Need and potential risks of strategic alliances for competing successfully

In today’s global economy, many companies’ managers consider strategic alliances as a key strategic alternative. Even if it is true that strategic alliances can be a really powerful competitive tool, managers should pay attention to all potential risks before involving in a partnership. This paper aims to address a series of issues that may arise when forming a strategic alliance.strategic management, strategic alliances, cross culture

Assessing quality and total quality in economic higher education

Nowadays, there are countries, systems and cultures where the issue of quality management and all the items implied are firmly on the agenda for higher education institutions. Whether a result of a growing climate of increasing accountability or an expansion in the size and diversity of student populations, both quality assurance and quality enhancement are now considered essential components of any quality management programme.higher education, quality management, total quality management

Structural variation in generated health reports

We present a natural language generator that produces a range of medical reports on the clinical histories of cancer patients, and discuss the problem of conceptual restatement in generating various textual views of the same conceptual content. We focus on two features of our system: the demand for 'loose paraphrases' between the various reports on a given patient, with a high degree of semantic overlap but some necessary amount of distinctive content; and the requirement for paraphrasing at primarily the discourse level

Social Psychology And Marketing: The Consumption Game. Understanding Marketing And Consumer Behavior Through Game Theory

Consumer psychology provides enough evidence that consumer behavior is not just one side of our existence, but, as a matter of fact, it is a central dimension of our everyday lives, engaging us into changing and defining our identity, beliefs, attitudes and practices. In relation to this, commodification has reached us on all levels: everything that people created, produced and developed over the years, during the post-industrial era, can be commodified and sold to a specific market. Commodification and increased consumption are crossing the line between values and needs, production and creation, identity and capital accumulation, thus making people constantly expecting a payoff while engaging in social, cultural and economic transactions. In this article we argue that we can use the models of game theory to understand socio-economic phenomena such as consumption, B2C marketing and market dynamics.Game Theory, consumer behaviour, commodification, decision theory, marketing

Physics Potential of SPS Upgrade in regard to Beta/EC Beams

The goal for future neutrino facilities is the determination of the $[U_{e3}]$ mixing and CP violation in neutrino oscillations. This will require precision experiments with a very intense neutrino source. With this objective the creation of neutrino beams from the radioactive decay of boosted ions by the SPS of CERN from either beta or electron capture transitions has been propossed. We discuss the capabilities of such facilities as a function of the energy of the boost and the baseline for the detector. We conclude that the SPS upgrade to 1000 GeV is crucial to have a better sensitivity to CP violation if it is accompanied by a longer baseline. We compare the physics potential for two different configurations. In the case of beta beams, with the same boost for both $\beta^+$ (neutrinos) and $\beta^-$ (antineutrinos), the two setups are: I) $\gamma=120$, L=130 Km (Frejus); II) $\gamma=330$, L=650 Km (Canfranc). In the case of monochromatic EC beams we exploit the energy dependence of neutrino oscillations to separate out the two parameters $U(e3)$ and the CP phase $\delta$. Setup I runs at $\gamma=90$ and $\gamma=195$ (maximum achievable at present SPS) to Frejus, whereas Setup II runs at $\gamma=195$ and $\gamma=440$ (maximum achievable at upgraded SPS) to Canfranc. The main conclusion is that, whereas the gain in the determination of $U(e3)$ is rather modest, setup II provides much better sensitivity to CP violation.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, Proceedings of LHC LUMI 2006 CARE-HHH-AP Wokshop, October 2006, Valenci

Methodological issues concerning the development of sustainable industrial parks

Nowadays, in order to make a sustainable economic growth possible, especially within manufacturing industries, with auspicious effects concerning the standard of living and the employment rates, the governments should develop and implement projects and strategies, aiming the transition towards knowledge-based economy. The entities that need investments the most are the countries which are crossing a development process, usually facing difficulties in developing a high-performance industrial sector. Under these circumstances, industrial parks prove to be important tools in order to ensure the competitiveness of the national industry. However, the more and more frequent relocation of industrial companies within industrial parks, as a consequence of amplifying the urban areas’ environmental regulations, is due to generate uncontrollable pollution centers, placed just nearby towns and cities, with highly destructive impact upon the environment. This article aims to describe and recommend several strategic options for developing sustainable industrial parks, focused on protecting the environment and promoting the “new economy’s” principles. Among the strategic options recommended, some of them are highly innovative, such as environmental benchmarking or environmental leadership.industrial parks, sustainable development, environment protection, environmental economics, environmental leaders, SME’s development, pro-active environment strategies.