In the context of the serious games industry, up to now the most commonly used business models (BM) among developers representing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) consists in offering an individual product to the customer, based on tailored one-of a kind production. Such production has high costs and low re-usability and leads to a long time-to-market. For an industry dealing with products h...

Supporting users’ training and thus improving their working productivity by increasing their search performance is crucial in every day’s work-life. This holds true not only for knowledge workers like auditors, who needs to stay-up-to-date with law and new compliance regulations, but also for production workers who need to improve their IT skills in order to keep pace with new technologies esta...

One of the reforms proposed for Ontario’s broader public sector by the Drummond Report is the establishment of centralized bargaining structures. As Chaykowski and Hickey have argued, such a reform “must consider whether, how, and in what context, alternative bargaining structures and enhanced coordination could yield outcomes which promote efficiencies and improve value.” In this regard, the t...

Chile presents an interesting case of development of information processing and technology. Its open-market policies, good education level and early adoption of computer technology have allowed its exports to become competitive on an international basis. This has been a pioneering approach in Latin-America. The Chilean software industry has had some initial success and it is attempting to grow ...

The European Commission has put software patents on its agenda. For the first time in Europe’s history a monopole will be granted by the State on immaterial ideas. The goal of this paper is to introduce the reader to the particular economics of the software sector and to compare the costs and benefits of a market with software patents against the actual situation. For this purpose we’ll explain...

Innovations are crucial for the survival of firms in an ever faster moving environment. But how should a firm organize its knowledge management for tacit and explicit knowledge? Where to focus? How to ensure transfer of knowledge from customer into the firm? In this paper we first develop a list of critical factors for knowledge management (KM), using different theoretical frameworks. We identi...

This paper presents an in-house BAuA study on the evaluation of the COSHH Essentials exposure predictive model. External validation is based on measurement data obtained in BAuA field studies performed in various industries, e.g. printing industry and textile industry. In addition, measurement data and information on industrial hygiene provided by the chemical industry within the framework of t...

Wage Setting in the Colombian Manufacturing Industry We show that wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry is not fundamentally driven by labor productivity in contrast to the standard theoretical prediction. On the contrary, internal institutional arrangements – payroll taxation, the minimum wage or the price wedge between manufacturing and consumption prices – together with a high...

We use the adaptive LASSO from the statistical learning literature to identify economically connected industries in a general predictive regression framework. The framework permits complex industry interdependencies, including both direct and indirect sectoral links. Consistent with gradual information diffusion across economically connected industries, we find extensive evidence that lagged re...