Firms based on their absorptive capacity, and level of intra-industry and extra-indus...