Improving Competitiveness Through Cooperation: Assessing The Benefits Of Cooperative Education Partnerships In Gaming Management

Cooperative education partnerships between industries and universities are becoming increasingly common in response to fundamental challenges facing both sectors. Theoretically, many benefits for both partners are espoused. This paper explores these benefits and then assesses whether and how these have occurred in a leading gaming management course in Australia. It was found that benefits for industry comprised enhanced industry professionalism and legitimacy; increased professional status; better public image; control of abstract knowledge and improved industry competitiveness. For the university, key benefits have included improved educational offerings; enhanced university reputation in the discipline and for cooperative education partnerships; additional student fees and economies of scale; and funds for discipline development and research and consultancy opportunities. However, precautions need to be taken in cooperative education partnerships if a university\u27s social contract is to remain intact in a climate of increased commercialization, and if it is to deliver expected benefits to industry

A Practical Perspective on Human Capital Post Merger Integration in Central and Eastern Europe

Driven by a philosophy of shareholder value, mergers and acquisitions form a new economic, social and cultural environment. It is only by a profound understanding of the success factors in mergers and acquisitions that they are able to improve transaction management and create new economic values. In this paper we focus on the perception of employees on a merger or acquisition, the impact it has on the new organization and what should be further done by the management team in order to ensure that critical employees are kept within the organization. We present a survey among 146 companies in 6 countries from Central and Eastern Europe that have experienced mergers or acquisitions in the last 5 years, in which we exhibit a comprehensive view of employees’ satisfaction on different hierarchical and demographic levels on the success of integration. In addition, this report includes information on risks identified that need to be addressed in the forthcoming period, especially by the organizations included in this survey, to cover areas that have been overlooked or that have been insufficiently addressed in the run to integrate faster.mergers; acquisitions; integration; human capital; survey; factors; items.

The Nexus Between Total Quality Management, Job Satisfaction and Employee Work Engagement in the Food and Beverage Multinational Company in Nigeria

Adopting total quality management (TQM) program in an organisation may have consequences not only for organisational outcomes but also for employee work behaviour. Therefore, this study investigates the conceptual and empirical link between TQM practices, job satisfaction, and employee work engagement. Cross-sectional survey design, quota, proportionate and simple random sampling were used to draw 300 participants from the study population, out of which 190 responded and n = 183(61%) usable responses to the questionnaire designed for the purpose from employees of a food and beverage multinational company in Lagos metropolis were obtained. Regression and correlation analyses were used to analyse the study data. Significant positive relationship was found between dimensions of TQM practices (leadership and management support, employee participation, training, reward and recognition, and customer focus), job satisfaction and employee work engagement. After controlling for sex, age and experience, job satisfaction and TQM practices construct jointly and independently predicted employee work engagement. Also, job satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between TQM practices and work engagement. The implications of soft TQM implementation on employee job satisfaction for achieving highly engaged workforce are discussed

Skills, organisational performance and economic activity in the hospitality industry : a literature review

This monograph aims to understand the pressures which push organisations to adopt particular routes to competitive advantage. The monograph aims to discover if the best practice high skill, high wage and high quality route is used in the hospitality industry. It seeks to determine the influence of companies' product market strategies and their in-company and external structural factors on skills levels, work organisation, job design and people management systems. The monograph looked at the notion of best practice approaches and then moved on to consider the best way to carry forward the future research agenda of reviewing the nature of human resource management (HRM) in the hospitality sector. Conclusions were drawn from a range of interviews and from existing work which has sought to address the issue of HRM in the hospitality sector

Authentication of tequilas using pattern recognition and supervised classification

[Abstract] Sales of reputed, Mexican tequila grown substantially in last years and, therefore, counterfeiting is increasing steadily. Hence, methodologies intended to characterize and authenticate commercial beverages are a real need. They require a combination of analytical characterization and chemometric tools. This work reports concisely on the former and focus on the chemometric tools employed so far in connection with them. Further, a practical case study presents the classification capabilities of nine supervised classification methods to differentiate white, rested, aged and extra-aged tequilas. The largest set of certified tequilas employed so far was considered. In general, non linear methods performed best than linear ones (accuracy higher than 94% in both training and validation). The case study demonstrates that it is possible to develop fast, cheap, easy to implement and reliable analytical methodologies to authenticate and classify samples of tequilas.Xunta de Galicia; GRC2013-047Ministerio de Industria, Energía y Competitividad; FJCI-2015-2607

