Institutional modeling and management of the firm’s ecosystem

By the early 20s of this century, it became clear that the network paradigm of inter-firm relations does not describe the entire landscape of business interactions. The introduction of digital technologies stimulated business development taking into account not only economic partners, consumers, suppliers and competitors, but also taking into account the influence of public organizations, authorities and social media. The paradigm of ecosystem analysis of the economy began to develop, the first works of which appeared at the end of the twentieth century. The purpose of this study is to develop an institutional model and principles for managing the firm’s ecosystem. The theoretical basis of the research is the authors’ model of the potential of digitalization of the company’s ecosystem. The article analyzes and criticizes previous studies, which demonstrated the relevance of formulating the problem of developing the formalized potential of digitalization of the firm’s ecosystem. Based on the authors’ development on the representation of ecosystem actors in the form of stakeholders, the main components of the external space of the company are identified: stakeholders, company resources and end-to-end digital technologies. The main factors forming the potential of digitalization of the company’s ecosystem are highlighted. Ecosystem stakeholders are divided into representatives of business, government, consumers, education and science, and mass media. The company’s resources are material, labor, financial and information resources. Digital technologies: artificial intelligence, additive technologies, blockchain, the Internet of Things, robotics, social networks, virtual reality. Various directions of application of the formalized potential of digitalization of the company’s ecosystem are presented: the possibility of assessing the use of potential in various directions; assessment of the impact of various components of the firm’s ecosystem on the development of its other elements; development of a general analytical model of potential; assessment of threshold values of factors for the development of the potential of digitalization of the firm’s ecosystem; a tool for developing a strategy for the firm’s ecosystem

Lessons to Be Learned: Political Party Research and Political Party Assistance

Generally speaking, the effects of international political party assistance are viewed nega-tively, or at least controversially. This study attributes some of the shortcomings of political party aid to the poor relationship between assistance providers and political science party research. They simply operate in different worlds. Party assistance lacks clear-cut concepts and strategies in practice, which makes it difficult to adequately evaluate it. At issue is its “standard method,” with its “transformative” intention to change the party organization of the assistance receivers. At the same time, the scholarship on political parties can provide only limited help to assistance providers due to its own conceptual and methodological re-strictions, such as the Western European bias underlying its major concepts, the predomi-nance of a functionalist approach, and the scant empirical research on political parties out-side of Europe and the US. Taking a cue from recent political party research, we could begin to question the overarching role of political parties in the transition and consolidation proc-ess of new democracies. Other research findings emphasize the coexistence of different types of party organizations, and the possibility of different organizational developments, which might all be consistent with consolidating democracy. All this suggests the necessity of aban-doning the controversial aim of the “transformative impact” of political party aid.democratization, democracy promotion, political party assistance, political party research

‘The Age of Constitutions’? Reflecting on the new faith in federal constitutions

Lessons for the EU, Iraq, Afghanistan from Australian and other experience – as well as lessons for Australia’s own constitutional development

Multilevel modeling of undergraduate student attrition across the University of North Carolina system

The volume of articles, books, and studies about increasing the retention, persistence, and graduation of undergraduate college students is nothing short of prolific (Seidman, 2005). However, only modest gains in undergraduate graduation rates have been made nationally (Chen, 2012; Seidman, 2005). Six-year graduation rates at all four-year colleges and universities rose minimally from 54.4% for the entering cohort of 1996 to 54.9% for the cohort beginning fourteen years later (U.S. Department of Education, 2019) with 35% of institutions experiencing declines in graduation rates during part of this period (Brainard & Fuller, 2010). Persistently low graduation rates coupled with recent leaps forward in technology, including processing speeds, statistical software, and data warehousing, have led many higher education researchers, practitioners, and companies to apply statistical models to examine what variables have a relationship with graduation. Many multi-university models suffer from a variety of hurdles including large amounts of missing data, missing important variables, questionable data quality and lack of common definitions across colleges or universities, and/ or inappropriate statistical methods that do not account for the nested nature of the data (students within universities). This study sought to avoid many of the limitations of past studies and used a two-level logistic hierarchical generalized linear model to comprehensively model six-year graduation in the UNC System. Included in this study were 406,909 undergraduate students who began undergraduate degree-seeking enrollment in any of the 16 public universities in the state of North Carolina from 2000 until 2010. Each variable included in the model was selected based on evidence in the literature of significant relationships with retention and persistence found in regression-based models. In comparison to past literature, this study included a wider array of financial and financial aid-related variables and examined more closely the relationship between university characteristics and student characteristics. Most level-1, student, variables included in this study were significant. The level-2, university, characteristics residential status and selectivity were found to have a significant relationship with six-year graduation and to have an influence on the relationship between some of the student-level covariates and six-year graduation. The results confirmed many of the relationships in the literature between the variables studied and student attrition with some fascinating deviations explored in the discussion. Limitations and suggestions for future research are provided. The results of this study will equip university practitioners and policy-makers in North Carolina with information to improve graduation and further explore student attrition. This study can act as a model for how other states or higher education systems use their own administrative data for comprehensive, multi-institutional modeling

Important factors of financial risk in the SME segment

The aim of the article is to define and quantify the significant factors which influence the intensity of financial risk, and to compare the perception of financial risk among groups of entrepreneurs in the SME segment according to their motivations for starting a business. In relation with the aims defined under this research, we carried out a survey of the entrepreneurial environment of SMEs in 2015, using a sample of 1,141 respondents (the owners of the enterprises). We used Z-score and regression analysis to assess our hypotheses. The results of our research confirmed that the attitude towards financial risk is determined by the following factors: CRM (Correct risk management by entrepreneurs), CFR (The influence of credit risk during a crisis), and SFS (Sufficient funds for SMEs). The entrepreneurs who started their business because they considered it to be their mission answered more frequently that they can correctly manage financial risk in their companies in comparison with the entrepreneurs who started their business for money. The difference was statistically significant. Our research also confirmed that entrepreneurs who started their business because of money perceived the effects of crisis on their company’s financial risk more intensely. © Foundation of International Studies, 2018 and CSR, 2018

Magnetohydrodynamic simulation of an equatorial dipolar paleomagnetosphere

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95191/1/jgra17407.pd