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The innovation creation literature primarily focuses on urban firms/regions or relies heavily on these data; less studied are rural firms and areas in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to employ a new firm-level data set, national in scale, and analyze characteristics that potentially influence innovation creation across rural and urban firms.

The authors use the 2014 National Survey of Business Competitiveness (NSBC) covering multiple firm-level variables related to innovation creation combined with secondary data reflecting the regional business and innovative environments where these firms operate. The number of patent applications filed by these firms measures their innovation creation, and the paper employs a negative binomial regression estimation for analysis.

After controlling for industry, county and state factors, rural and urban firms differ in their innovation creation characteristics and behaviors, suggesting that urban firms capitalize on their resources better than rural firms. Other major findings of the paper provide evidence that: first, for rural firms, the influence of university R&D is relevant to innovation creation, but their perception of university-provided information is not significant; and second, rural firms that are willing to try, but fail, in terms of innovation creation have a slight advantage over other rural firms less willing to take on the risk.

This paper is one of the first to analyze the 2014 NSBC, a firm-level national survey covering a wide range of innovation-related variables. The authors combine it with other regional secondary data, and use appropriate analytical modeling to provide empirical evidence of influencing factors on innovation creation across rural and urban firms.

Earthworks are the embankments and cuttings that allow a railway to maintain a certain line, level and grade through the landscape. Earth embankments consist of an engineered bank of earth that carries the railway above the natural ground. A cutting is used to carry the railway through ground with a natural level above the line of the railway. Modern (post 1960s) earthworks are carefully engineered to perform well. However, many railways run on earthworks that were constructed over 100 years ago without the use of mechanised plant. The quality of construction of older earthworks was often poor compared with present-day engineering practice. Ageing of the earthwork structures, and the greater demands of heavier and faster trains and climatic change, means that earthworks suffer ultimate and serviceability failures that can present operational difficulties. Older earthworks that fail or do not perform well require maintenance and repair, and sometimes complete replacement. This chapter explores the main engineering considerations for modern earthworks, and the challenges associated with older earthworks including their modes of failure and upgrade and repair.

The paper aims to relook at the notion of competitiveness in the challenging times of pandemic. The failure of global value chains caused many nations despite their state of economic development to struggle for necessary items. The goal of achieving profitability abated by having self-sufficiency, specifically in the manufacturing sector where unlike services, the production processes jolted. Under this backdrop, the paper attempts to project local industry clusters as a panacea for achieving resilient competitiveness.

To explore the credibility of clusters as an important tool to prepare nations towards a resilient future, a correlation between the state of cluster development in a country and its national competitiveness has been tested. Besides, any difference in the notion of state of cluster development between least developing countries, developing countries and developed countries has also been tested. The paper uses the data from World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.

Strong support for the research hypothesis has been found. High positive correlation exists between the state of cluster development and national competitiveness. The state of cluster development is found to be significantly different among three categories of countries.

Clusters have been promoted in academic literature, policy circles and the business community for many advantages. This paper is a novice attempt to showcase these can serve as an instrument to prepare economies for self-sufficiency and a resilient future by performing an objective evaluation.

This paper focuses on the strategic role of elites in managing institutional and organizational change within English public services, framed by the wider ideological and political context of neo-liberalism and its pervasive impact on the social and economic order over recent decades. It also highlights the unintended consequences of this elite-driven programme of institutional reform as realized in the emergence of hybridized regimes of ‘polyarchic governance’ and the innovative discursive and organizational technologies on which they depend. Within the latter, ‘leaderism’ is identified as a hegemonic ‘discursive imaginary’ that has the potential to connect selected marketization and market control elements of new public management (NPM), network governance, and visionary and shared leadership practices that ‘make the hybrid happen’ in public services reform.

Many attempts to integrate technology in Swedish schools have been initiated over the past 30 years with varying success. Although the use of digital tools has increased along with a general technology development, schools have mainly been using IT in administrative support activities. In recent years, school system reforms and developments in the educational technology sector have both required and enabled schools to digitalize. In this chapter, we follow the implementation of two technologies in a benchmark school in order to understand how technology integration is achieved. We suggest four types of embeddedness resulting from different types of activities that are subject to technology integration, as well as the social and material conditions that guide convergence during the postimplementation phase.

From interviews with selected experts and secondary sources, this paper charts the actions that led to Malaysia having its own green building rating tool. It began with the Institution of Architects Malaysia and the Institution of Engineers Malaysia working together in 2008 to come up with the Green Building Index (GBI) specifically suited for the Malaysian condition. The index was launched a year later, the same year that a new prime minister came into office. With greening the economy in mind, he launched a few major initiatives, one of which was the creation of the Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water to replace the Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications and another was the launching of the National Technology Policy. In December 2009, he made the commitment on Malaysia's behalf to reduce carbon dioxide emission at the Copenhagen Summit, thereby cementing his commitment to green issues at the international level. Behind-the-scene lobbying by the private sector resulted in the government explicitly endorsing the GBI by tying GBI certification of buildings to financial incentives. This paper makes the case that the strong cooperation between the private sector and the government over the GBI represents a form of public-private partnership on aspects of collaborative spirit, complementarity of resources, private sector leadership, wide-ranging ramifications over other partnerships across time, timing and sustainability. Other countries intending to come up with their own rating tool can take stock of the Malaysian experience.

