United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Historical Trajectory of Strategic Renewal Activities at Scandinavian Airlines System, 1946-2012

Although the second half of the twentieth century saw the rise and fall of ‘multi-flag companies’ in the civil aviation industry, our understanding of how some managed to buck the trend and achieve longevity remains limited. This paper advances business history and strategic management research by examining the strategic renewal activities of Scandinavian Airlines (formerly Scandinavian Airlines System) during the period 1946-2012. The study sheds light on the key roles of private and state owners, rivals as well as banks, in critical financial phases are discussed in terms of longevity in the company. The longevity of the business stems from the leaders’ ability to develop as anticipated and respond to change in their competitive arena in close interaction with the owners. Thus, incumbent firms that strategically renew themselves prior to or during market reform, such as deregulation, enhance their chances of developing the size of their networks and revenue streams. Our main contribution to business history and strategic management literatures is the development of context-specific stages, which shed light on the evolution of strategic renewal activities and shifts from older processes and routines towards customer service and efficiency

Experimenting with concepts from modular product design and multi-objective optimization to benefit people living in poverty

Every discipline has its own specific knowledge that has been accumulated and refined over time. In the aerospace industry, for example, the domain knowledge of multidisciplinary optimization has grown and matured. The same has happened with domain knowledge related to modularity in the consumer product design industry. Knowledge from these domains has carried over to other domains such as automotive, medical, and defense, and has enabled advances in these disciplines. One domain that has been underserved by the advanced engineering methodologies coming from other disciplines is the domain of design for the developing world. Exploring the use of engineering domain knowledge to alleviate poverty is a valuable study that will open opportunities to use engineering to benefit resource poor individuals. This paper explores the domain knowledge of modularity and multi-objective optimization and applies it to the domain of design for the developing world by introducing the concept of collaborative products to assist the resource poor individuals. Can knowledge from one domain be used in a new domain, and if so, what would it look like? In this paper, a general methodology is presented, followed by a simple example to illustrate the design of a collaborative product for the developing world. The paper suggests that by using domain knowledge from a non-related domain paired with the method presented, products can be designed and optimized for collaborative performance with potential to both generate new income and save money for the end customers

The molecular structure of the surface of water–ethanol mixtures

Mixtures of water and alcohol exhibit an excess surface concentration of alcohol as a result of the amphiphilic nature of the alcohol molecule, which has important consequences for the physicochemical properties of water–alcohol mixtures. Here we use a combination of intensity vibrational sum-frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopy, heterodyne-detected VSFG (HD-VSFG), and core-level photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) to investigate the molecular properties of water–ethanol mixtures at the air–liquid interface. We find that increasing the ethanol concentration up to a molar fraction (MF) of 0.1 leads to a steep increase of the surface density of the ethanol molecules, and an increased ordering of the ethanol molecules at the surface. When the ethanol concentration is further increased, the surface density of ethanol remains more or less constant, while the orientation of the ethanol molecules becomes increasingly disordered. The used techniques of PES and VSFG provide complementary information on the density and orientation of ethanol molecules at the surface of water, thus providing new information on the molecular-scale properties of the surface of water–alcohol mixtures over a wide range of compositions. This information is invaluable in understanding the chemical and physical properties of water–alcohol mixtures

Nanoparticle-Induced Charge Redistribution of the Air–Water Interface

The air–water interface is believed to carry a negative electrostatic potential that is nontrivial to invert through pH, electrolyte, or electrolyte strength. Here, through a combined experimental and theoretical study, we show that the close approach of a negatively charged nanoparticle induces a charge redistribution of the air–water interface. Using different electrolytes to control the interfacial potential of the nanoparticles, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results establish that nanoparticles with a more negative zeta potential adsorb closer to the air–water interface than do the same particles with a less negative zeta potential. The short-ranged attractive force between two (nominally) negative surfaces is caused by charge redistribution under the strong electric field of the nanoparticle that locally inverts the charge density of the air–water interface from negative to positive. The nature of the nanoparticle’s counterions modulates the attractive interaction, which thus could be used to control reactivity, stability, and nanoparticle self-assembly at air–water interfaces