Eco-efficiency is becoming an increasingly important organisational performance measure. Its indicators are regularly used alongside productivity, cost, quality, health and safety in operations and corporate social responsibility reporting. The purpose of this paper is to show an eco-efficiency modelling framework, and its application in the case of an automotive manufacturer. The framework composes, models and analyses resource and production data. Focus on energy, water distributions and material transformations in manufacturing, utility and facility assets are used to analyse eco-efficiency. Resources are examined in respect to three data granularity factors: subdivision, pulse, and magnitude. Models are linked with performance indicators to assess asset eco-efficiency. This work contributes to industrial sustainability literature by introducing a modelling framework that links with data granularity and eco-efficiency indicators.
The research focused on improving the adhesion of low melting temperature lead free solders to soda lime glass through ultrasonic soldering. All soldering parameters involving temperature, time, vibration amplitude and frequency were kept constant except for the new alloying elements to Sn40Bi solders. Improvement on adhesion strength of Sn40Bi solders was attempted by alloying with Al, Mg, Zn and Ag elements. Tensile test was applied on soldered specimen to determine shear separation strength. The positive effect of metal oxide passivation from alloying elements was observed on the adhesion strength. Tensile test and thermogravimetry analysis were applied to determine mechanical and chemical properties of selected solder alloys (Sn40Bi) 0.3 Mg and (Sn40Bi) 0.5Al. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) were used to examine the bonding mechanism of the selected solders to glass. Sn and Bi were observed to remain in metallic form without adhering to glass. Mg and Al were observed to passivate to metal oxide form. MgO from (Sn40Bi) 0.3 Mg forms metal oxide bond to glass. Al2O3 from (Sn40Bi) 0.5Al forms metal oxide bond to glass.
Mauritius embarked on an ambitious project of making the island a model of Sustainable Development in 2008. Over the last five years, the organizational set up for managing the project has been put in place, working groups have been constituted, a series of consultations with stakeholders have been made, a green paper has been published, awareness sessions have been held across the island and a strategic plan around the 5Es covering Energy, Environment, Employment, Education and Equity, has been worked out for implementation [1]. Though the project termed as MID project, has received wide acceptance, it is often argued that private companies are still hesitant on policy and implementation issues. The paper illustrates the status of manufacturing companies vis-à-vis sustainable practices and highlights the challenges facing these companies in the context of the MID project.
MediaMixer is a group of expert organisations in innovative multimedia technologies. We will present current trends in online media, the future media ecosystem that companies need to prepare for, and why this means new solutions are needed for media technologies. Through case studies and success stories, we reflect on how a combination of innovations in media analysis, annotation, rights and management, companies will be enabled to better find and re-use online media, and thus build new business models and revenue streams. 1. Trends in Online Media The media ecosystem that companies operate within is changing rapidly thanks to the greater ease of creating and publishing media assets, the growing scale and complexity of enterprise media, and the disruptions in the media value chain caused by media sharing and remixing. We believe there will be growing demand for fragments of online media in the future. This will be driven by the scale of media creation (online archives of broadcasters and producers hold >40m hours of footage), which leads to the need for reducing creation costs through flexible reuse of existing material (stock footage is a billion dollar market with >20% growth per annum). It is grounded in a cultural shift towards acceptance of media remixing, where new media contents are created out of the combination of existing media fragments (“Harlem Shake” is perhaps the most profitable user-sourced remix to date for a media owner). Finally, it will be facilitated by the interest of existing and emerging media owners to derive new value from their media assets, often archived and forgotten, meeting only the needs for the 'long tail', by being enabled to re-sell or re-distribute fragments of those assets in an open marketplace. Growing demand can only be sated by improved supply, and there are technological barriers in place to this today which need to be overcome by new innovation in enterprise media systems and workflows. 1 EU FP7 funded research project, http://mediamixer.eu InImpact: The Journal of Innovation Impact: ISSN 2051-6002 : http://www.inimpact.org Vol. 7. No. 1 : pp.266-274 : inkt14-025 Copyright © 2014 Future Technology Press and the authors 266 2. The future media ecosystem: a Hub of Media Fragments Figure 1. MediaMixer Hub as business mediator. Following the principles of the World Wide Web, and more recently with respect to annotations, the Semantic Web and Linked Data, we imagine that media owners should annotate their own media assets and publish those annotations on the Web. This means, importantly, they can keep full control of their own annotations, i.e. which assets' descriptions are published, and retain responsibility for what those descriptions contain. Access to those descriptions is made possible via a public endpoint to their annotation repository, and assuming each media owner will follow MediaMixer specifications [1], there would be interoperability across each owner's repository with respect to the media description models, the controlled vocabulary used for concepts in the annotations, and the access modality to the annotation repositories endpoint. Our vision of the MediaMixer Hub is a technology ecosystem which can expose media asset descriptions to agents which are searching for relevant media fragments on behalf of a media consumer. Media owners may then choose to register their public endpoints at specific MediaMixer Hubs (and not the other way around) which are used by different groups of media consumers. The Hubs act as mediators for media consumer queries and 2 "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One”, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004, http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ 3 http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ ; http://linkeddata.org/ MediaMixer: Innovative Multimedia Solutions ready for transfer to industry
Transport is a major driver of climate change and other negative effects. At the same time demographic change increases the need for home care services and transport of frail people. This short paper gives an overview of today’s means of transport for home care staff and frail people, and maps out the development of sustainability criteria to optimize these transports.
