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Industrial growth and a rapidly growing world population have large impacts on the global environment and allocation of material resources. Most changes in the environment are brought about by human activities and these activities result in a flow of materials. The flows of resources from the natural environment to the economy are a prerequisite of production while flows of residuals from the economy to the environment are the consequence of production and consumption. A full understanding of these processes requires a complete description of the physical dimension of the economy and its interaction with the environment.
The article opens with brief examples of the varied contexts in which professionals with expert knowledge of intercultural communication are commissioned
by organisations to help improve organisational and individual performance.
The development needs that are evident in these contexts entail a broader repertoire of competencies than those generally reflected in the term intercultural communication skills, and so the next section elaborates on the concept of intercultural interaction competence (ICIC), reporting on the numerous sub-competencies which go to make up the ability to perform joint and purposeful activity effectively and appropriately across cultures.
The third section reports on approaches to developing the ICIC of members of organisations, discussing desirable framework conditions for the development
intervention, its possible goals, the nature of the cognitive, affective and behavioural development outcomes which can be achieved, and the content, methods and tools available to the intercultural developer.
The article finishes with a brief consideration of the qualification profile of interculturalists engaged in this kind of work, pointing out that a multi-disciplinary background will enable interculturalists to meet a broad range of organisational and human resource development needs in the area of intercultural communication which go beyond the ‘mere’ development of communicative foreign-language skills.
New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) learn their business in the early-stages of their life-cycle. As a central element of the entrepreneurial learning process, the business model describes the value-creation functions that are conceptualized in different stages of the NTBF’s life-cycle. Transaction relations connect the model with the business reality and ideally mature in strength over time to a functioning value-network. This chapter describes the development of a research design that determines, extracts, and evaluates semantics constructs of this entrepreneurial learning out of a convenient sample and three cohorts of business plans submitted to a business plan award between 2008 and 2010. The analysis shows empirical evidence for the survival and growth of those NTBFs that exhibit a balanced status of entrepreneurial learning in the maturity of the value-network that can be characterized as early startup-stage. The empirical findings of the network theory based business plan analysis will allow for a better explanation of the performance in the entrepreneurial process that is discussed for NTBFs based on theory of organizational learning.