Adaptive development of competitive advantages of an industrial enterprise on the basis of analysis and ensuring the competitiveness of its products

Insufficient theoretical study of the issues of adapting the resource potential of an enterprise in the context of imperatives of innovative development reinforces the theoretical and practical significance of conducting a study aimed at studying the processes of the essence of adapting the resource potential of an industrial enterprise within a cluster, developing tools for evaluating and managing this process, allowing to model alternative uses of key components their potential within the cluster. Successful implementation of this task implies the development of an organizational and managerial mechanism for managing the potential of industrial enterprises - potential cluster members, including the formation of a capitalization strategy for their resource potential, an important unit that is information-analytical tools integrated into the cluster management system as a whole. This determined the relevance of the allocation of this spectrum of problems in an independent direction of scientific research, had a direct impact on the choice of topics, setting goals and objectives

Adaptive development of competitive advantages of an industrial enterprise on the basis of analysis and ensuring the competitiveness of its products

Insufficient theoretical study of the issues of adapting the resource potential of an enterprise in the context of imperatives of innovative development reinforces the theoretical and practical significance of conducting a study aimed at studying the processes of the essence of adapting the resource potential of an industrial enterprise within a cluster, developing tools for evaluating and managing this process, allowing to model alternative uses of key components their potential within the cluster. Successful implementation of this task implies the development of an organizational and managerial mechanism for managing the potential of industrial enterprises - potential cluster members, including the formation of a capitalization strategy for their resource potential, an important unit that is information-analytical tools integrated into the cluster management system as a whole. This determined the relevance of the allocation of this spectrum of problems in an independent direction of scientific research, had a direct impact on the choice of topics, setting goals and objectives

Internationalization strategies of companies in the wine industry in Portugal – context, forms of action and performance.

This research project aims to analyze the competitive environment of companies in the wine sector in Portugal and assess the implications in the development of contingent strategic guidelines and different performances.Proposes to apply the methodological framework the IKST – Integrated Key for Strategic Thought for international expansion. The research was carried out at two levels: at a preliminary level – a general characterisation was made of the companies as to their resources, and at a central level – the examination of the strategic aspect of the companies was carried out. The research involved the collection of primary data (survey of 164 companies in the sector) and secondary data (from documentary nature). Explores the strategic aspect, analyzing the sector in terms of global and national context, in order to design a diagnostic context of action, using the models of PEST and 5 Forces. Identifies, based on various statistical techniques, the adopted style of strategic thought and the profile in terms of contextual variables, as well as the underlying economic performance

FIRM COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES AND THE LIKELIHOOD OF SURVIVAL - THE SPANISH CASE

This paper, based on the ideas of Jovanovic’s theory (1982), analyses the impact of the main strategies determining the competitive behaviour of firms on their survival rate. We consider those strategies related both to product and price differentiation. Among the former ones, one may think of the specific differentiation due to advertisement and patent expenses or the technological differentiation based on R&D expenses or new production processes. Among the strategies of the second group, some are based on capital accumulation, or advantages of fixed costs such as scale economies or absolute cost advantages thanks to production techniques introduced by experience of by process innovations. The use of these strategies in a set of Spanish manufacturing firms (1990-2001) is analyzed. Firstly, several non-parametric tests for equality of survival functions are computed to check the diversity of survival rates across different competitive characteristics of firms. Secondly, a duration model based on a hazard rate model is estimated to study the impact of the main competitive strategies on firm survival. We find that several aspects on the competitive advantage of the firms play an important role in the likelihood of firm survival. Finally, we also conclude that there exists a different competitive strategy having into account two different size groups of firms.

Exploring efficient neural architectures for linguistic-acoustic mapping in text-to-speech

Conversion from text to speech relies on the accurate mapping from linguistic to acoustic symbol sequences, for which current practice employs recurrent statistical models such as recurrent neural networks. Despite the good performance of such models (in terms of low distortion in the generated speech), their recursive structure with intermediate affine transformations tends to make them slow to train and to sample from. In this work, we explore two different mechanisms that enhance the operational efficiency of recurrent neural networks, and study their performance–speed trade-off. The first mechanism is based on the quasi-recurrent neural network, where expensive affine transformations are removed from temporal connections and placed only on feed-forward computational directions. The second mechanism includes a module based on the transformer decoder network, designed without recurrent connections but emulating them with attention and positioning codes. Our results show that the proposed decoder networks are competitive in terms of distortion when compared to a recurrent baseline, whilst being significantly faster in terms of CPU and GPU inference time. The best performing model is the one based on the quasi-recurrent mechanism, reaching the same level of naturalness as the recurrent neural network based model with a speedup of 11.2 on CPU and 3.3 on GPU.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Inertia and Change in the Early Years: Employment Relations in Young, High Technology Firms

[Excerpt] This paper considers processes of organizational imprinting in a sample of 100 young, high technology companies. It examines the effects of a pair of initial conditions: the founders\u27 models of the employment relation and their business strategies. Our analyses indicate that these two features were well aligned when the firms were founded. However, the alignment has deteriorated over time, due to changes in the distribution of employment models. In particular, the \u27star\u27 model and \u27commitment\u27 model are less stable than the \u27engineering\u27 model and the \u27factory\u27 model. Despite their instability, these two blueprints for the employment relation have strong effects in shaping the early evolution of these firms. In particular, firms that embark with these models have significantly higher rates of replacing the founder chief executive with a non-founder as well as higher rates of completing an initial public stock offering. Some implications of these findings for future studies of imprinting and inertia in organizations are discussed

Assessing the performance of technology transfer offices: An analysis of the relevance of TTO’s outcome configuration and aspiration performance

The paper investigates the technology-transfer productivity of Spanish public universities. The proposed approach allows the development of a framework that matches universities’ technology transfer concerns with the need to accurately analyze the role of the outcome configuration of technology transfer offices (TTOs). We analyze technology transfer productivity of Spanish universities during 2006-2011 by computing total factor productivity models rooted in non-parametric techniques, namely the Malmquist index. The results confirm that technology transfer productivity is affected by changes in the configuration of the TTO’s outcome portfolio that result from benchmarking own and market peers’ performance levels. While benchmarking own performance levels facilitates the exploitation of internal resources and yields superior productivity results, changes in TTO’s portfolio based on comparisons with market peers might generate greater operational costs that negatively impact productivity.Postprint (published version