Firm competes on capabilities. Capability governs firm’s efficiency to produce desirable outcomes by using business practices as input. Capability can be classified into different categories. A previous research also proposes a time sequence of n + 1 value of a variable suffices to compute the value of n order rate of change. In the context of the manufacturing industry, firm capability consists of functional-based capability reflects the ability to perform business to achieve its operational excellence or customer intimacy, network-based capability possesses the theme of dynamic improvements to enhance the operation linkage with customers and suppliers, and innovative capability of capability allows manufacturing firms to develop novel strategies for business development. Innovative capability can be consider as a high order level capability. Objective of this study is to use an input-output approach to investigate firm capability of manufacturing firms in China and its association with firm performance. The findings of this study imply the significant role of innovative management in the manufacturing industry.
As in the era of globalisation knowledge has become increasingly important to national innovation performance and competitiveness. Knowledge and technology transfer processes have therefore become the foundations of contemporary innovation-based economies, and an increasingly vital success factor for global entities, as they help individual organisations build and maintain their competitive advantage. The development of the advanced and competitive knowledge-based economies has forced the governments to establish effective mechanisms and structures stimulating the transfer of knowledge between the R&D sector and the industry. As a result numerous legislative mandates regulating the issues of knowledge protection and commercialisation have been introduced. Such steps have also been undertaken by the Polish government and have led to an upward trend in the commercialisation of research results. However, the situation is still not satisfactory and, despite a number of good practices and success stories in this field, the scale of applications of results of research conducted at both Polish universities and PROs needs to be increased. In the article the author presents a case study of a knowledge and technology transfer process from a Polish PRO. The analysis was conducted for a stateowned research institute with the status of a national research institute - the Institute for Sustainable Technologies ‐ National Research Institute (ITeE-PIB) in Radom, Poland, which has great experience in the development and practical industrial application of innovative technological solutions.
This paper presents a conceptual framework on which to base further empirical research into Manufacturing SMEs’ (MSMEs) deployment of ICT systems to achieve successful servitized manufacturing strategies. The development of manufacturing servitization theory and research surrounding SME organisational characteristics are synthesised with insights from a single case company to propose means for MSMEs to overcome servitization transformation challenges recognised in the literature and in practice. This work is founded on a review of the literature and experience in a single case MSME, so whilst presenting a valuable platform, requires further research to be validated. This research contributes to a developing facet of an emerging topic in Operations Management by providing a model which considers manufacturing servitization through the lens of ICT systems, as well as in the underdeveloped research context of MSMEs.
2 The Costain Group, Costain House, Vanwall Business Park, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6 4BU Abstract The customer order decoupling point (CODP) is commonly used to develop a simplified range of supply chain structures, ranging from standardised ship-to-stock to customized 'engineer-to-order' supply chains. This paper focuses on the latter category, with the purpose being the exploration of CODP concepts in design and engineering activities. The methodology follows a two phase approach. In the first phase, a collaborative form of inquiry as the means for producing knowledge is adopted, whereby academics and practitioners co-operated to develop a conceptual framework. The second phase includes three exploratory case studies, using interviews and site visits to gather data. The framework results in a classification of nine potential engineering subclasses. Through the exploratory case studies insight is given into the subclasses.
