The future of additive manufacturing: materialise´s lbo - strategy & planning

The Future of Additive Manufacturing: Materialise's LBO This investment paper reviews the potential LBO of Materialise, a service provider and software producer with in the AM industry. An analysis of the company and market was conducted, facilitating the assessment of key market trends that enabled the creation of investment strategies. The ultimate result comprised of the execution of a leverage buy out with strong returns in every scenario, demonstrating Materialise as investment worthy. This section focuses deeper on the fund’s investment strategies for both organic growth, by increasing its global presence, focusing on the future, optimizing performance, and in organic growth, by buying Stratasys

History of Value-at-Risk: 1922-1998

value-at-risk history

What educational production functions really show : a positive theory of education spending

The accumulated results of empirical studies show that the public sector typically chooses spending on inputs such that the productivity of additional spending on books and instructional materials is 10 to 100 times larger than that of additional spending on teacher inputs (for example, higher wages, small class size). The authors argue that this pervasive and systemic deviation of actual spending from the technical optimum requires a political, not economic or technical, explanation. The evidence is consistent only with a class of positive models in which public spending choices are directly influenced by a desire for higher spending on teacher inputs, over and above their role in producing educational outputs. This desire could be due either to teacher power, or bureaucratic budget-maximizing behavior, or political patronage. The authors conclude by exploring the implications of these positive political models of educational spending behavior for various types of proposed educational reforms (localized control, parental participation, vouchers, and so on) which requires an examination of how the proposed reforms shift the relative powers of the stakeholders in the educational system: students and parents, educators, bureaucrats, and politicians.Economic Theory&Research,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Environmental Economics&Policies,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Gender and Education

The building blocks of a cloud strategy:evidence from three SaaS providers

Before looking to enter a cloud-based market, weigh industry characteristics and one's own stock of design capital

Achieving agility and quality in product development -an empirical study of hardware startups

acceptedVersio

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Business model requirements and challenges in the mobile telecommunication sector

The telecommunications business is undergoing a critical revolution, driven by innovative technologies, globalization, and deregulation. Cellular networks and telecommunications bring radical changes to the way telecom businesses are conducted. Globalization, on the other hand, is tearing down legacy barriers and forcing monopolistic national carriers to compete internationally. Moreover, the noticeable progress of many countries towards deregulation coupled with liberalization is significantly increasing telecom market power and allowing severe competition. The implications of this transition have changed the business rules of the telecom industry. In addition, entrants into the cellular industry have had severe difficulties due to inexistent or weak Business Models (BMs). Designing a BM for a mobile network operator is complex and requires multiple actors to balance different and often conflicting design requirements. Hence, there is a need to enhance operators’ ability in determining what constitutes the most viable business model to meet their strategic objectives within this turbulent environment. In this paper, the authors identify the main mobile BM dimensions along with their interdependencies and further analysis provides mobile network operators with insights to improve their business models in this new ‘boundary-less’ landscape