Attaining organisational agility through competitive intelligence: the roles of strategic flexibility and organisational innovation

Organizational agility can play an important role in an organization’s emergent strategy for survival in an increasingly competitive market-place. This paper examines the impact of competitive intelligence on organizational agility through strategic flexibility and organizational innovation. We gathered data from 83 agency managers of insurance companies in Iran, using random simple sampling. These were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS). Competitive intelligence was found to have an indirect influence on organizational agility through strategic flexibility, which was a mediating variable. Though competitive intelligence influenced organizational innovation organizational innovation did not have a significant effect on organizational agility. Our research contributes to the organizational agility literature by showing that organizational agility is influenced by competitive intelligence but organizational innovation is not as significant as has been assumed, instead strategic flexibility is a more important factor and suggests the human factor may be key to a successful strategy

Application of peleg model to study effect of water temperature and storage time on rehydration kinetics of air dried potato cubes,”

Abstract−− Potato cubes (1×1×1 cm) were dried at 65ºC in hot air oven. Samples were rehydrated by immersion in water during different periods of time and temperatures (23±2ºC and 100±2ºC). Rehydration kinetic was monitored by measuring samples' weights at regular intervals. All measurements were repeated after two months to study effect of shelf life on rehydration. Peleg's model was successfully applied to experimental data and the corresponding parameters were obtained and correlated with temperature. The parameters of the model were found to be greatly affected by the water temperature during rehydration. Rehydration of samples was also dependent to water temperature. In particular, temperature increase led to higher final moisture contents in the samples after two months storage. On the other hand, higher temperatures decreased the moisture content of the samples at the end of first month which could be related to the structural changes in potato due to higher temperatures