This study first reviews the structures and services of several leading maritime research institutions and then employs the knowledge management model to assess the performance of the existing maritime research institutes in Taiwan. Maritime research institutions(MRI) in Taiwan belong to one of the following three types of organization: a government-supported organization, a non-profit corporation (NPC), and a private consulting firm. Finally, based on a comprehensive questionnaire survey and post-survey interviews with shipping professionals, the best type of maritime research organization is proposed. This study employs the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) technique to propose and develop an appropriate type of maritime research institution in Taiwan. However, a maritime research institution cannot perform well without an appropriate knowledge management structure. Thus, this research aims to evaluate the performance differences between three types of maritime research institutions. The hierarchical structure is composed of three major criteria: knowledge creation, knowledge storage, and knowledge application. These three major criteria comprise nine sub-criteria: data collection, data mining, knowledge collaboration, data security, data integration, data transfer, information sharing and exchange, advisory planning, and innovation promotion. Using these nine sub-criteria the 30 surveyees were asked to evaluate the performance of the three types of shipping research institutions. The authors found non-profit corporations have the highest overall performance, followed by private consulting firms and lastly, government agencies. The research findings could be used as a road map if a new maritime research institution has to be developed in the fast growing maritime economics. These findings can also be used by the extant maritime research organizations to improve their performance on those sub-criteria and criteria with the greater degree of importance.
Universities are increasingly expected to develop links with the business community. At the same time, SMEs need to improve their skills and knowledge base so that they can develop their innovation capabilities and improve their competitiveness. Universities and other Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) seek links with large businesses for reasons of prestige and possibly access to funding. Hence, the links between university departments/research centres and SMEs may have been side-lined although they can be beneficial to both sides. This paper reviews how links between SMEs and academia can foster the innovative potential of SMEs. We focus on two initiatives: university-based business incubators and student internships. Such initiatives enable knowledge transfer from HEIs to small firms while the HEIs benefit from building links with local communities and improving their objectives regarding student employability. University spin-off companies are additional evidence of links between universities and SMEs.
Companies seek to reduce manufacturing lead-time in order to reduce the cost of the production; short lead-times are a major source of potential competitive advantage and can help achieve zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM). The quality of a product is dependent on both facilities (or equipment) and the manufacturing process. Any unexpected obstacle or glitch can create longer lead-time, which will prevent the product from promptly reaching the customer. A focus on reducing lead-time, therefore, will ensure an elimination of error, and work towards a zero-defect manufacturing system, which is necessary to increase the reliability and safety of manufacturing set ups and systems. This paper proposes a study on reducing manufacturing lead-time (MLT) in factories in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where lead-time has become a major issue in the manufacturing industry. The aim is to provide guidance to industry practitioners/technicians on how to reduce MLT. The paper will present a conceptual framework of the causes of excessive lead-time and also describe the relationship between setup time, operation time, and non-operation time in order to find potential methodologies that can reduce lead-time in the manufacturing process. It will also further identify simple strategies for reducing lead-time that can help towards achieving ZDM.
Whilst commercial organisations often exhibit their product ranges in their reception or meeting spaces, the broad base, significant size and multi‐campus (including international) layout of Universities such as Nottingham means there is no single visitor entry point. This limits the potential to draw together products (inventions) in a coherent, useful and impactful manner. The end result of this is that beyond the Technology Transfer Office, both internal and external audiences are relatively unaware of the broad range of expertise available, technologies looking for opportunities and ongoing success stories.
The paper reports about a German cross-cluster cooperation project that links a microelectronics cluster with a biotechnology cluster. The focus is on cross-cluster innovation: How can new products and start-ups be systematically generated and qualified at the intersection of the two fields? The article presents methods and tools that were custom-tailored and applied for cross-cluster innovation activities and events (Idea Lounge, Idea Day). Evidence was collected for the effectiveness of a custom-tailored cross-innovation processes, indicating the need for creative innovation management and customized workshop design. Generally, they indicate key components for the model of an open virtual incubator.
