Books

On how entrepreneurial teams should be formed in order to allow new businesses to be created.

This management book brings together distinguished writers from diverse fields and their specialised perspectives on new ideas and the challenges they pose to the hegemony of neo-classical scientific management. It explores various possibilities for the future development of the understanding of management and organisation in the context of new economic conditions taking shape in both the East and the West. The focus on these makes this volume topical. It provides today’s managers with alternatives to conventional approaches to management.

by Ronald Huisman
Transportation, storage, seasonality and settlement issues hardly figure in financial markets and their modelling. Yet, they are crucial to the working of energy markets and, as a result, traditional financial models must be customised to give useful results. More broadly, traders and portfolio managers, who make crucial decisions based on the output of these models, should be familiar with their power and their limitations. Ronald Huisman has combined both academic and practical approaches in "An Introduction to Models for the Energy Markets" to provide the reader with a clear exposition of the thinking behind the range of models used today in energy finance - from the most basic to the cutting edge.

Luca Berchicci
One of the challenges met by green entrepreneurs and product developers who have tried to develop more sustainable products is that efforts to have better products in environmental terms do not always translate into effective business cases. The purpose of this book is a better understanding of the implications of environmental issues in new product development. Through an empirical study in the human powered vehicle sector, Luca Berchicci examines how and to what extent the environmental ambition of product developers and managers influences the way new products and services are developed. The understanding of this phenomenon is particularly important since managers are encouraged and/or motivated to undertake environmental new product development projects.

By Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky and Leslie P. Willcocks
The global offshore outsourcing market for IT and business services exceeded $55 billion in 2008 and some estimates suggest an annual growth rate of 20% over the next five years. Furthermore, over 200 firms from the Forbes 2000 companies and 50 per cent of the Fortune Global 500 had offshored IT and business process activities through captive centres, making a total of about $9bn of business. The phenomenon of offshoring and offshore-outsourcing is certainly expanding. It has become increasingly important to understand the phenomenon, not least as a basis for suggesting what directions it will take, its impacts, how it has been conducted, and how its management can be better facilitated.

Andreas Freytag and Roy Thurik (Eds.). Innovative papers that explore the relationship between cultural features and entrepreneurship.

Prof. dr. Rob van Tulder
At the Max Havelaar Lecture 2008, Noreena Hertz, distinguished fellow at the Judge Business School, Cambridge, author of ‘The Silent Takeover’ and ‘The Debt Threat’ and Visiting Professor at the RSM Erasmus University, held a speech about partnership for development.

Luca Bertazzi; M. Grazia Speranza; Jo A.E.E.van Nunen
In a globalized economy logistics has become a crucial area for the success of companies. The performance of each company depends on the performance of its suppliers and of its business partners. The customers of each company are spread on a large geographical space. For this reason distribution logistics is the most important and complex part of logistics. An efficient and effective management of distribution logistics is a key issue for the success of a company. There are many different problems to deal with, from facility location to transportation, to inventory management, and, most important, to the integration and optimization of the entire logistics network. Quantitative methods provide relevant tools to support decisions, from strategic to operational, in distribution logistics.

Willem Hulsink & Hans Dons
This book looks at why certain regions are successful in creating an innovative technology cluster (with chapters on Silicon Valley and the Italian Food districts) and why aspiring communities and districts seek to learn from those examples and create an internationally successful region or sector (with chapters on the Dutch Biopartner program to stimulate entrepreneurship in the life sciences, on high-tech Israel and on the Italian Slow Food Movement).

Slawek Magala
This book examines patterns of sense making processes underlying cultural diversity. Is there a future for critical management studies? Many claim that 'the MBA is dead'. But are academic communities self-reflexively alive and critically kicking?