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This paper aims to add further evidence to adoption criteria for “revolutionary” business techniques.

Adoption criteria for business techniques with a high degree of novelty have been developed earlier. The case of exchange-traded funds supports the earlier findings. The methodology applied is explicative.

The analysis supports findings that an effective response to a problem, the availability of a controllable procedure, the means to apply the procedure easily and the hardware jointly explain adopting “revolutionary” business techniques.

The results of case studies, in general, do not permit induction. More research might identify additional adoption criteria or falsify the presently obtained results. Therefore, further research is invited.

Managers seeking or being introduced to new techniques in business administration might use the criteria outlined here for their evaluation.

The author believes this paper corroborates earlier findings on adopting “revolutionary” business techniques that draw on theoretically developed technologies.

The paper aims to identify adoption criteria for “revolutionary” business techniques; based on case material, it invites further research.

Building on the idea of scientific revolution, three cases from sub-disciplines of business administration are chosen to illicit adoption criteria for business techniques.

The analysis shows that a logical response to a problem, the availability of a controllable procedure, the software and the means to apply the procedure easily, and the hardware, jointly seem to explain the adoption of “revolutionary” business technologies.

In case analysis in general, the results do not lead to induction. More research might identify additional success criteria. Furthermore, it might lead to determining adoption probabilities of techniques.

Managers being introduced to new techniques in business administration might use the criteria outlined here for their evaluation.

The author believes that the paper sheds new light on the development of business technologies and that this light might guide developers of technologies to come up with more potentially successful technologies.

This paper aims to demonstrate that virtual project management can be based on a common spirit and mutual trust to achieve project objectives, rather than the use of modern electronic devices to lower communication costs.

Evidence from the eighteenth-century files of Academies of Science and from astronomical literature is used to characterize the projects and to show how major elements of project management (such as identification of benefits to stakeholders, management of uncertainties, communication and data aggregation across related projects) were applied.

The analysis shows how the initiative to better measure the Astronomical Unit defined a megaproject, and how this was broken down at local Academies of Science into major projects or programs. This, in turn, resulted in individual expeditions. It demonstrates that innovations arose from the projects, and that learning from earlier expeditions resulted in the final success of the megaproject.

The literature used was not written to demonstrate project management. In this respect, both the original sources and the later reports may lack information with respect to the present topic. Today’s project management might learn from the study that coordination and communication can greatly benefit from a joint vision of the project if based on a common spirit and mutual trust.

Present day project management might benefit from the finding that common values reduce communication costs in a similar way as recent electronic communication devices.

The author believes that this is the first paper to analyze the Venus transit projects from the project management perspective. This was a complex and global megaproject. The approaches taken to achieve the objectives relevant to different stakeholders provide lessons for today’s management of megaprojects.

Consider this scenario: A company's vice president for R&D had just given an exciting talk on what the firm believed would be the next major technological innovation in its business—one that would establish the company as the industry's technological leader and lay the ground‐work for a marketing plan to introduce a new system based on that technology next year. But during a Q&A session, a manager from the Far East commented that his firm had also investigated such an approach and had found that the technology could be produced.

The development in the German-speaking countries of International Management (IM) as an academic discipline is analyzed both from a research-oriented and an institutional standpoint. This development is characterized by a relatively long run-up after early beginnings in the 1920s and a steep jump during the past 15–20 years. Business Administration and Strategic Management rather than Economics have influenced the IM field which is now an established subject in its own right. The resulting discipline is well on its way to overcoming an alleged “black hole-image” of international isolation on the part of German-speaking countries’ scholars.