This chapter explores the benefits of reflective practice in learning environments and discusses the conditions that can impede and facilitate reflection for teachers and teaching assistants. Various strategies and tools to support teaching teams to reflect collaboratively are discussed and recommendations about how to introduce reflective practice are outlined.

Although it is widely acknowledged that health care delivery systems are complex adaptive systems, there are gaps in understanding the application of systems engineering approaches to systems analysis and redesign in the health care domain. Commonly employed methods, such as statistical analysis of risk factors and outcomes, are simply not adequate to robustly characterize all system requirements and facilitate reliable design of complex care delivery systems. This is especially apparent in institutional-level systems, such as patient safety programs that must mitigate the risk of infections and other complications that can occur in virtually any setting providing direct and indirect patient care. The case example presented here illustrates the application of various system engineering methods to identify requirements and intervention candidates for a critical patient safety problem known as failure to rescue. Detailed descriptions of the analysis methods and their application are presented along with specific analysis artifacts related to the failure to rescue case study. Given the prevalence of complex systems in health care, this practical and effective approach provides an important example of how systems engineering methods can effectively address the shortcomings in current health care analysis and design, where complex systems are increasingly prevalent.

Merchants and manufacturers have it in their power to minimise in some degree the extent to which we are becoming indebted to foreign countries in respect of the large excess of imports over exports, by obtaining, as far as possible, their imported supplies of food products and raw materials for industries from countries within the Empire. Take, for example, meat and cheese. The prevailing high prices are no doubt encouraging the home production of these commodities. Nevertheless a large quantity must necessarily be imported. In 1914 meat to the value of 62 million pounds was imported, and cheese to the value of 8 million pounds. Of the imports of meat 26 per cent. came from within the Empire, and of cheese 82 per cent. Clearly it is better under existing circumstances that we should buy meat from Australia and New Zealand than from Argentina, and cheese from Canada and New Zealand rather than from Holland and the United States. Many other examples may be mentioned of products which can equally as well be obtained within the Empire as from foreign countries, such as maize from South Africa, where a large increase of production is expected this year; oats from Canada rather than from Argentina and the United States; barley from Canada; peas from New Zealand; butter from Australia and New Zealand; canned salmon, of which 2½ million pounds' worth was imported in 1914, from Canada rather than from the United States; apples from Canada and Australia; wine from Australia; tea from India and Ceylon rather than from China and Java; cocoa from the Gold Coast and the West Indies; copra from Malaya, India and Australia; rubber from Malaya and Ceylon; fibres from New Zealand, Mauritius, Ceylon, etc.; wood pulp from Canada and Newfoundland; wool from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falkland Islands rather than from Argentina, Chile and other foreign sources; tanning materials from India, Natal, Australia and British East Africa; dyewoods from the West Indies; timber from Canada; hardwoods from India, West Africa, the West Indies and Australia; copper and copper ore from Australia and South Africa; tin and tin ore from Malaya, Nigeria, South Africa and Australia; manganese from India; plumbago from Ceylon; hides from India, Africa and Australia, and so forth. It has been stated that the result of the war may ultimately depend largely on financial strength. In that case the country which is to the greatest extent self‐supporting as regards supplies of the necessaries of life and materials for the manufacture of munitions of war will be in a position to carry on the longest. Undoubtedly the British Empire contains within itself the power to produce all such materials, and the Dominions, Colonies and Dependencies are in fact already supplying a large proportion of the food products and raw materials for industries, which are imported into the United Kingdom. There are a few notable exceptions, e.g., for our supplies of cotton and sugar we have always been largely dependent on foreign countries, but Uganda and the Soudan are capable of producing in the future very large quantities of cotton of the quality required by Lancashire spinners, and sugar production in our Colonies could, with proper encouragement, be expanded so as to meet the whole of the requirements of the Mother Country. If the British capital and energy which have in the past gone every year to the development of enterprises in foreign countries had been devoted for a tew years exclusively to exploiting the resources of the Dominions and Colonies, the British Empire would, by this time, have become practically self‐supporting, and the bulk of our imported foodstuffs and raw products required for our manufacturing industries would now be obtained from within the Empire and paid for by increased quantities of our own manufactures. It may be hoped that one of the lessons which we shall learn from the war will be definitely to encourage the development of the vast resources of our overseas Empire. — The Chamber of Commerce Journal.