Capturing and Delivering Value in the Trans-Atlantic Air Travel Market: The Case of the Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Atlantic Airways Strategic Joint Venture

This paper presents a case study of the Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Atlantic transatlantic joint venture, one of the world’s largest strategic passenger joint ventures. The study used a qualitative research approach. The data gathered for the study was examined by document analysis. The strategic analysis of the joint venture was based on the use of Porter’s Five Forces Model. The study found that the joint venture has evolved over time through the addition of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Alitalia, and Virgin Atlantic Airways to the original joint venture between Air France and Delta Air Lines. The joint venture has provided significant synergistic benefits to the partners and has allowed the partners to access new markets and to participate in the evolution of the transatlantic air travel market, one of the world’s major air travel markets. The joint venture has also enabled the venture partners to enhance their competitive position through strengthened service offerings, a comprehensive route network that offers customers a high level of connectivity, and greater flight frequencies within their own route networks, all of which creates value for the partners. A limitation of the study was that the annual revenue, revenue passenger kilometres performed, or passenger load factors data was not available. It was, therefore, not possible to analyze the business performance of the joint venture

Engineering Project Management Modeling Using Artificial Neural Networks

Performance evaluation of the comprehensive management level of engineering projects is advantageous case of study. Benefited from constructive and fluctuant of artificial neural networks (ANN) and based on their self-study, self-adjustment and nonlinear mapping (activation) function of the ANN inputs to outputs the performance evaluation model of engineering project management was established. Compared with conventional method, the influence of human factor is eliminated, thus the correctness of the measured results is increased. Different model structures were discussed with different ANN parameters and satisfactory results were concluded giving a new approach to evaluate the engineering project management. Keywords: ANN structure, training rate, training time, activation function, performance evaluation

Salesforce Automation: An Examination of Issues

The diffusion of sales force automation (SFA) systems has enabled a far more systematic approach to sales force management. This opens new avenues for the academic study of the industrial selling process as well: new arenas for investigation, new windows into salesperson behavior, and new methodological pitfalls. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a better understanding of SFA from an academic perspective, and then apply these insights to resolve gaps in our understanding of how sales forces behave and how they might be better managed. To do this, three areas of analysis are explored: methodological, behavioral, and theoretical

Economic opportunities of AMI implementation : a review

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is rapidly becoming a key element for the modernization and disruption of power grids, generating benefits and opportunities to all actors involved in its implementation. In order to guarantee a correct deployment of AMI, a wide knowledge of its advantages and challenges is needed, that takes into account previous experiences and latest advances that have been made in the field. In this paper, a review of literature is used as a mean to collect the relevant information concerning AMI, so as to conclude which are the opportunities that AMI provides to all parties involved. This is achieved by searching in the most important data bases and specialized sources such as IEEE and IEA. It was found that this infrastructure, does indeed help improve efficiency and leads to positive economic effects impacting variables like costs and prices

The links between international production and innovation: a double network approach

This paper examines the changing role of multinationals in the global generation, adoption and transfer of innovation. It is argued that the combination of traditional asset exploiting objectives with increasing asset seeking activities entails a transition of multinationals towards a double network structure. On the one hand multinationals are more and more characterised by the interconnection of a large number of internal units that are deeply involved in the company’s use, generation and absorption of knowledge. On the other hand, units belonging to the internal network tend to develop external networks with other firms and institutions that are located outside the boundaries of the multinational firm, in order to increase the potential for use, generation and absorption of knowledge. Extending the analysis to a more general level, it is suggested that each of the external actors with which multinationals are interconnected across countries are themselves involved in extensive webs of relationships with other firms and institutions. By becoming embedded in different local contexts, multinational firms act as bridging institutions connecting a number of geographically dispersed economic and innovation systems. As a result, they are conditioned by, and contribute to, the evolution of different contexts in which they operate.innovation, multinational firms, networks.

Towards a maintenance semantic architecture.

