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Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry
The book provides an explanation for the emergence of innovation and creativity in the music industry by retelling and interpreting its history, from Thomas Alva Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the latest innovations such as MP3-files and iPods. The global nature of this history causes me to believe that this book is going to be of interest to an international readership as well. My hope is that this translation will be received with the same level of warmth and generosity that the publication of the German original enjoyed.
Country-Compatible Incentive Design : A Comparision of Employees' Performance Reward Preferences in Germany and the USA
Based on an empirical study among employees of a multinational corporation (MNC) in Germany and the USA, Marjaana Gunkel shows that the employees in these countries have different preferences regarding incentives and that incentive plans designed for one country are not always effective in others. Money is an important motivator in both countries, but the motivational effects of non-monetary rewards differ greatly. In addition, the author presents an explorative study of employee groups in China and Japan and gives advice for designing appropriate compensation schemes for employees of MNC in different countries.
Costs and Benefits of Collective Pension Systems
The Dutch pension system is often praised as one of the best in the world: it is efficient, it provides certainty to participants and it preserves cohesion and solidarity among workers and pensioners. This book presents these benefits in detail. It also discusses the aspects of the system that are less favourable.
Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures
Distributed client/server architectures are the technological backbone of today’s data centres. A usage-based allocation of infrastructure costs to business processes or users is often not possible as the necessary resource consumption measurements incur too much overhead. Reinhard Brandl proposes a method to derive estimates for the expected resource consumption of customer-oriented services during standard load tests. This facilitates the determination of usage-based cost allocation keys significantly. He implements the concept in a software tool kit and evaluates it successfully in a set of experiments with multi-tier database applications. In particular, he uses the determined consumption estimates as input parameters for Queuing Network Models which lead to highly accurate performance predictions. Finally, he analyzes how the method can be integrated into existing IT processes at the BMW Group.
Corporate Taxation in a Dynamic World
This book analyzes the economic principles of modern corporate taxation. First of all, it analyzes not only the effects of taxation on firms' marginal choices, but also focuses on the impact of taxation on discrete choices, such as plant location, R&D investment, and new marketing programs.
Corporate Sustainability Management in the Energy Sector : An Empirical Contigency Approach
Corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and citizenship are terms that often evoke considerable scepticism and cynicism, particularly in civil society. Much needed sector-specific and comparative research, which could facilitate a more fact-oriented debate, is still missing from the literature. The present study aims to fill this gap by presenting data collected from two groups of managers, namely sustainability experts and non-sustainability experts, from two different industry sectors (integrated oil and gas vs. electric utilities) and several geographical regions. Oliver Salzmann provides a comprehensive view on corporate sustainability management in companies such as Shell and RWE and investigates the key social and environmental issues driving the energy sector. The author analyses the influence which stakeholder pressure exercises on energy companies and their efforts to become more responsive. Moreover, he develops a model for strategic, thus profit-oriented, corporate sustainability management.
Corporate Sustainability as a Challenge for Comprehensive Management
Sustainability has become a topic of global relevance: Corporations and other economically acting organizations increasingly need to realize economic, environmental and social objectives in order to survive. Supplementary to "classical" environmental management, realizing corporate sustainability requires comprehensive approaches which allow the integration of social and economic aspects. Such concepts can be found e.g. in international excellence models mainly based on a TQM thinking but also in the field of human factors in organizational design and management. Understood as systems approaches, they include the interests of all relevant stakeholders with a mid- or long-term time perspective and are thus highly linked with the principles of sustainable development. In this book internationally leading scientists discuss the issue of sustainability from their perspective, resulting in an innovative view on different management approaches under the umbrella of corporate sustainability.
Corporate Social Responsibility as an International Strategy
CSR, a concept aimed at determining the amount of responsibilities to be shouldered by private business toward stakeholder groups and society at large, deserves to be dealt with in considerable detail and not simply as another "PR fuzz" or marketing gag. As a model, CSR epitomises the old saying "business is business"; offering broader stakeholder management which can be seen as a competitive advantage. Increased financial performance and employee commitment are among the benefits the CSR model can offer corporations. This discussion presents practitioners and scholars with a unique examination of how firms can maximise productivity through the implementation of CSR programs.
Corporate Social Responsibility Across Europe
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly important topic in our global society. Corporate Social Responsibility Across Europe is the first volume of its kind to bring together twenty-three national perspectives on this issue. An overview and analysis is provided for each country. Topics addressed include business and societal mindsets in the different cultural settings, national drivers for the current development of CSR, and prospects for the individual countries in the future. Furthermore it contains three comprehensive pan-European analyses. The chapters also contain practical information and references to the Internet as well as relevant literature in order to support further research and stimulate business activities in this field. The result is a rather unique collection of essays on the topic of CSR across Europe.
Corporate Restructuring : Finance in Times of Crisis
This book provides a current overview and discussion about the meaning of the financing of the companies. The book uses case studies to show how financial restructuring can be implemented in practice, thus paving the way for successful expansion. The book is written for restructuring professionals.
