Innovation Hot Spots: the Case of the Computer Services Sector in the Region of Attica, Greece

Elaborating on the notion innovation hot spots, we examine the case of the computer services sector in the Region of Attica, Greece. Fast-growing, geographically and industrially clustered firms are becoming an increasingly important factor for innovation and regional development. As a result, innovation hot spots enjoy rapid growth, leading to job creation, knowledge expansion and, in the best cases, sustainable development. The most recent European Trend Chart Reports (2004 and 2005) present Greece as innovation leader in the computer services sector. Computer services are characterized by a high knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion intensity meaning that the hot spots exploiting such services position high on an innovation intensity scale. Consulting, implementation, operations management and support services enjoy similar growth since they are complementary industries forming the Attica IT innovation hot spot. The purpose of our research within this field is twofold. First, we present the conditions under which this innovation leadership has emerged and come to flourish. We argue that growth in the Region of Attica has been boosted by the Information Society Program, the Olympic Games and the necessity for modernizing Greek firms, which leads them to favor investments in new technologies. Moreover, the region presents a favorable macroeconomic environment, characterized by high rates of development, increase of consumption and investments. Second, we analyze and propose a framework for maintaining the dynamics in the region -and in innovation hot spots in general- as there is a significant risk of rise-and-fall patterns occurring, leading to former hot spots transforming into “blind spotsâ€, and core competencies developed turning into core rigidities and cultural lock-in.

Innovation Hot Spots: the Case of the Computer Services Sector in the Region of Attica, Greece

Elaborating on the notion innovation hot spots, we examine the case of the computer services sector in the Region of Attica, Greece. Fast-growing, geographically and industrially clustered firms are becoming an increasingly important factor for innovation and regional development. As a result, innovation hot spots enjoy rapid growth, leading to job creation, knowledge expansion and, in the best cases, sustainable development. The most recent European Trend Chart Reports (2004 and 2005) present Greece as innovation leader in the computer services sector. Computer services are characterized by a high knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion intensity meaning that the hot spots exploiting such services position high on an innovation intensity scale. Consulting, implementation, operations management and support services enjoy similar growth since they are complementary industries forming the Attica IT innovation hot spot. The purpose of our research within this field is twofold. First, we present the conditions under which this innovation leadership has emerged and come to flourish. We argue that growth in the Region of Attica has been boosted by the Information Society Program, the Olympic Games and the necessity for modernizing Greek firms, which leads them to favor investments in new technologies. Moreover, the region presents a favorable macroeconomic environment, characterized by high rates of development, increase of consumption and investments. Second, we analyze and propose a framework for maintaining the dynamics in the region -and in innovation hot spots in general- as there is a significant risk of rise-and-fall patterns occurring, leading to former hot spots transforming into "blind spots", and core competencies developed turning into core rigidities and cultural lock-in

Corporate real estate analysis: evaluating telecom branch efficiency in Greece

This paper proposes productivity analysis for evaluating the relative efficiency in corporate real estate usage across decision-making units. Using data from the Greek Telecommunications Organization (GTO), we measure the productivity of 127 braches using the number of employees and the total area covered per building as inputs and the number of telephony access lines as outputs. We apply three non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models assuming: constant returns to scale (CRS), variable returns to scale (VRS) and slacks-based measures (SBM), respectively. We discuss how the proposed approach can provide real estate managers and analysts a multi informational tool that allows the quantification of targets and may serve as a guide tool for the efficient employment of real estate assets

PBDS: A Decision Support System for Regional Blood Management

Human blood is a perishable product: in the U.S. it has a legal lifetime of 21 days from collection, during which it can be used for transfusion to a patient of the same type, and after which it has to be discarded. It is collected in units of one pint from volunteer donors at various collection sites such as a Regional Blood Center, and after a series of typing and screening tests it is shipped to Hospital Blood Banks in the region. Once at the Hospital Blood Bank, a unit is stored and is available to satisfy the random daily demand for transfusions to patients. Since not all units demanded for a patient are generally used, a unit can be issued several times during its lifetime until transfused or outdated. Efficient management of the regional blood resources is a difficult task. In addition to the complexity of the problem, introduced by the factors outlined above, the Regional Blood Center is faced with some typical characteristics of a Health Care management problem: (i) the performance of a regional blood management system can be evaluated in terms of more than one criteria, some of which are conflicting (e.g., shortages vs. outdates), and (ii) quantitative cost measurement of the system's performance, and, therefore, comparison of alternative policies using simple cost criteria, is very difficult since the estimation of many costs involved (e.g., unavailability of blood) is purely subjective. The two most common performance measures of a blood region are the shortage rate (i.e., the percentage of days when "supplementary" deliveries have to be made to satisfy a hospital's demand), and the outdate rate (i.e., the percentage of a hospital's supply that becomes outdated) for the hospitals in the region. The system described in this paper (PBDS) has been designed so as to provide a decision support mechanism to the Regional Blood Center to address the following fundamental inventory management questions related to these measures: (i) what are the minimum achievable outdate and shortage targets that can be set for the region, (ii) what is the distribution policy to achieve those targets, and (iii) what should the level of regional supply be in order to achieve alternative targets. The system is based on a mathematical programming model whose primary objective is to optimize the allocation of the regional blood resources while observing policy constraints. It is characterized by (i) a centralized management of blood, rather man management by individual hospitals, (ii) prescheduled deliveries, and (iii) a distribution system according to which blood is "rotated" among the hospitals. PBDS has been implemented in the 38 hospital region of Long Island, New York, where it has been operational for 3 years. It has established a routine management, and has drastically reduced the outdating and shortage incidents in the region. By now, it is completely computerized, and plans are being made for its introduction to other regions in the U. S. and abroad.health care: blood inventory management, mathematical programming: applications, decision support systems

On the Evaluation of a Class of Inventory Policies for Perishable Products Such as Blood

A class of inventory and distribution policies for scheduled deliveries of perishable products subject to variable demand is modeled as a Markov chain with a manageable number of states. From its stationary distribution, such measures as probability of shortage, the average age of the inventory, and the average number discarded per time period are obtained. Easily computable bounds on these measures that indicate how they behave as functions of demand, and inventory policy parameters are developed.

A problem generator-solver heuristic for vehicle routing with soft time windows

In this paper we consider the vehicle routing problem with soft time window constraints (VRPSTW), in which vehicles are allowed to service customers before and after the earliest and latest time window bounds, respectively. This relaxation comes at the expense of appropriate penalties that reflect the effect that time window violations have on the customers' satisfaction. The problem is of particular importance for fleet planning as it allows decision-makers from both the logistics and marketing-sales side to determine minimal fleet sizes by appropriate contract negotiations for order delivery times. To solve the problem, we couple the nearest-neighbour method with a problem generator that provides, in a structured manner, numerous instances that result from the manipulation of the level of time window violations and the population of customers that allow such violations. The proposed heuristic results in solutions that reduce the number of vehicles required for the hard case and provide minimal violations of time windows. Computational results on a set of benchmark problems show that our method outperforms previous approaches to the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows, and that it can serve as the basis for efficient and effective fleet planning.Routing Heuristics Logistics Transportation Fleet planning