The Role of Technology Support Centres in stimulating Entrepreneurship and Innovation in SME Clusters

The Innovative Product Development Centre (IPDC) was established at the University of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands region of the UK with a mission “to help small and medium sized companies improve their business, secure jobs and contribute to the economic regeneration of the West Midlands Region”. Since 2000, the IPDC has helped several hundred enterprises to develop their businesses through innovation and new product development. Demand for help is high, which reflects a healthy desire by the SMEs to innovate. The assistance given is time limited, but its impact on the business is extremely varied. This paper will discuss the role that a university based product development and technology centre can play in supporting a regional agenda for developing entrepreneurship and innovation in SMEs. Using case studies drawn from the experiences of working with SMEs from the West Midlands region, the paper will consider key issues such as: • Entrepreneurial leadership in SMEs • Formalised approaches for managing NPD • Technology support for innovation • Product innovation • Business networks and entrepreneurial clusters The paper will conclude that university based centres like IPDC can play a vital role in regional development programmes by helping minimise the risks for entrepreneurs to develop new products or adopt new process technologies. Importantly, investments in such centres by regional development agencies can be pivotal for stimulating access to new technology for the exploitation of entrepreneurial clusters and creating attractive inward investment opportunities

Network brokerage:An integrative review and future research agenda

Network brokerage research has grown rapidly in recent decades, spanning the boundaries of multiple social science disciplines as well as diverse research areas within management. Accordingly, we take stock of the literature on network brokerage and provide guidance on ways to move this burgeoning research area forward. We provide a comprehensive review of this literature, including crucial dimensions of the concept itself in terms of brokerage structure and behavior, a set of key categories of factors surrounding the brokerage concept (antecedents, outcomes, and moderators), and an overview of brokerage dynamics over time. We use these dimensions and categories to depict network brokerage’s theoretical and empirical underpinnings as well as evaluate prior research efforts. In so doing, we offer a means to summarize and synthesize this large, interdisciplinary literature, identify important research gaps, and offer promising directions for future research

ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES

The Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining field proposes the development of methods and techniques for assigning useful meanings for data stored in databases. It gathers researches from many study fields like machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, statistics, artificial intelligence, knowledge acquisition for expert systems, data visualization and grids. While Data Mining represents a set of specific algorithms of finding useful meanings in stored data, Knowledge Discovery in Databases represents the overall process of finding knowledge and includes the Data Mining as one step among others such as selection, pre�processing, transformation and interpretation of mined data. This paper aims to point the most important steps that were made in the Knowledge Discovery in Databases field of study and to show how the overall process of discovering can be improved in the future.

Economic Geography and the Evolution of Networks

An evolutionary perspective on economic geography requires a dynamic understanding of change in networks. This paper explores theories of network evolution for their use in geography and develops the conceptual framework of geographical network trajectories. It specifically assesses how tie selection constitutes the evolutionary process of retention and variation in network structure and how geography affects these mechanisms. Finally, a typology of regional network formations is used to discuss opportunities for innovation in and across regions.evolution, network trajectory, evolutionary economic geography, social network analysis, innovation

Patterns of innovatin networking in Dutch small firms

Small firms may rely on a variety of network partners, and in various roles, to identify and exploit opportunities for innovation. This paper adds to the literature on innovation networking by developing a typology at the level of innovation objects, rather than at the firm or industry level. �

Geospatial information infrastructures to address spatial needs in health: Collaboration, challenges and opportunities

Most health-related issues such as public health outbreaks and epidemiological threats are better understood from a spatial–temporal perspective and, clearly demand related geospatial datasets and services so that decision makers may jointly make informed decisions and coordinate response plans. Although current health applications support a kind of geospatial features, these are still disconnected from the wide range of geospatial services and datasets that geospatial information infrastructures may bring into health. In this paper we are questioning the hypothesis whether geospatial information infrastructures, in terms of standards-based geospatial services, technologies, and data models as operational assets already in place, can be exploited by health applications for which the geospatial dimension is of great importance. This may be certainly addressed by defining better collaboration strategies to uncover and promote geospatial assets to the health community. We discuss the value of collaboration, as well as the opportunities that geographic information infrastructures offer to address geospatial challenges in health applications

Investigating Security for Ubiquitous Sensor Networks

The availability of powerful and sensor-enabled mobile and Internet-connected devices have enabled the advent of the ubiquitous sensor network paradigm which is providing various types of solutions to the community and the individual user in various sectors including environmental monitoring, entertainment, transportation, security, and healthcare. We explore and compare the features of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous sensor networks and based on the differences between these two types of systems, we classify the security-related challenges of ubiquitous sensor networks. We identify and discuss solutions available to address these challenges. Finally, we briefly discuss open challenges that need to be addressed to design more secure ubiquitous sensor networks in the future