This paper builds upon the widely-used resourcebased approach to explaining survival of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). However, instead of looking at the NTBF’s initial resource configuration, a process-oriented perspective is taken by focusing on the entrepreneur’s ability to transform resources in response to triggers resulting from market interactions. Transaction relations reflect these interactions and are thus operationalized with a suggested method for measuring the status of venture emergence (VE) applicable to early-stage NTBFs. NTBFs’ value network maturity is reflected in the number and strength of their transaction relations in the four market dimensions customer, investor, partner, and human resource. Business plans of NTBFs represent the artifact that contains this data in the form of transaction relation descriptions. Using content analysis, a multi-step combined human and computer coding process has been developed to annotate and classify transaction relations from business plans in order to empirically determine NTBFs’ status of VE. Results of the business plan analysis suggest that the level of transaction relations allows to draw conclusions on the VE status. Moreover, applying the developed process, first analysis of a business plan coding test shows that the transaction relation based VE status significantly relates to NTBF survival capability.
corporate entrepreneurship is one tool for established companies to strengthen their capabilities for strategic renewal and innovativeness. The question, however, which factors are influencing the success of a corporate entrepreneurship initiative requires further attention. The corporate entrepreneur who is acting as both the leader of embedded entrepreneurial teams and linking pin to the corporate, is providing one possible perspective. Based on 6 interviews conducted in 6 German organizations this study contributes to the understanding of the role of the corporate entrepreneur and how this role can be distinguished from other roles in the context of innovation.
The European research project Res-AGorA aims to develop a governance framework for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). This paper presents the analysis behind our approach. While the various existing RRI governance arrangements do call for a comprehensive framework, the heterogeneity of R&I does not allow to impose a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, to design a governance framework which can be applied effectively, we propose to actively build on “RRI in the making”. This is a constructive feature of our approach, enabling anticipatory responses in RRI governance. It needs reflection on an overarching level, which is conceptualised as a ‘meta-governance’ approach that guides the governance of RRI
External cooperation is seen by many to further innovation: in clusters, for open innovation, in innovation systems, or networks, just to name a few. If this is so, finding suitable partners is of strategic relevance. But our theoretical understanding of the matchmaking phenomena is limited with only few available studies and theories with little predictive value for managerial action. The aim of the special issue and workshop is to anchor match making in a deeper theoretical perspective and contribute to an ongoing discussion in academia and practice.This workshop discusses theoretical and empirical contributions to further our understanding of matchmaking, its processes as well as antecedents and success factors.
Renewable energy investment is an integral part of sustainable economic development agenda. Whereas some important advances have been made in recent years to assist project investors in evaluating real options embedded in renewable energy projects and making better use of financial risk management instruments, this research asserts that, owing to failure to consider both behavioral uncertainty and the limit of risk transfer, these approaches may still lead to a biased evaluation result. Drawing on a novel concept of "risk-bearing capacity", investors can coherently incorporate the choice of financial protection into investment evaluation.
The daily work, reach and scope of SMEs have expanded to global business relationships. This implies that "ad hoc collaboration around a table" with partners and customers is no longer feasible. Specialist engineers and managers are increasingly on the move, but nevertheless they need full access to all relevant business data, like drawings, calculations and/or reports and project state. An appropriate collaboration software system for these employees is needed to ensure full date access, to enable proper communication and to efficiently collaborate with colleagues at their "home base" but also with dispersed business partners while being on the move. This paper introduces and describes the bottlenecks and barriers of SMEs in collaborative engineering as well as the methodology for gathering SME requirements. Finally the collected and consolidated SME requirements for Collaborative Virtual Engineering for SMEs with special focus on mobility aspects are presented.
This paper presents an answer on the demand for more interoperability of data, systems and thus organisations. PROCESSUS as a particular project of the German national funded high-tech-initiative THESEUS has the objective to create an IT-based corporate system that will allow companies to compare products, solutions and details of business associates, as well as locating the complex and sometimes obscure specialist information needed by employees whose work involves high-density knowledge bases. The research teams are also aiming to develop a basic semantic platform that will integrate a company's internal planning of resources with management of the digital content of agile business processes. One specific scenario taken from the domain of mechanical engineering will demonstrate the requirements of intra- and intererenterprise communication and the envisaged solution.
Nowadays we observe new tendencies in organizations trying to accommodate to the changing global environment. The accent is put on knowledge and crossing the countries' boundaries. Some innovations concerning teamwork and project workflow are necessary. New types of organizations appear as, among others, the Virtual Teams. Important barriers for virtual cooperative work appear and we must find potential solutions for these barriers. The results of Polish research show common tendencies in virtual work that concern its possibilities and limits.
In the last years the production paradigm of European Industry sector has changed. More and more, bigger companies are adopting Virtual Reality (VR) tools in their production chains, while the SMEs are still looking for more customised solution: more suitable for their dimension and less expensive. DiFac is an IST research project (FP6-2005-IST-5-035079) funded by the European Commission within the 6 th Framework Programme priority "Collaborative Working Environment". The project aims to the development of an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for the next generation of Digital Factory in order to support SMEs competitiveness. The framework is based on three main pillars: presence, ergonomic and collaboration. They are composed by both tools and methodologies. This is the base on which the tools for supporting the manufacturing activities are developed on. This paper shortly presents the architecture of the Factory Constructor.
