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Knowledge
Management and its Emerging Role in Pharmaceutical Research
and Development: Strategies and Perspectives
--Navneet
Wadhwa and Lewlyn L R Rodrigues
The
concept of Knowledge Management (KM) is a strategic factor,
which shapes how efficiently the pharmaceutical companies
do business. Advocates of KM believe that these practices
accelerate collective learning, improve competitiveness, and
facilitate response to market changes. In this context, the
paper provides a systematic approach to reap the benefits
of KM in pharmaceutical industry. The paper starts with the
five important stages of knowledge growth in pharmaceuticals
and highlights the need to have a knowledge management system
with specific reference to Indian pharmaceutical sector. We
have highlighted the importance of IT applications to support
and integrate the knowledge capture and sharing processes.
The selection of the right KM model with reference to the
Indian context is discussed. The pharmaceutical industry being
dependent to a great extent on intellectual property and innovation,
KM clearly has a powerful role to play. An in-depth coverage
of KM implementation strategies and perspectives along with
the role of KM as an enabler for the emerging pharmaceutical
R&D model is presented in this paper. In this era of global
competition, KM comes as a survival technique, and this paper
is an attempt to publicize the tremendous growth opportunity
KM has to offer to the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
©
2004 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Toward
a Comparative Perspective on Corporate Governance and Labor
Management
--Gregory
Jackson
While
stakeholder models of corporate governance support long-term
employment, recent reforms have promoted shareholder-oriented
corporate governance worldwide. Will reform cause employment
to converge on a market system? This paper presents a comparison
of the linkages between corporate governance and employment
patterns in 22 countries using the QCA method (Qualitative
Comparative Analysis). Case studies of Germany and Japan also
show that firms must now cope with capital market pressures,
but do so by creative adaptation of their existing national
employment institutions. International differences are thus
growing smaller, but convergence will not occur in the foreseeable
future.
©
2004 Gregory Jackson (www.sase.org). Reprinted with permission.
Privacy,
Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet
--Andrew
Odlyzko
The
rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles. Why is it
occurring, and why do people care about it? This paper proposes
an explanation for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing
importance of price discrimination. Privacy appears to be
declining largely in order to facilitate differential pricing,
which offers greater social and economic gains than auctions
or shopping agents. The thesis of this paper is that what
really motivates commercial organizations (even though they
often do not realize it clearly themselves) is the growing
incentive to price discriminate, coupled with the increasing
ability to price discriminate. It is the same incentive that
has led to the airline yield management system, with a complex
and constantly changing array of prices. It is also the same
incentive that led railroads to invent a variety of price
and quality differentiation schemes in the 19th
century. Privacy intrusions serve to provide the information
that allows sellers to determine buyers' willingness to pay.
They also allow monitoring of usage, to ensure that arbitrage
is not used to bypass discriminatory pricing. Economically,
price discrimination is usually regarded as desirable, since
it often increases the efficiency of the economy. That is
why it is frequently promoted by governments, either through
explicit mandates or through indirect means. On the other
hand, price discrimination often arouses strong opposition
from the public. There is no easy resolution to the conflict
between sellers' incentives to price discriminate and buyers'
resistance to such measures. The continuing tension between
these two factors will have important consequences for the
nature of the economy. It will also determine which technologies
will be adopted widely. Governments will likely play an increasing
role in controlling pricing, although their roles will continue
to be ambiguous. Sellers are likely to rely to an even greater
extent on techniques such as bundling that will allow them
to extract more consumer surplus and also to conceal the extent
of price discrimination. Micropayments and auctions are likely
to play a smaller role than is often expected. In general,
because of strong conflicting pressures, privacy is likely
to prove an intractable problem that will be prominent on
the public agenda for the foreseeable future.
©
2003 Andrew Odlyzko (www.dtc.umn.edu). This paper was first
published in the proceedings of ICEC 2003: Fifth International
Conference on Electronic Commerce, N Sadeh, ed., printed by
ACM, 2003. Reprinted with permission.
Executives'
Perceptions on the Ethical Behavior of Public Sector Organizations
- Is there an Antagonistic Relationship?
--José
Manuel Moreira, Arménio Rego and Cláudia S Sarrico
This
paper is part of a bigger research project, in which 123 executives
were invited to report on how their organizations assume their
"corporate social responsibility". Three main conclusions
are arrived at: (1) 42% of executives assert that their companies
have a code of conduct; (2) in general, executives consider
that their companies act ethically towards public entities,
but they also consider that these do not reciprocate in the
same way; (3) this tendency is corroborated by the fact that,
in a scale ranging from 1 to 10, executives give a mean score
of 4.8 to the ethical conduct of public entities. These findings
are discussed and some suggestions are made concerning the
"behavior" of the companies and the "behavior"
of the State and the public entities in general.
©
2003 José Manuel Moreira, Arménio Rego and Cláudia
S Sarrico (www.fernuni-hagen.de). Reprinted with permission.
How
Much Do Leaders Matter in Internal Brand Building? An International
Perspective
--Christine
Vallaster and Leslie de Chernatony
Internal
brand building is about aligning employee behavior with brand
values. As corporate brands expand internationally and employ
`multicultural' work forces in different zones of the world,
this process becomes increasingly complex. The current literature
does not fully answer the roles corporate structures and leadership
should play encouraging employee behavior to reinforce the
desired brand values. Drawing on structuration theory, we
propose that, due to their social position and access to more
resources, compared to other organizational members, leaders
can initiate and facilitate change to enable brand-supportive
behavior. Preliminary research results provide evidence that
leaders do this by acting as mediators between corporate branding
structures and individuals.
©2004
Christine Vallaster and Leslie de Chernatony (www.business.bham.ac.uk).
Reprinted with permission.
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