What Responsible Businesses can Learn from Social Innovation

This chapter presents initiatives and success stories from the realm of social innovation with the aim of identifying elements of Responsible Innovation (RI) and their significance. The motivation behind selecting social innovation to highlight the positive impact of RI practices is twofold. Focusing on social innovation provides, primarily, an opportunity to investigate the business perspective, by looking into cases where businesses have reconnected with the community through shifting their focus towards serving society, as a means to become more successful. Often this leads to immediate benefits for the business but also sets the framework for a long-term strategy that goes beyond well-known corporate social innovation activities, to encompass further activities that potentially initiate and support both social and environmental change. In addition, the focus on social innovation allows a better view of the community perspective, by considering the public as important business stakeholders, i.e. consumers and customers. As such, the public increasingly demands that business practices are handled in a more ethical way. As societies become more vulnerable due to economic instabilities, resource crises and political changes, the public demands adoption of new ways of thinking, and it is often implied that the road to a successful economic, and often cultural, transformation needs to go through social innovation. Undoubtedly, the goal of social innovation is to provide socially beneficial solutions that drive economic growth, but the task is not an easy one. Therefore, RI is essential for driving society forward, especially when it comes to the key aspects of employment, education and social inclusion

Developing Girls' Technical Giftedness and Supporting Their Resilience

© 2020 ACM. The article considers the problem of diagnosis and development of technical giftedness of girls. In the practical part, the results of a study of sex and age dynamics of the development of signs of technical giftedness are presented. It is established that in early adolescence the signs of technical giftedness are more developed than in adolescence. An empirical study showed that it is necessary to overcome gender stereotypes that boys have better developed technical thinking than girls. Using same-sex educational environment to reveal the technical abilities of girls and support their resilience in general has been put forward as a proposal

Diffusion and aggregation of Ag

The diffusion and aggregation of preformed Agn-clusters $(n=2{-}9)$ deposited onto a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) substrate is studied by two-photon-photoemission (2PPE). The sample is irradiated with ultrashort laser pulse pairs and the kinetic energy of the emitted photoelectrons is analyzed in a magnetic bottle type time-of-flight spectrometer. During annealing of the sample from 100 K up to room temperature, nanoparticles are formed on the surface by diffusion and aggregation of the silver clusters. A steep increase of the total photoelectron yield at a sample temperature of about 150 K is explained by the excitation of plasmons in the silver nanoparticles. From the kinetic energy distribution of the photoelectrons we deduce a strong variation of the work function of the sample during the formation of the nanoparticles, which is attributed to a quantum size effect