Public Entrepreneurship as Social Creativity

The article begins with an overview of the innovation process and the entrepreneurial process, each treated as separate but interrelated phenomena. The innovation process tracks the evolution of a new idea through time, whereas the entrepreneurial process tracks the activities that entrepreneurs develop to promote and defend the idea against its detractors. The model of innovation and entrepreneurship introduced distinguishes between individual and collective entrepreneurship and identifies two types of collective entrepreneurship: team entrepreneurship and functional entrepreneurship. A Minnesota case study demonstrates the power of both team and functional entrepreneurship. It also illustrates how important the linkages are between the entrepreneurs and their larger community. An innovative idea's development and survival depends on an “ecology of organizations” that provide “venture” capital for analysis and experimentation. The vast networks of contacts and associations represent a form of social capital just as important as the community's economic capital. In this case, both aspects of social creativity—the community resources and the network of social relations—were found to be instrumental in passing and implementing the first public school choice program in the country.     

Teaching ethics in engineering education through historical analysis

The goal of this paper is to stress the significance of ethics for engineering education and to illustrate how it can be brought into the mainstream of higher education in a natural way that is integrated with the teaching objectives of enriching the core meaning of engineering. Everyone will agree that the practicing engineer should be virtuous, should be a good colleague, and should use professional understanding for the common good. But these injunctions to virtue do not reach closely enough the ethic of the engineer as engineer, as someone acting in a uniquely engineering situation, and it is to such conditions that I wish to speak through a set of specific examples from recent history. I shall briefly refer to four controversies between engineers. Then, in some detail I shall narrate three historical cases that directly involve the actions of one engineer, and finally I would like to address some common contemporary issues. The first section, “Engineering Ethics and the History of Innovation” includes four cases involving professional controversy. Each controversy sets two people against each other in disputes over who invented the telegraph, the radio, the automobile, and the airplane. In each dispute, it is possible to identify ethical and unethical behavior or ambiguous ethical behavior that serves as a basis for educational discussion. The first two historical cases described in “Crises and the Engineer” involve the primary closure dam systems in the Netherlands, each one the result of the actions of one engineer. The third tells of an American engineer who took his political boss, a big city mayor, to court over the illegal use of a watershed. The challenges these engineers faced required, in the deepest sense, a commitment to ethical behavior that is unique to engineering and instructive to our students. Finally, the cases in “Professors and Comparative Critical Analysis” illuminate the behavior of engineers in the design of structures and also how professors can make public criticisms of designs that seem wasteful. This paper was the keynote address at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, USA, 9–10 June 2005.     

One world,one environment,one vision: are we close to achieving this? An exploratory study of consumer environmental behaviour across three countries

The environment as an issue has been central to a number of conferences and debates held worldwide. This indicates the growing concern regarding environmental issues on the part of various nations. It is apparent that both public support and political efforts are required to halt environmental deterioration. Members of the public need to display a change in attitude and governments need policies and strategies to channel this change in appropriate directions. The present study concentrates on the aspect of public awareness and how this translates to their purchase of environmentally friendly products. The theoretical framework incorporates respondents from three countries. The main aim is to investigate differences in public awareness and behaviour based on individual variables, such as Cognitive style and Involvement, and broad factors, such as the economic and developmental stages of the countries included in the sample. Data has been collected from a sample of 132 respondents. The results indicate that the attitudes and behaviour of UK respondents are generally non‐committal, whereas the sample from India displays a more involved attitude, which is reflected in their purchasing behaviour. The ‘availability’ and the ‘price’ of environmentally friendly products have been identified as the most significant issues common to India, Greece and the UK. Cognitive style analysis indicates that innovators are responsible for generating a range of qualitative differences, whereas the differences highlighted by Involvement are quantitative in nature. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.