Collecting data is different from accumulating knowledge. To succeed, public affairs informatics must develop three infrastructures: 1) protocols for standardising which variables are meaningful and formats for records; 2) storage and retrieval hardware and rules that protect privacy and ensure...

Over the past decade a broad cross section of research has been carried out under the rubric of best practices (Bendixson and de Guchteneire, 2003). This article takes a closer look at best practices research and its application to the field of public affairs. First, two questions are addressed:...

Within a public environment in which accountability is at the forefront, an important evaluation question is how to document the economic value of innovation-related outputs and outcomes from intramural research relative to the cost of funding an intramural research programme. In this paper, we...

A model to explain and predict relative performance among new technology-based firms is useful to government and regional authorities. In Sweden, science parks new technology-based firms stand out as a special group of small firms in terms of performance (growth: sales and employment). This...

A new economic order based on globalisation and localisation processes has changed the fundamental economic systems. This resulted in a severe recession in the mid 1990s in Finland. In order to overcome the economic recession, the government and industry began to emphasise technology and...

The US healthcare system is experiencing a funding shortfall that constrains efforts to provide healthcare to our citizens. Patients are no longer sure they will receive adequate healthcare during their senior years. One solution is to create an annuity at birth for each individual. This annuity...

'Involuntary self-employment' has recently received considerable political and media attention in Finland. The notion of involuntary self-employment has been used to refer to situations where an employer seeks increased flexibility and cost efficiency by 'pushing' former employees into new forms...

This paper describes a multi-year attempt to develop, implement and maintain an evidence-based international clinical decision support system for preventing and treating chronic wounds. Incidental to implementation efforts, over 37,000 wound assessments, risk assessments and treatment events...

The use of neural networks has been slow in coming to the public sector. One promising area in which neural networks are likely to prove beneficial is in the area of revenue forecasting. A sales tax forecasting model is developed and compared to the actual collections for the State of Indiana....

This article reviews the establishment and use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Ireland. It notes the many difficulties experienced in obtaining a precise view of the composition of the Irish public sector and comments on ambivalent (and therefore often destructive) attitudes to the control...