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This chapter presents results from initial studies on personal certifications of innovation management professionals, drawing from a Swedish context. The results capture motivations for, as well as effects from, the certification process. They are discussed from the perspective of how this is relevant for developing and enhancing innovation leadership competencies. Increased knowledge, enhanced professional communication, and strengthened self-confidence related to innovation management were identified as outcomes for individuals pursuing the certifications. Further, this laid the ground for increased visibility, expanded network, and thus more opportunities to influence innovation work. An overarching theme appearing in the study is how a certification can contribute to strengthening the legitimacy of working with innovation management, and thus serve as an enabler for innovation management practice and subsequently innovation leadership. Effects from the certification that may be beneficial for successful innovation leadership include the opportunity for practitioners to articulate their own experiences and competencies, in addition to improving the impact of their efforts utilising innovation terminology. For organisations, knowledge of personal certification can be used both for recruitment and for development of existing personnel and their innovation leadership. Through a longer perspective, it can also contribute to decreasing the dependence on a few specific individuals and instead strengthen the long-term organisational innovation capabilities.

Upcoming as well as mature industries are facing pressure as regards successfully managing operational excellence, and, at the same time, driving and managing innovation. Quality management concepts and practices’ ability to tackle this challenge have been questioned. It has even been suggested that there is a need to provide and promote an updated/changed, and even re-branded, version of Total Quality Management, merging quality management (QM) and innovation management (IM). Can such a shift then actually be spotted? The purpose of this paper is to explore and see if there are any signs suggesting that QM and IM actually are about to merge.

The study is based on literature reviews, document studies and interviews.

The paper highlights three signs indicating that QM and IM indeed are approaching each other, and that it is a movement driven from both sectors, e.g., in the work with new ISO-standards and the Toyota Kata framework.

The indicated development has fundamental and extensive practical implications. It will for example have to be followed by a similar merging of the two fields in the educational system, and in the competences of future managers.

In many countries today there is a debate on how to improve accounting to recognise also the non‐material value of companies. As a contribution to this debate, the Swedish Public Relations Association has initiated a project to develop the know‐how of how a company's profits and value can increase through investments in information, communications and relationships. The project applies also to the public sector and other organisations.

There are several ways to implement and work with the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The company Ericsson Data AB was one of the pioneers in employing the BSC in Sweden. As early adopters, they were interested in obtaining an evaluation performed by external researchers. We were fortunate to have that opportunity. During the autumn of 1998, Majvor Karlsson and Ellen Sharma had full access to the developmental department dealing with the implementation of BSC at the company. The present article is based on interviews with managers and developers with the aim to determine how the BSC was implemented and how it functions in the day‐to‐day life of the company. The BSC model introduced in Ericsson was given the name Cockpit. As one might expect, implementing BSC requires a great deal of time and energy. We found that it resembles the process in other organisational changes as well. In our research, we found that there were many aspects of the implementation of BSC with which we could interpret and explain our observations with the help of theories of organisational change. Our findings led us to formulate a theory concerning the implementation process of the BSC. It was a relief to discover that we could use a method that allowed us to listen and learn from the persons involved in the implementation process at Ericsson Data.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the perspective of the management group regarding how they reasoned when deciding to engage in a model focussing on systematic work environment management, and what motives that influenced their decision.

This qualitative study with semi-structured interviews includes 18 representatives from the management groups in 18 Swedish municipalities. Data were analysed with a constant comparative method.

The participants described two aspects that were of importance when making the decision; establishing commitment before making the decision and establishing strategies to legitimise the decision. Furthermore, they expressed motives that were linked both to their individual expectations and wishes and to policies and facts in their organisations. The participants experienced the model as a valuable tool in their organisations to increase employee participation and to provide structured support to their first-line managers.

The managers’ motives were linked to individual expectations and external directives. These were often intertwined and influenced their decisions. When implementing this type of model, it is important to discuss decisions in a larger group to avoid building an organisational initiative on one person’s expectations. Furthermore, it is important to support the management’s work to establish commitment for the model in the municipal organisation.

This study adds to knowledge of the complexity of deciding and implementing models to support systematic work environment management in organisations.

