Innovation and performance. An analysis on European and Romanian companies

The challenges of the economy and of the modern society based on knowledge are closely related to the success of firms, their ability to generate new, innovative products and services, in a steady pace and in a large, diverse structure in order to ensure performance and long-term welfare. In a global world where countries compete to produce and promote the market for quality and convenient products for the consumers, the innovation capacity of a country and the innovative capabilities of companies acquire a special importance. Numerous studies have analyzed the determinants of innovation of the innovative activities in companies, focusing in particular on organizational and technological capabilities and associated strategies required for successful innovation. There are different types of measuring innovation at the firm level, and in this paper we chose four main groups inspired by the typology promoted by OECD and Eurostat: product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation, marketing innovation. To remain competitive in the long term, companies must consider all these areas, introduce new products to market, improve the quality of the existing products, upgrade or purchase new production technologies. Based on statistical reports of world and national organizations, our research highlights an extremely diverse and heterogeneous picture of the performance innovation indicators in Europe and the situation in Romania, by comparison both with the EU average, with countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but also with their own performance in prior periods

Romania: Many Entrepreneurs but Few Innovators

Entrepreneurship is considered an essential element for the development and prosperity of contemporary economies. The already known traits: creating jobs, boosting growth, revenues to the state budget, are supplemented by vitality and adaptability, and not least, a capacity for innovation. Thus, innovation became one of the most important factors in the companies’ activity. However, innovation doesn’t only mean new products and services. It is closely related to the capacity of entrepreneurs and managers to apply new business models, embedding an organizational culture capable to identify how new ideas could be converted into value for business and society. Innovation supports the efforts of ambitious entrepreneurs to pursue their objectives and stimulate other potential entrepreneurs to enter into businesses. Innovation generates, directly and indirectly, positive effects not only within a company but also within the national economy, as a whole. Despite this empirical evidence, the link between entrepreneurship and innovation is difficult to describe, to introduce it in strong theoretical models, in order to substantiate viable political programs. First, only a relatively small part of entrepreneurs really innovate. Secondly, researchers reveal deep, but subtle, ties between the entrepreneurs’ profile, availability for innovation and effects on states’ competitiveness and prosperity. Finally, the number (or proportion) of entrepreneurs isn’t the most relevant, but their availability to innovate, the type of innovation chosen and, especially, how entrepreneurial organizations stimulate innovative initiatives among their employees (intrapreneurship). From this point of view, Romania's situation is difficult and challenging. The importance and size of the sector, entrepreneurial motivations, or the share of early stage innovative entrepreneurs indicate an average position at a global or European Union (EU) level. However, Romania is a modest innovator, often ranked last in the EU for a several innovation indicators, and its innovation performance in 2014 is at a significantly lower level compared to 2007. The poorest relative performance has been registered for the Linkages & entrepreneurship indicator. Our research also performs a comparison between entrepreneurship and innovation indicators, for Romania and selected Central and Eastern European states, to better understand the gap regarding a reasonable performance in innovation

Innovation and performance. An analysis on European and Romanian companies

The challenges of the economy and of the modern society based on knowledge are closely related to the success of firms, their ability to generate new, innovative products and services, in a steady pace and in a large, diverse structure in order to ensure performance and long-term welfare. In a global world where countries compete to produce and promote the market for quality and convenient products for the consumers, the innovation capacity of a country and the innovative capabilities of companies acquire a special importance. Numerous studies have analyzed the determinants of innovation of the innovative activities in companies, focusing in particular on organizational and technological capabilities and associated strategies required for successful innovation. There are different types of measuring innovation at the firm level, and in this paper we chose four main groups inspired by the typology promoted by OECD and Eurostat: product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation, marketing innovation. To remain competitive in the long term, companies must consider all these areas, introduce new products to market, improve the quality of the existing products, upgrade or purchase new production technologies. Based on statistical reports of world and national organizations, our research highlights an extremely diverse and heterogeneous picture of the performance innovation indicators in Europe and the situation in Romania, by comparison both with the EU average, with countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but also with their own performance in prior periods

Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship. A Literature Review

Entrepreneurship is nowadays a buzz word, present both in political arguments and discussions, in official debates and also in the economic literature. However, the entrepreneurship and the recognition of the entrepreneur’s role for the economic system have been revealed by different authors for two centuries. Despite of this fact, there are still controversies regarding the meaning and significance of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship. Since then, and especially in the latest decades, some new concepts have been added to the already rich literature, e.g. intrapreneur and intrapreneurship. This paper is a modest attempt to review some old but also some recent approaches concerning the named terms and concepts, and thud contributing to a better understanding and use of these concepts. After reminding some relevant approaches regarding the terms entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, the newly emerged terms have been in our attention. Indeed, while notions like „entrepreneur” and „entrepreneurship” are widely used and known, the words „intrapreneur” and „intrapreneurship” are less commonly used and much more new but in rapidly spreading, due to the fact that the recent decades have been labeled by certain economists as „the entrepreneurship era”. The reason why the notion of intrapreneurship is less known than that of entrepreneurship is very simple to explain: the former one is pretty new, whereas the latter one has a history of over 200 years

Symbooglix: A Symbolic Execution Engine for Boogie Programs

Abstract-We present the design and implementation of Symbooglix, a symbolic execution engine for the Boogie intermediate verification language. Symbooglix aims to find bugs in Boogie programs efficiently, providing bug-finding capabilities for any program analysis framework that uses Boogie as a target language. We discuss the technical challenges associated with handling Boogie, and describe how we optimised Symbooglix using a small training set of benchmarks. This empiricallydriven optimisation approach avoids over-fitting Symbooglix to our benchmarks, enabling a fair comparison with other tools. We present an evaluation across 3749 Boogie programs generated from the SV-COMP suite of C programs using the SMACK frontend, and 579 Boogie programs originating from several OpenCL and CUDA GPU benchmark suites, translated by the GPUVerify front-end. Our results show that Symbooglix significantly outperforms Boogaloo, an existing symbolic execution tool for Boogie, and is competitive with GPUVerify on benchmarks for which GPUVerify is highly optimised. While generally less effective than the Corral and Duality tools on the SV-COMP suite, Symbooglix is complementary to them in terms of bug-finding ability

The Effects of Environment and Physiological Cyclicity on the Immune System of Viperinae

One of the important aspects of species' survival is connected with global climate changes, which also conditions the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Poikilotherms are exposed, as other species, to climatic influence, especially due to their physiological peculiarities such as important stages of their life cycle: hibernation, shedding, and active phase. The immune system serves as an accurate indicator of the health status and stress levels in these species. This study aimed to monitor the changes of innate (leukocyte subpopulations and total immune globulins) and adaptive immunity (in vitro leukocyte blast transformation) of two viper species, V. berus berus and V. ammodytes ammodytes, endemic in Europe and spread in different regions of Romania during their three major life cycles, hibernation, shedding, and active phase. The results indicated that seasonal variance and cycle rather than species and regional distribution influence the functionality of the immune system