Corporate Performance Management : ARIS in Practice
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) is a basic approach which examines the relationship between corporate performance and process optimization. How to successfully introduce CPM in practice is demonstrated through project reports from E.ON, British Telecom, Credit Suisse and Vodafone among others. The methods and tools presented here guarantee a continuous and automated monitoring of the corporate performance and enable Business Process Excellence to be permanently established in the company by company-internal and company-external benchmarking. The articles in this book focus on the use of the ARIS Controlling Platform developed by IDS Scheer.
Corporate Governance in Japan : From the Viewpoints of Management, Accounting, and the Market
In Japan, the problem of corporate governance has been cogently argued in the ?eld of social science for the past decade, and the issue has also been taken up separately in law, business administration, and accounting. The study presented here proposes that a company should play a social role to bring about a sustainable society.
Corporate Evaluation in the German Banking Sector
This book presents a new model to quantify the value of German banks. Finally, he offers solutions to the problem that banks do not interlink the evaluation of their own value with a value-oriented management process.
Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance
This book represents an introduction to and overview of the diverse aspects of the ethical challenges confronting companies today. This book presents industry-specific topics in ethics, and on the other hand it provides a general, interdisciplinary survey of the ethical dimensions of management and business.
Corporate Entrepreneurship and Venturing
The common theme in Corporate Entrepreneurship and Venturing is how and why corporate entrepreneurship and corporate venturing can contribute to innovation and strategic renewal in large established companies. In particular it explores ways to balance exploitation and exploration in established companies. The issue is how the locus of entrepreneurship affects the way corporate entrepreneurship addresses the exploitation/exploration challenge. One stream of research focuses on the entrepreneurial culture in large companies and how they can create an environment in which intrapreneurs (entrepreneurs within large companies) can blossom. In this view entrepreneurial initiatives can emerge throughout the organization and this type of entrepreneurship has been labelled as ‘dispersed corporate entrepreneurship’. Two related chapters fit into that stream of research. The other three chapters address the challenge of corporate venture capital programs. These programs have funds to invest in start-ups (external ventures) and the corporate parent want to benefit from the technology, new products or new competences developed in these start-ups. In this case they have separated the locus of entrepreneurship from the main line of business operations, which has been labelled ‘focused corporate entrepreneurship’. In this ‘focused corporate entrepreneurship’ stream the issue is not so much the motivational factors and supportive culture to entrepreneurial initiatives, but the creation and development of linkage mechanisms between the start-ups and the parent company in order to create new combinations based on competences from both the start-up and the parent company. Although the challenges in these two streams of literature are different, they both address the strategic issue of balancing exploitation and exploration.
Corporate Data Quality : Voraussetzung erfolgreicher Geschäftsmodelle
Data is the basis of the digitized economy. Industry 4.0 and digital services produce unprecedented amounts of data and enable new business models. Data quality is becoming a critical success factor. This book presents an approach to quality-oriented data management and ten case studies for practitioners and scientists alike. The book was created in the Competence Center Corporate Data Quality in close cooperation between researchers from the University of St. Gallen and the Fraunhofer IML as well as numerous representatives from more than twenty large companies.
Corporate Control and Enterprise Reform in China : An Econometric Analysis of Block Share Trades
This study sheds light on the efficiency of corporate control allocation in Chinese listed firms. Using a panel data set for the period 1996 to 2006, it examines the frequency, causes and consequences of changes in corporate control. The results indicate that poorly performing firms are the predominant targets of control changes; shareholder and creditor control generally act as a complement for changes in control. Following the change in ownership there is a substantial amount of corporate restructuring and an improvement in operating performance. Significant differences in these dimensions emerge, however, between State and private transfers of control. The findings not only provide insights into the motives and constraints of the key players involved in governance practices in China; but they also contain useful implications for other emerging markets around the world that have weak legal systems and weak property rights protection.
Coping with Water Deficiency : From Research to Policymaking
In line with the Water Framework Directive, this book stresses the need for an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to balance the competing demands on water-domestic, agricultural, industrial, tourism and environmental/ecological- and promote economically efficient, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable water use in selected regions from Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the developing world. Results from the research projects covered by this book, demonstrate that effective water management tools and decisions-making practices, are needed in order to complement integrated interventions for increasing the availability of supply and/or managing the growing demand for scarce water supplies. Further, the book attempts to bridge the gap between ideas and actions endorsed at the research-oriented environmental debate, and their translation into policy making structures and programs in developed and developing countries.
Coping with Uncertainty : Modeling and Policy Issues
Ongoing global changes bring fundamentally new scientific problems requiring new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of practically irreducible uncertainties, which challenge our traditional models and require new concepts and analytical tools. The complexity of new problems does not allow to achieve enough certainty by increasing the resolution of models or by bringing in more links. Hence, new tools for modeling and management of uncertainty are needed, as given in this book.
Coping With Institutional Order Flow
Handling the large orders of institutional participants presents some of the most complex problems for system design. How well are our current systems operating, and how effective are new facilities on the scene? To what extent is market quality impaired for all participants when institutional trading costs are not properly contained? Can institutional order flow be efficiently integrated with the orders of retail customers, or are separate facilities needed? What are the impediments to market structure change, and how might they best be overcome?
