Enviropreneurial Management An effective approach to cope with the ecological challenge

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/729 on 28.02.2017 by CS (TIS)Humankind is the major force influencing our planet earth. Irreversible environmental degradation are a widespread problem. Atmospheric changes, worsening climate, ozone depletion, etc. is accompanying our daily life. From the ecological perspective the future of the 21st century is endangered. A change of consumption pattern, material thinking, lifestyles have to change fundamentally. lt may even require to break with 'business-as-usual'. In the age of continuously and rapidly changing compet1t1ve environments, companies are increasingly forced to be highly flexible and responsive to changes having an impact on their competitiveness or even affecting the firm's viability. "Entrepreneurship" is an emerging practice, which involves the application of an entrepreneurial spirit to established businesses. The management style is seen to embody the appropriate characteristics for surviving or even growing in a constantly changing environment. A major objective of this research is to determine whether an entrepreneurial management style has an impact on the ecological approach a firm may adopt. For this purpose a mail survey of 500 German firms across all industries was undertaken in the first phase. The aim is to further determine whether firms adopting a proactive ecological approach meet the ecological challenge in a strategic manner. In order to achieve this objective a case study approach was chosen in the second phase based on ten interviews conducted in the food & allied industry. The survey aimed at examining the management style, organisational structure and the business environment of 212 firms to determine firms' nature and style of strategic response to their business environment. Moreover, firms' ecological orientation and ecological environment is measured to determine to which degree firms are proactively oriented. Based on this, the relationship between the management style adopted by firms and the ecological approach is analysed. The results of the survey suggest that firms' response to the ecological issue is strongly influenced by the way in which they respond to business challenges or changes in the business environment. Furthermore, the case study aimed at identifying the degree to which firms integrate the ecological issue into their strategic behaviour. Another aim is to analyse if the relationship between management style and ecological approach can be confirmed further, thus supporting the results of the first phase. The results indicate that a proactive ecological approach demands a comprehensive way of realisation. The ecological issue should be an integral part of the firms' strategic management process and be approached in a strategic manner. Thus, the research project strongly suggests that an entrepreneurial style supported by organic organisational structures is seen as the appropriate approach to follow the path of an ecologically sustainable future. An entrepreneurial approach will enable firms to be innovative and thus inducing fundamental changes with regard to ecological matters. Far-reaching environmental improvements are needed to take a large step towards a sustainable society. An entrepreneurial environmental approach enables firms to anticipate and give fresh impetus to the ecological development. However, it has to be kept in mind that all forces upsetting the equilibrium of the global system have to be handled sustainably

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 10980 and 10981 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 52 full and 13 tool papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques, from algorithmic and logical foundations of verification to practical applications in distributed, networked, cyber-physical, and autonomous systems. They are organized in topical sections on model checking, program analysis using polyhedra, synthesis, learning, runtime verification, hybrid and timed systems, tools, probabilistic systems, static analysis, theory and security, SAT, SMT and decisions procedures, concurrency, and CPS, hardware, industrial applications

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 10980 and 10981 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 52 full and 13 tool papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques, from algorithmic and logical foundations of verification to practical applications in distributed, networked, cyber-physical, and autonomous systems. They are organized in topical sections on model checking, program analysis using polyhedra, synthesis, learning, runtime verification, hybrid and timed systems, tools, probabilistic systems, static analysis, theory and security, SAT, SMT and decisions procedures, concurrency, and CPS, hardware, industrial applications

The Schulze Method of Voting

We propose a new single-winner election method ("Schulze method") and prove that it satisfies many academic criteria (e.g. monotonicity, reversal symmetry, resolvability, independence of clones, Condorcet criterion, k-consistency, polynomial runtime). We then generalize this method to proportional representation by the single transferable vote ("Schulze STV") and to methods to calculate a proportional ranking ("Schulze proportional ranking"). Furthermore, we propose a generalization of the Condorcet criterion to multi-winner elections. This paper contains a large number of examples to illustrate the proposed methods

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The 23 full papers, 1 tool paper and 6 testing competition papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers cover topics such as requirements engineering, software architectures, specification, software quality, validation, verification of functional and non-functional properties, model-driven development and model transformation, software processes, security and software evolution

Computational Complexity of Strong Admissibility for Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) have been introduced as a formalism for modeling and evaluating argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments arecalled semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. Recently, the notion of strong admissibility has been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we study the computational complexityof the following reasoning tasks under strong admissibility semantics. We address 1. the credulous/skeptical decision problem; 2. the verification problem; 3. the strong justification problem; and 4. the problem of finding a smallest witness of strong justification of a queried argument