Inc-Int

Income Statement

The income statement provides information concerning return on investment, risk, financial flexibility, and operating capabilities. Return on investment is a measure of a firm's overall performance.

Incubators, Business

Business incubators are literally what they sound like, a warm nurturing environment for new, small, entrepreneurial businesses to start and grow. Incubators are usually located in older, sometimes abandoned offices or industrial buildings.

Independent Contractors

Independent contractors, also known as freelance employees, are individuals who work on their own, without a long-term contractual commitment to any one employer. An independent contractor usually performs services or completes work assignments under short-term contracts with several employers, or clients, who have the right to control only the final result of the individual's work, rather than the specific means used to get the work done.

Index/Indexes

Various kinds of indexes or index numbers are used by the scientific and academic communities, and the popular media. In fact, some indexes are so commonly used that one does not even recognize that they are index numbers, not absolute values of the variable or the item of interest.

India, Doing Business in

India is the world's largest democracy and is rapidly becoming one of the most attractive developing nations for doing business. This attractive business environment came about largely because of political and economic reforms that provide foreign investors with incentives for doing business in India.

Individual Retirement Account (IRA)

Created under federal tax law, an individual retirement account (IRA) is a tax-deferred retirement program in which any employed person can participate. The extent of annual contributions and the tax deductibility thereof are, however, dependent on the individual worker's situation.

Indonesia, Doing Business in

Indonesia is comprised of more than 6,000 inhabited islands. The nation's total land area is just over 700,000 square miles, or just under three times the size of Texas.

Industrial Relations

Industrial relations refers to processes and outcomes involving employment relationships. Frequently the term is used in a narrower sense, for employment relationships involving collective representation of employees in the form of a labor union or employee association, especially in the United States.

Industrial Safety

Safety problems in work settings range from immediate threats like toxic substances and grievous bodily injuries to subtle, progressive dangers such as repetitive motion injuries, high noise levels, and air quality.

Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Industrial/organizational (110) psychology is the application or extension of psychological methods and principles to the solution of organizational and workplace problems. Most commonly, 1/0 psychology is concerned with those problems caused by human performance and those which affect human performance within organizational contexts.

Inflation

Inflation is commonly understood as an increase in the price level. Formally, it is defined as the rate of change in the price level.

Infomercials

An infomercial is a 30- or 60-minute broadcast commercial that delivers extensive sales messages in a natural format. It differs from the typical television commercial in the amount of time, amount of information, and amount of "reality." It is, in short, an elaborately orchestrated sales pitch.

Information Management and Processing

Many business scholars consider information processing, in all of its forms, the lifeblood of organizations. Information in this context is defined broadly to encompass ideas, documents, records, personal communications, and most of all, knowledge shared within an organization.

Information Technology

Information technology (IT) is the lifeblood of most businesses. It is used to fulfill administrative and production requirements, and it crosses all industries.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure refers to a wide variety of systems in place to support the prevailing industrial society, in both the public and private sectors. The public infrastructure encompasses a number of basic structures and services, including wastewater systems, power plants, dams, housing, and education.

Injunction

An injunction is a court order, issued by a judge, that prohibits an individual, business firm, labor union, or other type of organization from engaging in a specified action, or that requires them to resume an action. An injunction is intended to protect the property rights of an individual or business from being violated.

Innovation

Innovation is the act of introducing something new or doing something in a different way. Innovation in business differs from creativity in that the latter is generally associated with the generation of new ideas.

Input-Output Analysis

Input-output analysis is a basic method of quantitative economics that portrays macroeconomic activity as a system of interrelated goods and services. In particular, the technique observes various economic sectors as a series of inputs of source materials (or services) and outputs of finished or semi-finished goods (or services).

Institutional Investments

An institutional investor is an organization that trades large volumes of securities on behalf of a collection of individual investors. Institutional investors include commercial banks, savings and loan associations, investment trusts, insurance companies, pension funds, and, most notably in recent years, mutual funds.

Intangible Assets

In accounting and law, intangible assets are nonphysical assets or things of value, such as trademarks, patent rights, copyrights (known collectively as intellectual property), franchise rights, leasehold interests, and noncompete agreements, as well as unquantifiable assets often referred to as goodwill or deferred costs, such as corporate culture and strategy, customer satisfaction, and employee loyalty. Although they lack physical substance, intangible assets—also called intangible property—may represent a substantial, or even a major, portion of a company's total assets.

Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital provides a conceptual platform from which to view, analyze, and hopefully quantify the nontangible (but nonetheless extremely valuable) assets of a corporation. Defining the function of intellectual capital is often easier than defining intellectual capital itself.

Intellectual Property

A major component of what many posit is the emerging knowledge economy, intellectual property consists of items that represent the expression of ideas or intellectual pursuits and that are assigned certain rights of property. It is an intangible creation of the human mind usually expressed or translated into a tangible form.

Interest Rates

It is human nature to prefer immediate gratification. We dislike postponing consumption.

Internal Auditing

Most large companies, major institutions, governmental agencies, and federal, state, and local governments have established internal auditing functions. Job titles other than "internal auditor"—such as internal consultants, compliance officers, quality assurance managers, or operations analysts—are sometimes given to those performing internal audit functions.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is mandated by federal law to enforce the tax laws of the United States.

International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC)

The International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) is an independent private-sector organization that in its own words is a "body working to achieve uniformity in the accounting principles that are used by businesses and other organizations for financial reporting around the world." As stated in its constitution the IASC's goals are to "formulate and publish in the public interest accounting standards to be observed in the presentation of financial statements and to promote their worldwide acceptance," and to "work for the improvement and harmonization of regulations, accounting standards and procedures relating to the presentation of financial statements." The IASC was founded in London in 1973 and by 1998 its membership included 143 accounting organizations representing 2 million accountants in 103 countries.

International Commercial Arbitration

Arbitration is the process by which parties to a dispute submit their differences to the binding judgment of an impartial third person (or group of persons) selected by mutual consent. The perceived advantages of arbitration in a domestic context are magnified in an international transaction; savings in time and expense may be considerable, and preventing litigation in the other party's "home" judicial system is often far more preferable than exposure to the uncertainties of a different nation's laws and procedures.

International Competition

International competition is a fact of life for today's companies. Manufacturers in the United States, for example, must compete not only with exports from other countries, but also with American subsidiaries of foreign corporations.