The emergence of clusters in societal transition : a coevolutionary perspective on the TCM cluster at Tonghua/China

New industries are recognized as new impetus to national wealth. At the same time, they are increasingly becoming geographically concentrated in some well defined areas. But current studies on the emergence of industrial clusters tend to analyze favorable driving factors. This dissertation takes the example of a Chinese endogenous industrial cluster, the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) cluster at Tonghua, a small peripheral city in Northeastern China, to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the emergence of industrial cluster as a co-evolutionary process of organizations, institutions and firms, or, to put it more broadly, as economic evolution embedded in complex socio-economic contexts. The recent advance in evolutionary and co-evolutionary economics which considers the economy and economic landscape as dynamic process instead of equilibrium can be regarded as a part of broader and more intellectual turn of quest for history in social sciences. Although the principle of "history matters" is widely acknowledged, it tends to be reduced to a quite simple concept of "path dependence". However, path dependence cannot offer space for new path creation, except from an external shock. Accordingly, the role of human conscious action or Schumpeterian innovation should be added to path analysis through the concept of path creation. Furthermore, and more importantly, history should be understood as context, and historical context can be explored through the understanding of multi-paths and interaction among them over time. So path inter-dependence (co-evolution between paths) would be useful to better understand the complexity of real history. Since the industrial cluster is composed of interconnected firms and is also subject to changes in institution and technology, I will focus on the multi-way causal relationship between firm, institution and technology. The theorizing is not entirely new, but most of the theoretical and empirical discussions are at the national or industrial level, not regional or local one. A competitive cluster can be regarded as a co-evolutionary hotspot in which multiple populations actively interact and are interconnected. Co-evolution itself is a dynamic and evolutionary process. So I will adopt a dynamic and evolutionary view to examine co-evolutionary degree or co-evolutionary effects in the Tonghua pharmaceutical cluster through time. After a brief introduction which deals with the national institutional changes that are highly associated with new venture creation, entrepreneurship, and innovation, with registrations on drug and healthcare system, and with changes in market demand of China’s pharmaceutical industry and geographical distribution, I will collect evidences from three aspects based upon field survey and second hand data, i.e., the history of the enterprises, the origin of entrepreneurship, and the knowledge of evolution, linking their respective generative relationships through the genealogical method. In this volume, the evolution of the Tonghua pharmaceutical firm organization, the formation of local entrepreneurship, historical accumulation of knowledge, and particular knowledge of transfer among generations of firms will be discussed, then I will probe into co-adaption and co-evolution between local formal and informal institutions and organizations in Tonghua’s TCM industry. In addition, I will try to understand the co-evolutionary process at different geographical levels (namely, national and local). In summary, my main findings include the following several points. Firstly, in the course of the emergence of Tonghua’s pharmaceutical industry, local social networks and the traditional alliance between enterprises and government have played important roles. Secondly, the most important factor that influences the evolution of endogenous industrial clusters such as the Tonghua pharmaceutical industry in transitional countries is not the change in technology, but the change in fundamental national institutions. Thirdly, the success of the Tonghua pharmaceutical industry can be ascribed to the creation of multiple paths largely based on initial conditions, which implies that economic policy should have historical consciousness, namely, new economic innovation should make full