Entrepreneurial Orientation and Second-order Competences: The Moderating Role of Environmental Hostility and Organizational Structure

The influence of Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) on a firm’s performance and success is broadly recognized. Similarly, second-order competences—defined as the firm’s competence to build new competences—as a critical resource of a firm’s competitive advantage are also important to a firm’s success. However, the direct association between EO and second-order competences remains largely elusive. Our study investigates in what ways and how EO associates with second-order R&D and Marketing competences while accounting for specific contingencies. We mainly argue that a firm’s manifestation of EO behavior benefits second-order competences; yet, while such gained effects are enhanced as environment hostility increases, these benefits are diminished by organizational structure. Analysis of data, collected using a web-based survey from executives of firms from different industries, using regression modeling, provide support to our main arguments and some support to the contingency factors. Important and novel theoretical and managerial implications emerge from this study

Can Corporate Entrepreneurship Form Second-order Competences? The Role of Internal and External Contingencies

The influence of Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE), and second-order competences (SOC) on a firm’s performance are largely acknowledged. Yet, the association between CE and SOC remains largely under-investigated, less so potential moderators of their relationship. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we study whether and how second-order R&D and Marketing competences are influenced by CE. We theoretically argue, and empirically test, the positive influence of CE on SOC. We also find that while such gains are enhanced as environmental hostility increases, they are diminished by the interplay of organizational structure. Data collected from executives of firms from knowledge-intensive industries, analyzed using regression modeling, supports our predicted model's main arguments and offers some support for contingency relationships. Several novel theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

Taming hierarchical connectors

Building and maintaining complex systems requires good software engineering practices, including code modularity and reuse. The same applies in the context of coordination of complex component-based systems. This paper investigates how to verify properties of complex coordination patterns built hierarchically, i.e., built from composing blocks that are in turn built from smaller blocks. Most existing approaches to verify properties flatten these hierarchical models before the verification process, losing the hierarchical structure. We propose an approach to verify hierarchical models using containers as actions; more concretely, containers interacting with their neighbours. We present a dynamic modal logic tailored for hierarchical connectors, using Reo and Petri Nets to illustrate our approach. We realise our approach via a prototype implementation available online to verify hierarchical Reo connectors, encoding connectors and formulas into mCRL2 specifications and formulas.publishe

Communicating Processes with Data for Supervisory Coordination

We employ supervisory controllers to safely coordinate high-level discrete(-event) behavior of distributed components of complex systems. Supervisory controllers observe discrete-event system behavior, make a decision on allowed activities, and communicate the control signals to the involved parties. Models of the supervisory controllers can be automatically synthesized based on formal models of the system components and a formalization of the safe coordination (control) requirements. Based on the obtained models, code generation can be used to implement the supervisory controllers in software, on a PLC, or an embedded (micro)processor. In this article, we develop a process theory with data that supports a model-based systems engineering framework for supervisory coordination. We employ communication to distinguish between the different flows of information, i.e., observation and supervision, whereas we employ data to specify the coordination requirements more compactly, and to increase the expressivity of the framework. To illustrate the framework, we remodel an industrial case study involving coordination of maintenance procedures of a printing process of a high-tech Oce printer.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

Acidosis and Deafness in Patients with Recessive Mutations in FOXI1

Maintenance of the composition of inner ear fluid and regulation of electrolytes and acid-base homeostasis in the collecting duct system of the kidney require an overlapping set of membrane transport proteins regulated by the forkhead transcription factor FOXI1. In two unrelated consanguineous families, we identified three patients with novel homozygous missense mutations in FOXI1 (p.L146F and p.R213P) predicted to affect the highly conserved DNA binding domain. Patients presented with early-onset sensorineural deafness and distal renal tubular acidosis. In cultured cells, the mutations reduced the DNA binding affinity of FOXI1, which hence, failed to adequately activate genes crucial for normal inner ear function and acidbase regulation in the kidney. A substantial proportion of patients with a clinical diagnosis of inherited distal renal tubular acidosis has no identified causative mutations in currently known disease genes. Our data suggest that recessive mutations in FOXI1 can explain the disease in a subset of these patients

Partially distributed coordination with Reo and constraint automata

Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Service orchestration with priority constraints

Business process management is an operational management approach that focuses on improving business processes. Business processes, i.e., collections of important activities in an organization, are represented in the form of a workflow, an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activities amenable to automated analysis and control. Priority is an important concept in modeling workflows. We need priority to model cancelable and compensable tasks within transactional business processes. We use the Reo coordination language to model and formally analyze workflows. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based approach to formalize priority in Reo. We introduce special channels to propagate and block priority flows, define their semantics as constraints, and model priority propagation as a constraint satisfaction problem

Twenty years of coordination technologies: State-of-the-art and perspectives

Since complexity of inter- and intra-systems interactions is steadily increasing in modern application scenarios (e.g., the IoT), coordination technologies are required to take a crucial step towards maturity. In this paper we look back at the history of the COORDINATION conference in order to shed light on the current status of the coordination technologies there proposed throughout the years, in an attempt to understand success stories, limitations, and possibly reveal the gap between actual technologies, theoretical models, and novel application needs