European retrospective: the European aerospace industry 1970-2000

The success of Airbus Industrie in challenging Boeing’s dominant position in the highly competitive civil airliner market has been widely reported. In the light of this success this paper reviews the progress made by the European aerospace industry in the last three decades of the twentieth century. In particular the position of Europe in relation to the US aerospace industry is analysed. As well as covering civil airliner production the study also considers the space and aero engine sectors. In order to explore the factors that have led to a European challenge, three organisations, each from different sectors of the industry, are analysed. The paper concludes that there has been a revival in the fortunes of the industry and its position within the world aerospace industry

Strategic alliances and competitive strategies in the European aerospace industry: the case of BMW Rolls-Royce GmbH

Strategic alliances are an important feature of the aerospace industry and there have been many studies that have sought to evaluate their performance. Most have taken a policy perspective exploring the economic and political benefits claimed for collaboration of this type. The perspective is a reflection of the political origins of many aerospace alliances. This study seeks to evaluate, from a managerial perspective, one of the newer alliances established on a strictly commercial basis,. It focuses on BMW Rolls-Royce GmbH, one of a small number of truly European alliances. The study concludes that although Rolls-Royce bought out its German partner after a decade of operation, the alliance was a success. The two engines developed by the alliance over this period were a technical success, overall sales were well on target and the alliance was about to break even. In addition, the study concludes that the alliance formed a key element in Rolls-Royce‟s successful strategy to extend its product portfolio, a strategy that elevated the company to second place in the global aero engine market

Five Differences Between Ecological and Economic Networks

Ecological and economic networks have many similarities and are often compared. However, the comparison is often more apt as metaphor than a direct equivalence. In this paper, five key differences are explained which should inform any analysis which compares the two.Comment: 4 page

Propagation of Cascades in Complex Networks: From Supply Chains to Food Webs

A general theory of top-down cascades in complex networks is described which explains two similar types of perturbation amplifications in the complex networks of business supply chains (the `bullwhip effect') and ecological food webs (trophic cascades). The dependence of the strength of the effects on the interaction strength and covariance in the dynamics as well as the graph structure allows both explanation and prediction of widely recognized effects in each type of system.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Research that serves: building active teacher-researcher partnerships

The impact of scholarly research in education on educational practice in classrooms remains low (Admiraal, Buijs, Claessens, Honing, & Karkdijk, 2017). As a result, educational practices in schools remain tied to practical wisdom, rather than educational theories that have been developed and tested in classrooms. This research to practice gap, as it is widely known, is attributed to beliefs that scholars in higher education tend to examine problems that teachers in schools find irrelevant. Classroom teachers contend that because scholars’ primary purpose is to publish, they tend to aim toward generalizations rather than to focus on the improvement of relevant educational practice. Gore and Gitlin (2004) argued that existing tensions between researchers and practitioners may be related to long-standing traditions of framing educational research in such a way that classroom teachers are positioned as “users” rather than “producers” of knowledge.Accepted manuscrip