use of both historical legacies and existing assets. Finally, it is co-adaption and co-selection of firm organization, institution, and technology that have jointly made Tonghua’s pharmaceutical industry become highly competitive, which means that whether one region can grasp new opportunities partially depends on its capabilities to coordinate a varity of development agents.Neue Industrien werden im Allgemeinen als Impuls der Entwicklung zu nationalem Wohlstand verstanden. Zugleich sind sie überwiegend an einigen geographisch genau definierten Orten konzentriert. Aktuelle Studien zur Emergenz dieser Industrie-Cluster neigen dazu, entsprechende begünstigende Faktoren zu analysieren. Mit dem Beispiel eines endogenen Clusters in China, dem Cluster der Traditionellen Chinesischen Medizin (TCM) in Tonghua, will diese Dissertation zum theoretischen Verständnis der Emergenz von Industrie-Clustern unter der Perspektive eines ko-evolutorischen Prozesses von Form der Organisation, Institutionen und Unternehmen beitragen. Oder, um es etwas breiter auszudrücken, diese Emergenz als ökonomische Evolution zu verstehen, die in einen komplexen sozio-ökonomischen Kontext eingebettet ist. Obgleich der Vorstellung, Geschichte habe eine Bedeutung („history matters“), überwiegend in der Forschung zugestimmt wird, bleibt diese oft auf das Konzept der Pfadabhängigkeit beschränkt. Das aber eröffnet keinen Raum für die Betrachtung endogener Pfad-Bildung. Dem Konzept der Pfad-Bildung entsprechend sollte jedoch die Pfadanalyse ergänzt werden um bewusste Handlungen des Menschen oder auch um Innovationen im Schumpeterschen Sinn. Wichtiger ist außerdem, dass Geschichte als ein Kontext verstanden werden sollte, in dem mehrere Pfade ko-existieren und im Zeitverlauf auch interagieren. So wäre ein Konzept der Pfad-Interdependenz (oder der Ko-Evolution von Pfaden) nützlich zum besseren Verständnis der Komplexität „wirklicher“ Geschichte. Weil das Industriecluster sich aus untereinander verflochtenen Unternehmen zusammen setzt und zugleich Gegenstand von Änderungen in den Institutionen und der Technologie ist, konzentriert sich die Dissertation auf vielseitige kausale Beziehungen von Unternehmen, Institutionen und Technologie. Ein wettbewerbsfähiges Cluster kann aus geographischer Sicht als ein „hot spot“ der Ko-evolution betrachtet werden, in dem verschiedenartige Populationen aktiv untereinander agieren und daher miteinander verflochten sind. Ko-Evolution selbst ist dann ein dynamischer und evolutorischer Prozess. Die Arbeit wählt diese Perspektive, um das Maß und die Wirkungen der Ko-Evolution im Pharma-Cluster von Tonghua im Zeitverlauf zu analysieren. Die Dissertation fußt auf empirischen Erhebungen, ergänzt um eine Dokumenten-Analyse, zur Geschichte der Unternehmen, der Herkunft der Unternehmerschaft sowie der Evolution von Wissen. Sie diskutiert die Evolution in den Organisationsformen der Pharma-Unternehmen in Tonghua, die Bildung einer lokalen Unternehmerschaft, die historische Akkumulation von Wissen und den besonderen Wissenstransfer zwischen Generationen von Unternehmen. Schließlich untersucht sie die Ko-Adaption und Ko-Evolution von lokalen formalen und informellen Institutionen und Organisationen der TCM-Industrie in Tonghua. Die folgenden Punkte betreffen die wichtigsten Ergebnisse der Dissertation: Erstens haben sehr langfristige und dichte lokale soziale Netzwerke eine erhebliche Rolle im Lauf der Emergenz der Pharma-Industrie in Tonghua gespielt. Zweitens ist der wichtigste Faktor in der Pharma-Industrie nicht im technologischen Fortschritt durch Anstrengungen bei Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE) zu sehen, sondern im institutionellen Wandel sowohl auf nationaler als auch auf lokaler Ebene. Drittens kann der Erfolg der Pharma-Industrie in Tonghua der Bildung multipler Pfade zugeschrieben werden, die auf bestimmten Anfangsbedingungen gründen. Das bedeutet, dass die neue ökonomische Entwicklungspolitik sowohl das historische Erbe als auch bestehende Aktivposten in vollem Umfang nutzen sollte. Schließlich ist festzustellen, dass Ko-Adaption und Ko-Selektion der Unternehmens-Organisation, von Institutionen und Technologie zusammen die Pharma-Industrie von Tonghua in hohem Maße wettbewerbsfähig gemacht haben. Ob eine Region neue Gelegenheiten ergreifen kann, hängt folglich teilweise von ihrer Fähigkeit ab, eine Vielfalt von Entwicklungs-Agenten zu koordinieren

