128,018 research outputs found
Coopetition and innovation. Lessons from worker cooperatives in the Spanish machine tool industry
This is an electronic version of the accepted paper in Journal of Business & Industrial
Marketing[EN] Purpose –
This paper aims to investigate how the implementation of the inter-cooperation principle
among Spanish machine-tool cooperatives helps them to coopete–collaborate with
competitors, in their innovation and internationalization processes and achieve collaborative
advantages.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a multi-case approach based on interviews
with 15 CEOs and research and development (R&D) managers, representing 14 Spanish
machine tool firms and institutions. Eight of these organizations are worker-cooperatives..
Findings – Worker -cooperatives achieve advantages on innovation and internationalization
via inter-cooperation (shared R&D units, joint sales offices, joint after-sale services,
knowledge exchange and relocation of key R&D technicians and managers). Several mutual
bonds and ties among cooperatives help to overcome the risk of opportunistic behaviour and
knowledge leakage associated to coopetition. The obtained results give some clues explaining
to what extent and under which conditions coopetitive strategies of cooperatives are
transferable to other types of ownership arrangements across sectors.
Practical implications – Firms seeking cooperation with competitors in their R&D and
internationalization processes can learn from the coopetitive arrangements analyzed in the
paper.
Social implications – Findings can be valuable for sectoral associations and public bodies
trying to promote coopetition and alliances between competitors as a means to benefit from
collaborative advantages.
Originality/value – Focusing on an “ideal type” of co-operation -cooperative organisationsand
having access to primary sources, the paper shows to what extent (and how) strong
coopetitive structures and processes foster innovation and internationalization
Multi-Agent Cooperation for Particle Accelerator Control
We present practical investigations in a real industrial controls environment
for justifying theoretical DAI (Distributed Artificial Intelligence) results,
and we discuss theoretical aspects of practical investigations for
accelerator control and operation. A generalized hypothesis is introduced,
based on a unified view of control, monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and
repair tasks leading to a general method of cooperation for expert systems
by exchanging hypotheses. This has been tested for task and result sharing
cooperation scenarios. Generalized hypotheses also allow us to treat the
repetitive diagnosis-recovery cycle as task sharing cooperation. Problems
with such a loop or even recursive calls between the different agents are
discussed
Cooperative Online Learning: Keeping your Neighbors Updated
We study an asynchronous online learning setting with a network of agents. At
each time step, some of the agents are activated, requested to make a
prediction, and pay the corresponding loss. The loss function is then revealed
to these agents and also to their neighbors in the network. Our results
characterize how much knowing the network structure affects the regret as a
function of the model of agent activations. When activations are stochastic,
the optimal regret (up to constant factors) is shown to be of order
, where is the horizon and is the independence
number of the network. We prove that the upper bound is achieved even when
agents have no information about the network structure. When activations are
adversarial the situation changes dramatically: if agents ignore the network
structure, a lower bound on the regret can be proven, showing that
learning is impossible. However, when agents can choose to ignore some of their
neighbors based on the knowledge of the network structure, we prove a
sublinear regret bound, where is the clique-covering number of the network
- …