aking dumb places smart is what wearable computing is really about, " says Edward McConaghay, president and chief executive officer of ViA Inc. (www.via-pc.com)— " and bringing knowledge to knowledge workers in the field can provide high returns on investment. " For proof, McConaghay points to the use of connected wearables that let technicians work on expensive capital equipment without runnin...

There is a long research tradition around the existence of underinvestment problems that might arise in R&D and, more generally, innovative activities. These problems might become significant barriers to innovation in SMEs, due to the relationship between access to finance and production scale. However, previous literature is consistent with the hypothesis that innovative capabilities are not n...

Competition among cities for mobile capital in the 21st century has intensified. Urban hierarchy of a region is undergoing transformation, where economic fortunes vary markedly among different localities. In China, these global forces and regional restructures have caused a relative economic decline of some historically powerful cities, and have also brought about the emergence of new economic ...

This paper studies the relationship between social capital and household welfare. Social capital is taken to mean, very simply, 'durable social networks'. The relationship is investigated using survey work conducted in two villages in eastern Uganda. The surveys gathered information on the quality and extent of people’s participation in local organizations, as well as household welfare. To orga...

Infrastructure projects often require large investments, can have long gestation periods, and typically involve multiple parties: government, private sector firms and outside investors. Government and private sector firms must expend effort to implement and maintain the projects, may derive private benefits in participating in the project, and may possess only limited information. Moreover, gov...

China is home to nearly half of the world’s 50,000 large dams, which provide irrigation, flood protection, and hydroelectricity. Most of these projects involve substantial population displacement, which can disrupt social capital, the webs of interdependence and support that community members maintain with one another through relationships of trust and reciprocity. We use new empirical evidence...

This paper reports preliminary findings from a 3-year study investigating the capture and transfer of organisational knowledge and learning practices in the production of what have been termed complex product systems (CoPS). CoPS have been defined as capital-, engineering-, and IT-intensive, business-to-business products, networks, constructs and systems (Hobday, 1998). They tend to be high in ...