The idea of a Single European Electronic Market (SEEM), described by the European Union and further elaborated within the European Project SEEMseed seems to be a good chance for Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises to seamlessly participate in the electronic market today and in the future. Even individuals may take advantage of the SEEM idea to actively benefit from electronic business within Europe. The overall goal of realizing a Single Electronic European Market is not easy attainable because of high complexity and fragmentation of the areas of interest. Under patronage and sponsorship of European Commission (above all 6 th and 7 th Framework Programme), several R&D project are currently running or soon to be started in order to foster the SEEM idea. Similar to this, CEN / ISSS has developed the project WS / eCAT. In this paper, we will describe and analyze the current efforts in this area and we will describe a "meta-project" called Simple On Line Catalog - to connect results of the existing projects, initiatives and studies and to cover them with an integral user interface, accessible to SME and Individuals across the borders and languages.
Present team members have difficulties in keeping the relations between their various, concurrent activities due to the lack of suitable tools supporting context coupling and sharing. Furthermore, collaboration services are hardly aware of related context of team members and their activities. Such awareness is required to adapt to the dynamics of collaborative teams. In this paper, we discuss the context coupling techniques provided by the inContext project. Utilizing the concept of activity-based context and Web services techniques, we can couple individual and team contexts at runtime, thus improving the context-awareness and adaptation of collaboration services such as email, shared calendars, instant messaging and document management.
An enterprise's competitiveness today is to a large extent determined by its ability to seamlessly interoperate with others. Observing and analyzing the growing need for collaboration, an international team of academic and industry partners is involved in an EC funded project for the development of an innovative integrated collaborative platform. This paper is focused on the elaboration of the Enterprise Interoperability Value Proposition (EIVP) at the enterprise-community level, considering the practical case of the platform implementation in a Bulgarian manufacturing company. The provided argumentation reveals the great potential of the new collaborative environment to bring EI value especially for SMEs participating in business networks and having intensive relationships with many business partners. The improved communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration activities and processes between the participants in extended enterprises and cluster communities will strongly contribute to increasing the competitiveness of SMEs in Europe.
For many years, it was assumed that technical features were the most important ingredients to support an effective and efficient collaborative platform. Nowadays, ICT users are creating value in massively populating web applications and online role-playing games with their own activities and related data (i.e. eBay, Amazon, Linked-In, FaceBook, SecondLife, World-of-Warcraft). When looking at the global success of online social networking, online presence and other popular web applications, one may realise the crying users' need to have collaborative platform supporting also social interactions with dedicated social features instead of purely focusing on technical features. This paper presents an empirical study on the use of both shared workspace and group blogging forming a collaborative platform. This study has been conducted according to the Living Lab user-centred research approach through the use of an exploratory environment as being a real life experiment. The basic idea was to engage a community of users into the collaborative concepts experimentation during their project activities. Important issues like whether the collaborative platform has helped in somehow sharing knowledge and reaching a mutual understanding as well as overcoming various types of collaborative distance are also discussed in this paper.
Virtual Worlds are designed for sociability, environments where people have interaction with other people. Enterprises have already started exploring this new world as a way to provide a compelling new value proposition to their products and services. This paper makes a proposal for addressing the issue of interoperability between virtual and real-world business environments as a way to foster value creation opportunities as the virtual and real world interact with each other. To this end, the authors propose the Integration of 2nd Life object behaviour modelling within the actual Enterprise Engineering Life-Cycle in order to achieve a seamless enactment of both interoperable models in the virtual and real world. We believe therefore that our approach can bring value to most interaction types, especially in integration of the consumer in the value network and in strengthening the relationship between the consumer and the actual physical product. It is our believe that this will foster new opportunities for value creation, both in the interaction between the enterprises (including different segments of the network value chain) and in the interaction between these and actual the product or service consumer.
Software industry is living in a continuous evolution and revolution of new technologies in order to provide new ways for enabling interoperability among organisations. Such technologies are gaining relevance depending on their added value, and they are under an iterative capabilities improvement process. Model driven development (MDD) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are some of these current trends in software engineering providing capabilities for enabling interoperability among stakeholders. Each approach highlights a set of benefits and they are combined providing a holistic approach of the used technologies. This paper evaluates quality aspects of a MDD and SOA combined approach, defines an ISO9126 evaluation process and outlines a research agenda using these technologies.
This paper gives a formal ontological approach for formalisation of expert knowledge in the conformity-checking model in construction. First, we present our knowledge acquisition method aimed at the representation of all the knowledge on the reasoning process formalized with the help of the conformity-checking ontology. Based on this method, we then develop a reasoning model on the checking of the conformity of a construction project against technical norms by matching of a representation of a construction project to representations of conformity queries. In order to enrich our model with tacit expert knowledge guiding the checking process, we develop special (semi)formal expert rules based on semantic annotations of conformity queries that schedule the matching operations of the checking process and, thus, make it more effective. Finally, to validate our model, we present the C3R system and discuss its further development to integrate the context knowledge related to non-formalised construction practices.
This paper describes the concept of the solution provider, i.e. the provider of customised product/service bundles. A model — consisting of six principles and success factors for solution management — is designed and explored through a survey. The answers from 99 German medium-sized companies are used to draw conclusions on the relevance and the need for action to manage the transition from being a product-centric company towards being a solution provider. The responses show that 1) the solution concept offers the opportunity to gain competitive advantage, 2) the potential of providing solutions has been recognised, yet the implementation is lagging behind, 3) a consistent solution management process is a prerequisite for success, 4) appropriate methods and tools are required along the whole solution management process.
Sustainability in food networks has become a dominant issue in the development of the food sector in light of the challenging scenarios one might expect in the future. Products, enterprises, chains, consumers, and regions are all affected by this discussion. Environmental, social and economic pressures require the development of strategies on how to best meet the challenges and to move the sector with its global presence and its many SMEs towards a status which is sustainable and robust enough to remain so even if future scenarios might deviate from today's expectations (dynamic sustainability). The paper outlines a framework for research on sustainability developments, sustainability assessments, consumer communication, and the transition of enterprises and chains towards improvements in sustainability.