Artificial Intelligence Advancements for Digitising Industry

In the digital transformation era, when flexibility and know-how in manufacturing complex products become a critical competitive advantage, artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the technologies driving the digital transformation of industry and industrial products. These products with high complexity based on multi-dimensional requirements need flexible and adaptive manufacturing lines and novel components, e.g., dedicated CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs and neuromorphic architectures that support AI operations at the edge with reliable sensors and specialised AI capabilities. The change towards AI-driven applications in industrial sectors enables new innovative industrial and manufacturing models. New process management approaches appear and become part of the core competence in the organizations and the network of manufacturing sites. In this context, bringing AI from the cloud to the edge and promoting the silicon-born AI components by advancing Moore’s law and accelerating edge processing adoption in different industries through reference implementations becomes a priority for digitising industry. This article gives an overview of the ECSEL AI4DI project that aims to apply at the edge AI-based technologies, methods, algorithms, and integration with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and robotics to enhance industrial processes based on repetitive tasks, focusing on replacing process identification and validation methods with intelligent technologies across automotive, semiconductor, machinery, food and beverage, and transportation industries.publishedVersio

The True Colors of Trademark Law: Green-lighting a Red Tide of Anti Competition Blues

The elevation of color to stand-alone trademark status illustrates the unbounded nature of trademarks within the judicial consciousness. The availability of color-alone marks also facilitates the commoditization of color in ways that complicate the development and distribution of products and services that use color for multiple purposes conterminously. The economic case for color-alone trademarks is severely undermined by careful observation of the ways that colors are actually deployed in commerce, which makes it clear that the trademarks of multiple goods and services can utilize the same color to telegraph the same message without confusing anyone or diluting the commercial power of textual or symbolic trademarks. Trademark law can be used to monopolistically harness the aesthetic appeal or preexisting social meaning of a color. The Supreme Court was wrong to facilitate this abuse of trademark powers when it decided in Qualitex v. Jacobson Products Co. that colors alone could constitute protectable trademarks! Long ago the Supreme Court held in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. v Stiffel Co. and Compco Corp. v. Day-Brite Lighting, Inc. cases that the Intellectual Property Clause of the Constitution preserves a right to copy any product feature that is unrestricted by patents or copyrights., Ruling in favor of color-alone trademarks abrogated this important principle for no good reason. The Qualitex holding did not lessen color related consumer confusion, because there was not evidence of any. Instead it reduced competition and consumer choice by creating illegitimate aesthetic and communicative cartels. The primary doctrinal arguments against recognizing color-alone trademarks raised here include aesthetic functionality, the related concept of communicative functionality, uncertainty about scope, and color exhaustion. Colors always add aesthetic value, and often communicate messages unrelated to commercial source. Coupled with the uncertainties related to color-alone marks and the risks of color exhaustion, the anticompetitive effects of color monopolies outweigh any possible social benefit from a regime that permits registration of color-alone trademarks. It is further argued that if any court attempted to declare a color famous for dilution purposes, thereby granting a commercial entity broad rights to monopolize the color well beyond the context in which it is used in commerce, there would be a furious backlash against this ill-advised doctrine. The palette of commercially appealing colors is far more limited than the dictionary of attractive and usable words, and could be radically depleted by deployment of dilution precepts rather quickly. Courts that recognize this may relegate color-alone marks to some second class status that is ineligible for dilution protections, preserving color availability somewhat but further warping trademark doctrine

Dimensionality reduction by clustering of variables while setting aside atypical variables

Clustering of variables is one possible approach for reducing the dimensionality of a dataset. However, all the variables are usually assigned to one of the clusters, even the scattered variables associated with atypical or noise information. The presence of this type of information could obscure the interpretation of the latent variables associated with the clusters, or even give rise to artificial clusters. We propose two strategies to address this problem. The first is a "K +1" strategy, which consists of introducing an additional group of variables,  called the "noise cluster" for simplicity. The second is based on the definition of sparse latent variables. Both strategies result in refined clusters for the identification of more relevant latent variables