University of St.Gallen

Accepting a fixed trade-off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress. Studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts, ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation. They typically overestimated compliance costs, neglected innovation offsets, and disregarded the affected industry's initial competitiveness. Rather than simply adding to cost, properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets, allowing companies to improve their resource productivity. Shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward. It is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity.

Abstract The article is intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of corporate sustainability. At the business level sustainability is often equated with eco‐efficiency. However, such a reduction misses several important criteria that firms have to satisfy if they want to become truly sustainable. This article discusses how the concept of sustainable development has evolved over the past three decades and particularly how it can be applied to the business level. It then goes on to describe the three types of capital relevant within the concept of corporate sustainability: economic, natural and social capital. From this basis we shall then develop the six criteria managers aiming for corporate sustainability will have to satisfy: eco‐efficiency, socio‐efficiency, eco‐effectiveness, socio‐effectiveness, sufficiency and ecological equity. The article ends with a brief outlook towards future research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

This paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects' homes. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks "in general", we find that gender, age, height, and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks. The experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure, using paid lottery choices. Turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts, we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes, and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts. We conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks, occupational choice, and smoking. The question about risk taking in general generates the best all-round predictor of risky behavior.

Organizational ambidexterity, defined as an organization's ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today's business demands while simultaneously being adaptive to changes in the environment, has gained increasing interest in recent years. In this article, the authors review various literature streams to develop a comprehensive model that covers research into the antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of organizational ambidexterity. They indicate gaps within and across different research domains and point to important avenues for future research.

The authors develop and estimate a conceptual model of how different aspects of customers’ relationships with the brand community influence their intentions and behaviors. The authors describe how identification with the brand community leads to positive consequences, such as greater community engagement, and negative consequences, such as normative community pressure and (ultimately) reactance. They examine the moderating effects of customers’ brand knowledge and the brand community's size and test their hypotheses by estimating a structural equation model with survey data from a sample of European car club members.

Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through differentiation or through integration? Does ambidexterity occur at the individual or organizational level? Must organizations take a static or dynamic perspective on ambidexterity? Finally, can ambidexterity arise internally, or do firms have to externalize some processes? We provide an overview of the seven articles included in this special issue and suggest several avenues for future research.

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.

Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The “private investment” model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The “collective action” model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper, we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound “private-collective” model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the “best of both worlds” under many conditions. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes.

Abstract This article investigates the methodological sophistication of case studies as a tool for generating and testing theory by analyzing case studies published during the period 1995–2000 in 10 influential management journals. We find that case studies emphasized external validity at the expense of the two more fundamental quality measures, internal and construct validity. Comparing case studies published in the three highest‐ranking journals with the other seven, we reveal strategies that may be useful for authors wishing to conduct methodologically rigorous case study research. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside‐in process of open innovation, while the inside‐out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge‐intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.

In this paper, we present a patch-based land use and land cover classification approach using Sentinel-2 satellite images. The Sentinel-2 satellite images are openly and freely accessible, and are provided in the earth observation program Copernicus. We present a novel dataset, based on these images that covers 13 spectral bands and is comprised of ten classes with a total of 27 000 labeled and geo-referenced images. Benchmarks are provided for this novel dataset with its spectral bands using state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks. An overall classification accuracy of 98.57% was achieved with the proposed novel dataset. The resulting classification system opens a gate toward a number of earth observation applications. We demonstrate how this classification system can be used for detecting land use and land cover changes, and how it can assist in improving geographical maps. The geo-referenced dataset EuroSAT is made publicly available at https://github.com/phelber/eurosat.

Institutional openness is becoming increasingly popular in practice and academia: open innovation, open R&D and open business models. Our special issue builds on the concepts, underlying assumptions and implications discussed in two previous R&D Management special issues (2006, 2009). This overview indicates nine perspectives needed to develop an open innovation theory more fully. It also assesses some of the recent evidence that has come to light about open innovation, in theory and in practice.

Science is a cumulative endeavour as new knowledge is often created in the process of interpreting and combining existing knowledge. This is why literature reviews have long played a decisive role in scholarship. The quality of literature reviews is particularly determined by the literature search process. As Sir Isaac Newton eminently put it: If I can see further, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Drawing on this metaphor, the goal of writing a literature review is to reconstruct the giant of accumulated knowledge in a specific domain. And in doing so, a literature search represents the fundamental first step that makes up the giant's skeleton and largely determines its reconstruction in the subsequent literature analysis. In this paper, we argue that the process of searching the literature must be comprehensibly described. Only then can readers assess the exhaustiveness of the review and other scholars in the field can more confidently (re)use the results in their own research. We set out to explore the methodological rigour of literature review articles published in ten major information systems (IS) journals and show that many of these reviews do not thoroughly document the process of literature search. The results drawn from our analysis lead us to call for more rigour in documenting the literature search process and to present guidelines for crafting a literature review and search in the IS domain.