Two-phase flow in rocks : new insights from multi-scale pore network modeling and fast pore scale visualization

Many geological applications involve the flow of multiple fluids through porous geological materials, e.g. environmental remediation of polluted ground water resources, carbon dioxide storage in geological reservoirs and petroleum recovery. Commonly, to model these applications, the geological materials in question are treated as continuous porous media with effective material properties. Since these properties are a manifestation of what goes on in the pores of the material, we have to study the transport processes at the pore scale to understand why and how they vary over space and time in different rocks and under different conditions. As the high cost of acquiring and testing samples in many of these applications is often a limiting factor, numerical modelling at the pore scale is becoming a key technology to gain new insights in this field. This could be crucial in reducing uncertainties in field scale projects. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the investigation of two-phase flow in sedimentary rocks, and is an integrated numerical and experimental study. It deals primarily with two outstanding issues. First, image-based pore scale simulation methods have difficulties with representing the multiple pore scales in rocks with wide pore size distributions, due to a trade-off in the size and resolution of both modeling and imaging methods. Therefore, performing two-phase flow simulations in a number of important rock types, such as many carbonates and tight, clay-baring sandstones has remained an outstanding challenge. To tackle this problem, a new numerical model was developed to calculate capillary pressure, relative permeability and resistivity index curves during drainage and imbibition processes in such materials. The multi-scale model was based on information obtained from 3D micro-computed tomography images of the internal pore structure, complemented with information on the pores that are unresolved with this technique. In this method, pore network models were first extracted from resolved pores in the images, by using a maximal ball network extraction algorithm. Then, pores which touched regions with unresolved porosity were connected with a special type of network element called micro-links. In the quasi-static simulations that were performed on these network models, the micro-links carried average properties of the unresolved porosity. In contrast to most previous models, the new approach to taking into account unresolved porosity therefore allowed efficient simulations on images of complex rocks, with sizes comparable to single-scale pore network models. It was able to reproduce most of the behaviour of a fully resolved pore network model, for both drainage and imbibition processes, and for different pore scale wettability distributions (water-wet, oil-wet and different mixed-wet distributions). Furthermore, simulations on images of carbonate rocks showed good agreement to experiments. A sensitivity study on carbonate rocks and tight, clay-bearing sandstones produced results that were in qualitative agreement with experiments, and allowed to analyse how the two-phase flow behaviour of these rocks is influenced by their pore scale properties. The second issue which is treated in this thesis is related to the validation of pore scale models. Comparing predicted effective properties to experimentally measured values is useful and necessary, but is complicated by the typical difference in size between the model and the experiment. Furthermore, it does not always give a clear indication of the reasons for an observed mismatch between models and experiments. Comparing two-phase flow models to pore scale experiments in which the evolution of the fluid distributions is visualized is thus extremely useful. However, this requires to image the two-phase flow process while it is taking place in a rock, and it is necessary to do this with time resolutions on the order of tens of seconds and spatial resolutions on the order of micrometers. Previous experimental approaches used synchrotron beam lines to achieve this. In this thesis, we show that such experiments are also possible using laboratory-based micro-computed tomography scanners, which are orders of magnitude cheaper and therefore more accessible than synchrotrons. An experiment in which kerosene was pumped into a water-saturated sandstone is presented, showing that individual Haines jumps (pore filling events) could be visualized during this drainage process. Because the image quality is lower than at synchrotrons, care had to be taken to adapt the image analysis work flow to deal with high image noise levels. The work flow was designed to allow to track the fluid filling state of individual pores. The results indicate that the dynamic effects due to viscous and inertial forces during Haines jumps do not significantly impact the evolution of the fluid distributions during drainage, which may thus be adequately described by quasi-static models

2019 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program

Oklahoma Research Day 2019 - SWOSU Celebrating 20 years of Undergraduate Research Successes

Toward a theory of the evolution of business ecosystems : enterprise architectures, competitive dynamics, firm performance & industrial co-evolution