Vector autoregressions (VAR) combined with Minnesota-type priors are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting. The fact that strong but sensible priors can substantially improve forecast performance implies VAR forecasts are sensitive to prior hyperparameters. But the nature of this sensitivity is seldom investigated. We develop a general method based on Automatic Differentiation to systematically compute the sensitivities of forecasts – both points and intervals – with respect to any prior hyperparameters. In a forecasting exercise using US data, we find that forecasts are relatively sensitive to the strength of shrinkage for the VAR coefficients, but they are not much affected by the prior mean of the error covariance matrix or the strength of shrinkage for the intercepts.

Process facilitation as part of a complex intervention for changing or improving practices within workplaces is becoming a common work method. The aim of this study was to investigate what characterizes the process-facilitating role in a complex intervention.

The present study focuses on a complex work environment intervention targeting eight organizational units (workplaces) in the Swedish healthcare sector. The study applies a mixed-method approach and has been carried out in two steps. First, a qualitative process evaluation was performed. Secondly, an evaluation was conducted to see to what extent these identified conditions and mechanisms affected the quantitative intervention effect in term of sickness absence.

The analysis shows that the facilitating role consisted of three overlapping and partially iterative phases. These phases involved different activities for the facilitating role. Depending on how the facilitating role and the intervention were designed, various supporting conditions were found to significantly affect the outcome of the intervention measured as the total sickness absence.

It is concluded that the facilitation is not static or fixed during the change process. Instead, the facilitation role develops and emerges through the process of support during the different implementation phases.

The facilitative role of performing support is based on a combination of support role activities and expert role activities. The support role focuses on support activities, while the expert role includes capacity building through knowledge- and legitimacy-oriented activities.

This study contributes to earlier research by developing a methodological approach for carrying out process facilitation in complex interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the selection of decision-making approaches at manufacturing companies when implementing process innovations.

This study reviews the current understanding of decision structuredness for determining a decision-making approach and conducts a case study based on an interactive research approach at a global manufacturer.

The findings show the correspondence of intuitive, normative and combined intuitive and normative decision-making approaches in relation to varying degrees of equivocality and analyzability. Accordingly, the conditions for determining a decision-making choice when implementing process innovations are revealed.

This study contributes to increased understanding of the combined use of intuitive and normative decision making in production system design.

Empirical data are drawn from two projects in the heavy-vehicle industry. The study describes decisions, from start to finish, and the corresponding decision-making approaches when implementing process innovations. These findings are of value to staff responsible for the design of production systems.

Unlike prior conceptual studies, this study considers normative, intuitive and combined intuitive and normative decision making. In addition, this study extends the current understanding of decision structuredness and discloses the correspondence of decision-making approaches to varying degrees of equivocality and analyzability.

William J. Baumol was one of the most prolific economists of his generation, analyzing a broad range of central economic issues addressing real problems of the world. In this essay, we present and critically evaluate Baumol’s research contributions in entrepreneurship economics and point to areas for future research. Baumol contributed an impressive number of important insights, increasing our understanding of entrepreneurship from both a macro and a micro perspective. He also devoted a large part of his writings to discussing public policy, linking his theoretical insights with policy issues in practice. His analyses are rooted in contemporary mainstream neoclassical economics, and one of his main objectives was to integrate the entrepreneur into this tradition. Today, Baumol is best known for his tripartite distinction between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship and his associated idea that the institutional framework, “the rules of the game,” will determine how entrepreneurs allocate their time and effort across different – productive or unproductive – activities. An institutional environment that encourages productive entrepreneurship and spontaneous experimentation while disincentivizing unproductive activities becomes, through this insightful lens, the driving force of economic growth. As an economist, Baumol was knowledgeable and well acquainted with earlier scholars and their writings about entrepreneurship. Baumol’s writings were greatly inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s views on entrepreneurship, and he made several attempts to formalize Schumpeter’s concept of the innovative entrepreneur. Baumol was in all senses an innovative contributor to entrepreneurship economics. His work has inspired the research community of entrepreneurship scholars, but like all great scientists, he also encountered criticism. His effort to integrate entrepreneurship into the mainstream theory of the firm was only partly successful.