This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of roughly 1,000 German adults. Subjects participate in choice experiments with monetary incentives measuring risk aversion, and impatience over an annual horizon, and conduct two different, widely used, tests of cognitive ability. We find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion, and more pronounced impatience. These relationships are significant, and robust to controlling for personal characteristics, education, income, and measures of credit constraints. We perform a series of additional robustness checks, which help rule out other possible confounds.

We used 14 easily measured biologic and clinical variables to develop a simple scoring system reflecting the risk of death in ICU patients. The simplified acute physiology score (SAPS) was evaluated in 679 consecutive patients admitted to eight multidisciplinary referral ICUs in France. Surgery accounted for 40% of admissions. Data were collected during the first 24 h after ICU admission. SAPS correctly classified patients in groups of increasing probability of death, irrespective of diagnosis, and compared favorably with the acute physiology score (APS), a more complex scoring system which has also been applied to ICU patients. SAPS was a simpler and less time-consuming method for comparative studies and management evaluation between different ICUs.

Abstract The genetic make-up of an individual contributes to the susceptibility and response to viral infection. Although environmental, clinical and social factors have a role in the chance of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and the severity of COVID-19 1,2 , host genetics may also be important. Identifying host-specific genetic factors may reveal biological mechanisms of therapeutic relevance and clarify causal relationships of modifiable environmental risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection and outcomes. We formed a global network of researchers to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity. Here we describe the results of three genome-wide association meta-analyses that consist of up to 49,562 patients with COVID-19 from 46 studies across 19 countries. We report 13 genome-wide significant loci that are associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection or severe manifestations of COVID-19. Several of these loci correspond to previously documented associations to lung or autoimmune and inflammatory diseases 3–7 . They also represent potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection. Mendelian randomization analyses support a causal role for smoking and body-mass index for severe COVID-19 although not for type II diabetes. The identification of novel host genetic factors associated with COVID-19 was made possible by the community of human genetics researchers coming together to prioritize the sharing of data, results, resources and analytical frameworks. This working model of international collaboration underscores what is possible for future genetic discoveries in emerging pandemics, or indeed for any complex human disease.

This paper gives a short overview of Monte Carlo studies on the usefulness of Heckman’s (1976, 1979) two‐step estimator for estimating selection models. Such models occur frequently in empirical work, especially in microeconometrics when estimating wage equations or consumer expenditures. It is shown that exploratory work to check for collinearity problems is strongly recommended before deciding on which estimator to apply. In the absence of collinearity problems, the full‐information maximum likelihood estimator is preferable to the limited‐information two‐step method of Heckman, although the latter also gives reasonable results. If, however, collinearity problems prevail, subsample OLS (or the Two‐Part Model) is the most robust amongst the simple‐to‐calculate estimators.

Recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals, assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models. This paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature: (1) transmission of attitudes from parents to children; (2) an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment on child attitudes; and (3) positive assortative mating of parents, which enhances the ability of a parent to pass on his or her attitudes to the child. We focus on two fundamentally important attitudes, willingness to take risks and willingness to trust others. We find empirical support for all three aspects, providing an empirical underpinning for the literature. An investigation of underlying mechanisms shows that socialization is important in the transmission process. Various parental characteristics and aspects of family structure are found to strengthen the socialization process, with implications for modeling the socialization production function and for policies focused on affecting children's non-cognitive skills. The paper also provides evidence that the transmission of risk and trust attitudes affects a wide variety of child outcomes, implying a potentially large total effect on children's economic situation.

Using participant-observation data, interviews, and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks, this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions. To interpret these patterns, which are global in scope but microsocial in character, this article uses the term "global microstructures." Features of the interaction order, loosely defined, have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth. This study draws on Schutz in the development ofthe concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets. This article contributes to economic sociology through the analysis of cambist (Le., trading) markets, which are distinguished from producer markets, and by positing a form of market coordination that supplements relational or network forms of coordination.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshapes companies and how innovation management is organized. Consistent with rapid technological development and the replacement of human organization, AI may indeed compel management to rethink a company's entire innovation process. In response, we review and explore the implications for future innovation management. Using ideas from the Carnegie School and the behavioral theory of the firm, we review the implications for innovation management of AI technologies and machine learning-based AI systems. We outline a framework showing the extent to which AI can replace humans and explain what is important to consider in making the transformation to the digital organization of innovation. We conclude our study by exploring directions for future research.