Thinking about growth : a cognitive mapping approach to understanding small business development

School of Managemen

The 'place' of multi-level governance? Defining the policy agenda for regional development in Western Flanders

The policy-making function of the principal agency for regional development is examined. Are institutional and governance forms for Regional Development as much a product of specific local and regional conditions (the 'place' of multi-level governance) as they are a part of the mechanisms that facilitate their reproduction- such as the state, economy, society and the widely interpreted term ‘globalization’? Following on from this, are multi-level policy priorities for regional development influenced more by the ‘business-led agenda’ and its ‘positional elites’ than the regional- local institutional capacities and by the local actors ‘outside of the game’

Empirical study in assessment of safety climate in construction site

With the rate of safety accidents during the engineering construction becoming higher and higher, more and more attention was paid on engineering safety. To better cognize the present safety situation of engineering construction without which prevention are hard to develop, this paper developed 2 surveys which aims at evaluating the present safety situation of a series of construction dominated by urban construction bureau of Dong’guan city in Guangdong province. Based on so many existing papers, safety climate is the most important impaction of safety accidents, furthermore, safety altitude reflect safety climate to a great extent, thus the first survey is developed to testify the conclusion. Based on the conclusion, another survey is developed to evaluate safety situation in Dong’guan city

La política industrial en América Latina y el Caribe a comienzos del siglo

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) Este sondeo de políticas industriales en América Latina y el Caribe presenta dos afirmaciones básicas: (1) el período desde finales de los años 80 y todos los 90 fue de transición de las políticas industriales del modelo de sustitución de importaciones hacia políticas industriales adecuadas para economías nacionales abiertas en una economía mundial más cohesionada; y (2) que este período de transición no ha terminado y, por ende, es prematuro emitir juicios sobre la eficacia de este conjunto, aún emergente, de políticas.

Research on Foreign Innovative Countries and Their Revelations

Focused on the Chinese innovation, The paper researched on the typical experiences of foreign innovatiove countries and the revelations for china to build an innovative country. Firstly, the paper intruduced the original theory of innovative country:Schumpeterian’s innovation theory. Secondly, it expounded the theory connotation of innovative country from two levels of technological economics and institutional economics and described totally the representatives and their basic theories of innovative country. Furthermore, it summed up the inevitability into the times of innovation-oriented nation, and the basic connotation and characteristic of innovative country. On that basis, it studied characteristics of foreign typical innovative countries in different levels, including USA, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Sweden. Finally, According to the achievements and shortcomings of building an innovative country of China at past time and making recommendations of the construction with Chinese characteristics, such as innovative national policy, institution, environment and so on, the paper specified the concepts of ‘innovative country’, concluded by advocating strengthening of national level capacities to revelate seven levels as follows: speeding up the national innovation system and culturing the initiate innovation ability of enterprises; improving the system and building a innovational security policies system perfectly; strengthening coordination between the innovation main bodies and enhancing the overall efficiency of system innovation; making good use of global science and technology resources, and expanding the economy and technology cooperation with developed countries; strengthening personnel training and setting up a relaxed environment for employment; accelerating the integration and construction of regional innovation system and improving the operating efficiency; building an innovation culture and strengthening the innovation spirit trainine and the innovational sense cultivation. Key words: Innovative Countries; Different Countries; Innovation Theory; Innovational Policy Résumé: Cet article nous présente des recherches sur les expériences typiques des pays innovateurs étrangers et les révélations pour la Chine pour construire un nouveau modèle de pays innovateur. Dans un premier temps, on introduit la naissance de la théorie de pays innovateur, c’est-à-dire la théorie de l’innovation technique de Schumpeter; ensuite, on explique les connotations de la théorie de pays innovateur du point de vue de l’économie de technologie et de l’économie de politique en faisant une présentation complète et raffinée sur les personnages représentatifs étrangers et leurs opinions principales sur la théorie de pays innovateur ; et puis, on résume l’inévitabilité de l’entrée dans l’époque d’innovation, les connotations et les caractéristiques des pays innovateurs. A partir de cette base,on fait des études sur les caractéristiques de certians pays innovateurs typiques, par exemple les Etats-Unis, le Japon,la Coréé du Sund, la Finlande et la Suède. Finalement, des révélations et des réflexions sur la construction d’un pays innovateur en Chine. Mots-Clés: pays innovateur,pays différents; la théorie d’innovation; la politique d’innovatio

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

Assessing organizations collaboration readiness: a behavioral approach

Dissertation presented at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon to obtain the degree of Doctor in Electrical Engineering, specialty of Robotics and Integrated ManufacturingThis thesis presents an approach for assessing organizations‘ readiness to collaborate. This assessment is based in three fundamental aspects, namely (1) on collaboration preparedness, which aims at assessing whether a partner has adequate collaboration-related character traits; (2) on competencies fitness which is predominantly aimed at assessing how well an organization is able to use its competencies in a collaboration context; and (3) on willingness to collaborate, which is a concept applied to assess whether an organization is, or is not, really interested to engage in concrete collaboration opportunities. The proposed approach contributes to the formation of improved collaborative networks, increasing their likelihood of success. The principal characteristic of the model lies in the fact that it follows a behavioral perspective. As such, collaboration preparedness is based on the idea of the organizations‘ character, traits and behavioral patterns. Competencies fitness is in turn based on the so-called soft competencies, exploring the performance influences/effects of the soft competencies on the hard ones in a collaboration context. Finally, willingness to collaborate is based on the organization‘s planned behavior, attitudes and intentions that are perceived in/from a partner. The work involved in the conceptualization of readiness to collaborate includes the utilization of text data mining to discover the behavioral aspects, namely the collaboration-related organization‘s traits which are relevant for assessing collaboration readiness. Bayesian belief networks are proposed as a way to deal with the underlying uncertainty in assessing collaboration readiness. A soft versus hard competencies dichotomy is used to develop the concept of competencies fitness, proposing the adjusted competencies profile and the fitness level, as the way to assess whether a partner‘s competencies fit in a collaboration opportunity. The Theory of the Planned Behavior is adapted from social sciences and used in organizations in collaboration contexts. Various modeling experiments were performed to assist in the development of this readiness concept. The validation through some cases of partnerships is proposed to evaluate the underlying collaboration readiness assessment model

Factors Underlying the Formation of Industrial Clusters in Japan and Industrial Cluster Policy: A Quantitative Survey

The purpose of this report is to use information provided by a questionnaire survey to analyze the factors and processes underlying the formation of industrial clusters in Japan. The study, based on questionnaire surveys, forms part of an "Industrial Cluster Project". The Japanese government has implemented policies for industrial clusters so as to enable Japanese industries to maintain competitive power in global markets, and to aid the self-sufficient expansion of local industries. The government's project goes under the heading "Industry Agglomeration for the Recovery of Local Industries with respect to so-called "Industry Clusters." The authors aim to identify what expectations are held of government by the enterprises that make up industrial clusters. As part of our investigation, we used the results of a survey conducted by UNDP in 2004. Tsuji's study, published by the Osaka School of International Public Policy, surveyed 1198 small or medium sized manufacturing companies located in O ward, Tokyo and Higashi Osaka city, Osaka prefecture. The outcome of the present study, together with data from Tsuji's work on IT usage by SMEs in Japan, is meant to form the basis for policy design and implementation.Industrial Cluster Policy, Agglomeration, Innovation, IT, Industrial policy, Local industry, Japan