Does technology and Innovation Management improve Market Position? Empirical Evidence from Innovating Firms in South Africa

There is a growing recognition of the central role of technology and knowledge management for market success of organizations. Little is empirically know, however, about this relationship. Drawing on the South African Innovation Survey, a unique dataset on innovative behavior of South African firms in manufacturing and services, this paper investigates the question to what extent and in which ways do technology and innovation management activities affect firms’ market position. Findings show that conducting technology strategy activities pays out. Moreover, especially a combination of internal and external technology audits seems to be beneficial for organizational performance

Dynamics, stratospheric ozone, and climate change

Dynamics affects the distribution and abundance of stratospheric ozone directly through transport of ozone itself and indirectly through its effect on ozone chemistry via temperature and transport of other chemical species. Dynamical processes must be considered in order to understand past ozone changes, especially in the northern hemisphere where there appears to be significant low-frequency variability which can look “trend-like” on decadal time scales. A major challenge is to quantify the predictable, or deterministic, component of past ozone changes. Over the coming century, changes in climate will affect the expected recovery of ozone. For policy reasons it is important to be able to distinguish and separately attribute the effects of ozone-depleting substances and greenhouse gases on both ozone and climate. While the radiative-chemical effects can be relatively easily identified, this is not so evident for dynamics — yet dynamical changes (e.g., changes in the Brewer-Dobson circulation) could have a first-order effect on ozone over particular regions. Understanding the predictability and robustness of such dynamical changes represents another major challenge. Chemistry-climate models have recently emerged as useful tools for addressing these questions, as they provide a self-consistent representation of dynamical aspects of climate and their coupling to ozone chemistry. We can expect such models to play an increasingly central role in the study of ozone and climate in the future, analogous to the central role of global climate models in the study of tropospheric climate change

Firm financial performance following mergers

This study, using a sample of 162 firms and industry-adjusted cash flow returns on market value of assets as performance criteria, examines the financial performance of the combined target and acquiring firms over a 5-year post-merger period in relation to the corresponding pre-merger period. We find that post-merger performance is negatively associated with relative target size and positively associated with long-term incentive compensation plans. Firms that are in dissimilar industries also show improved performance, as do firms that merged prior to 1983. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers

Petri Net Extensions for the Development of MIMO Net Models of Automated Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, the development of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) subnets is discussed. Hierarchical TimeExtended Petri Nets (H-EPNs), a form of extended PNs allow the development of structured MIMO subnets to model complex system functionalities. In addition, H-EPNs also provide a means to convert such a MIMO structure to a Single Input Single Output (SISO) net that can easily be integrated within a top-down system decomposition. The activator arc definition is instrumental in deriving this transformation. The activator arc definition and the H-EPN subnet definitions are integrated with the SPNP package 1 for simulation and analysis purposes. The activator arc extension allows a truly hybrid approach to PN based systems modeling, analysis and development of complex PN models of automated manufacturing systems. The case study emphasizes the usefulness of this extension in studying important issues such as static priority scheduling, dynamic failure recognition and rescheduling i..