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Vita.Includes bibliographical references (v. 4, p. 698-745).This dissertation contributes toward the building of a theory of the evolution of business ecosystems. In the process, it addresses a question that has been posed by evolutionary theorists in the economics and sociology literatures for decades: "Why do firms in the same industry vary systematically in performance over time?" Seeking a systematic explanation of a longitudinal phenomenon inevitably requires characterizing the evolution of the industrial ecosystem, as both the organization (firm) and its environment (industry, markets and institutions) are co-evolving. This question is therefore explored via a theoretical sample in three industrial ecosystems covering manufacturing and service sectors, with competitors from the US, Europe and Japan: commercial airplanes, motor vehicles and airlines. The research is based primarily on an in depth seven-year, multi-level, multi-method, field-based case study of both firms in the large commercial airplanes industry mixed duopoly as well as the key stakeholders in their extended enterprises (i.e. customers, suppliers, investors and employees). This field work is supplemented with historical comparative analysis in all three industries, as well as nonlinear dynamic simulation models developed to capture the essential mechanisms governing the evolution of business ecosystems.(cont.) A theoretical framework is developed which endogenously traces the co-evolution of firms and their industrial environments using their highest-level system properties of form, function and fitness (as reflected in the system sciences of morphology, physiology and ecology), and which embraces the evolutionary processes of variation, selection and retention. The framework captures the path-dependent evolution of heterogeneous populations of enterprise architectures engaged in symbiotic inter-species competition and posits the evolution of dominant designs in enterprise architectures that oscillate deterministically and chaotically between modular and integral states throughout an industry's life-cycle. Architectural innovation - at the extended enterprise level - is demonstrated to contribute to the failure of established firms, with causal mechanisms developed to explain tipping points.by Theodore F. Piepenbrock.Ph.D

Proceedings /5th International Symposium on Industrial Engineering – SIE2012, June 14-15, 2012., Belgrade

editors Dragan D. Milanović, Vesna Spasojević-Brkić, Mirjana Misit

Proceedings /5th International Symposium on Industrial Engineering – SIE2012, June 14-15, 2012., Belgrade

editors Dragan D. Milanović, Vesna Spasojević-Brkić, Mirjana Misit

Nanofluid Flow in Porous Media

Studies of fluid flow and heat transfer in a porous medium have been the subject of continuous interest for the past several decades because of the wide range of applications, such as geothermal systems, drying technologies, production of thermal isolators, control of pollutant spread in groundwater, insulation of buildings, solar power collectors, design of nuclear reactors, and compact heat exchangers, etc. There are several models for simulating porous media such as the Darcy model, Non-Darcy model, and non-equilibrium model. In porous media applications, such as the environmental impact of buried nuclear heat-generating waste, chemical reactors, thermal energy transport/storage systems, the cooling of electronic devices, etc., a temperature discrepancy between the solid matrix and the saturating fluid has been observed and recognized

Technology 2003: The Fourth National Technology Transfer Conference and Exposition, volume 2

Proceedings from symposia of the Technology 2003 Conference and Exposition, Dec. 7-9, 1993, Anaheim, CA, are presented. Volume 2 features papers on artificial intelligence, CAD&E, computer hardware, computer software, information management, photonics, robotics, test and measurement, video and imaging, and virtual reality/simulation

Reconstructing the Arsenical Copper Production Process in Early Bronze Age Southwest Asia

As the dominant alloy in much of the Old World for several millennia between in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, surprisingly little work has been undertaken to understand how arsenical copper was produced and what led to its ubiquitous appearance in the archaeological record. Since arsenic and copper mineralizations often occur paragenetically, and due to the proximity of such deposits to a number of early production centres, it has often been assumed that the dominance of the alloy at the time was simply the result of the serendipitous smelting of widely available polymetallic ores. This thesis questions this narrative as overly simplistic and offers new evidence of intentional and advanced alloying techniques predating the rise of tin bronzes by several centuries. The archaeometric study of metallurgical remains from two recently excavated sites is used as the basis for the reconstruction of arsenical copper’s chaînes opératoires. The sites are Çamlıbel Tarlası in Central Turkey, dating to the mid-fourh millennium BC, and Arisman in West Central Iran, dating to the late fourth to early third millennium BC. The material under study consists of the full gamut of metal production remains, including ore minerals, crucibles, furnaces, slag, and finished objects, all of which were microscopically and compositionally characterised using optical microscopy and SEM-EDS. Other techniques, such as pXRF, EPMA, and ICP-MS were also employed to answer specific questions and in situations where the benchtop instruments were unsuitable. The overall aim of the thesis was first and foremost to evaluate ways in which arsenical copper was produced. The results demonstrate unequivocally that both naturally occurring and synthetically produced arsenic minerals were alloyed with copper in stages entirely separate from smelting. These findings are then contextualised within the wider large scale societal developments occurring at the onset of the Bronze Age by looking at the impacts of these technological innovations on the emergence of settlement specialization, the organisation of labour, and wider networks of knowledge transfer and sharing