International audienceTechnological and software progress with the evolution of processes within company have highlighted the need to evolve systems of maintenance process from autonomous systems to cooperative and sharing information system based on software platform. However, this need gives rise to various maintenance platforms. The first part of this study investigates the different types of existing industrial platforms and characterizes them compared to two criteria namely : information exchange and relationship intensity. This allowed identifying the e-maintenance architecture as the current most efficient architecture. despite its effectiveness, this latter can only guarantee technical interoperability between various components. Therefore, the second part of this study proposes a semantic-knowledge based architecture, thereby ensuring a higher level of semantic interoperability. To this end, specific maintenance ontology has been developed

Financing Cooperative Supply Chain Members — The Bank’s Perspective

This paper contributes to the supply chain finance literature with an agent-based Monte Carlo simulation model focusing on the bank’s point of view. Our theoretical model assesses how a bank should screen a supply chain (SC) member and whether that requires different considerations and monitoring systems compared with traditional corporate loans. In the model, the SC members may cooperate, reducing their bankruptcy risk considerably; thus, the chance for and extent of inter-entity financial aid are critical to consider when assessing bankruptcy risk. A cooperative SC member cannot just be financed from debt taken by other members, but it may also offer protection to other SC members using its operating cash flow. Thus, based on our results, bankruptcy risk is SC-specific, rather than a characteristic of an individual firm. Therefore, to finance an SC member is a quasi-joint decision of its peers, so particular care should be paid to estimating and monitoring the correlations between the operational cash flows of cooperative SC members. One of the key results is that of edge default exposure of the bank; it might be optimal to limit the amount of the loan made available to a given collaborative SC member instead of charging higher rates or financing the most attractive SC member only. Another SC member offering an additional guarantee with its assets will provide the remaining need for financing. As this solution also reduces the total bankruptcy risk of the SC, the SC itself should prefer this financing structure

Becoming a keystone: How incumbents can leverage technological change to create ecosystems

The proliferation of digital technology and automation in the 21st century has created a need to\ua0revisit established theories on value creation. Exponential advances in Internet of Things (IoT)\ua0technologies are dismantling firm- and industry-specific value creation processes. The firms\ua0developing digital technology-based products and services typically participate in broad\ua0networks, which allows them to integrate distinct systems and technologies to produce a focal\ua0value proposition. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how incumbents can leverage\ua0technological change to create an innovation ecosystem.\ua0The concept of an innovation ecosystem is a powerful analogy to explain value co-creation in\ua0a network. In general, ecosystems are broad cooperative networks, in which the actors coalesce\ua0organically and co-evolve through the construction of a value proposition. Although several\ua0scholars have studied value co-creation in an ecosystem, few have explored the process of\ua0ecosystem emergence. Also, extant research on ecosystem primarily investigates orchestration\ua0capabilities from the perspective of technology firms or new entrants that emerge within an\ua0ecosystem. Few empirical studies investigate how incumbent firms can co-create value and\ua0develop capabilities to orchestrate an ecosystem as a keystone actor.In this context, this thesis investigates a manufacturing firm’s efforts to develop a new\ua0technology. The research was designed as an ethnographic in-depth case study of Volvo Car\ua0Group, an incumbent in the automotive industry. The thesis employs a qualitative abductive\ua0research approach to explore the collaborations related to the development of AD technology,\ua0a discontinuous technological change for incumbent automotive firms. Based on a four-year\ua0longitudinal case study and findings from four papers, the thesis makes important contributions\ua0to scholarly understanding of ecosystem emergence in traditional industries.This thesis makes three main contributions to literature on innovation ecosystems: (1) it\ua0describes ‘layered modularity’ as a design mechanism that facilitates joint value creation\ua0leading to the emergence of an innovation ecosystem, (2) it shows how developing physical\ua0products (such as devices or hardware platforms) and digital systems (such as IoT technologies\ua0or software) in distinct layers allows intertwining of divergent innovation activities anddevelopment methods, (3) it distinguishes between three distinct activities – cooperation,\ua0coordination and competition – that incumbents firms need to manage in order to become a\ua0keystone actor and orchestrate the ecosystem. The findings presented in this thesis have\ua0important implications for manufacturing firms looking to leverage a DTC to create new\ua0ecosystems