Industrial cluster formation in European regions. U.S. cluster templates and Austrian evidence.

The paper will be organized in the following manner. We first provide a concise review of how industrial trade clusters were developed from available I/O coefficients (see box), including how regional industrial data may be embedded within their "templates". Second, we will review the steps taken, using available industrial concordances, that permit regional data from other advanced national industrial systems to be embedded within these templates. Third, we will illustrate the results of applying the U.S. template for the motor vehicle industrial trade cluster to regions in both Austria and North Carolina over 5-10 year time periods. Finally, we will offer some speculative observations about what the results may indicate about regional cluster development in these two regions. (authors' abstract, ed. M.Putz)Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

Knowledge intensive industries, networks, and collective learning

Knowledge has become a key source of competitiveness for advanced regions and nations, indicating a transformation of capitalism towards “knowledge-driven economies“. Know ledge intensive sectors in production and in services have a lead in this respect, they can be considered as role models for the future. The innovation process, the mechanisms of knowledge exchange and the respective linkages in those industries differ quite markedly from those in other sectors. Clustering and local knowledge spillovers are frequently stated phenomena, although it is still unclear to what extent regional networks and collective learning are indeed relevant and what the mechanisms of knowledge flows are. The aim of the paper is to examine in a differentiated way the character of the innovation process and the ype of interactions in those industries, in order to find out how strongly they are related to regional, national and international innovation systems. We will analyse the relevant types of actors, the respective mechanisms of knowledge exchange and the importance of collective learning and innovation. The paper will discuss relevant theoretical concepts and available evidence and it will be based on an empirical analysis for Austria. The data base is a recent firm survey which was carried out in the year 2003. From this analysis conclusions regarding the role of regional and other innovation systems for the development of knowledge-based industries will be drawn.

Effects of the internet on the spatial structure of innovation networks

Research on innovation systems and innovative milieux has shown that the innovation process of companies is strongly interrelated with other firms and organisations. Internet is a new information and communication technology with a considerable potential to change such relationships and networks. An often held expectation is that the Internet will allow firms to interact with distant partners more easily and that as a consequence innovation networks become independent from geographical space. A contrasting view argues that local and regional networks and innovation systems will keep their importance, due to the fact that tacit knowledge, face to face communication and institutional factors are still of key relevance. In the paper we are going to investigate to which extent and how the Internet changes innovation network of companies. Do firms using the Internet intensively have other innovation partners at wider spatial scales than firms which hardly use this communication technology? We have analysed the effects of the Internet on the innovation-related knowledge flows of firms by conducting a telephone survey, personal interviews and a WWW-survey of Austrian firms. Preliminary analysis shows that there is significant variance between firms depending on the relative importance of different types of knowledge communicated and the type of firm (e.g., science-based firms versus traditional manufacturing firms). Overall, there is evidence that the Internet made relations to innovation partners more efficient. However, the configuration of networks (types and location of partners) did not change as much as is often expected in the literature.

Key Messages der Konferenz zur 5. Multiprojektmanagement-Studie

StudieDie 5. Benchmarkingstudie in Multiprojektmanagement durch die Technische Universität Berlin und die ZHAW School of Management an Law wird demnächst abgeschlossen. Untersucht werden die Themen "Project Portfolio Dynamics", "Risk & Opportunity Management im Multiprojektumfeld" sowie "Kommunikation im Multiprojektumfeld"

Why not just switch on the light?: light and its versatile applications in the field of nanomedicine

Over the last decade, the emerging field of nanomedicine has undergone rapid progresses. Different internal and external stimuli like pH, temperature, radiation, ultrasound or light have been introduced to expand the diagnostic and therapeutic options of various applications within the field. This review focuses on the novel application of light in the field of nanomedicine as a mechanism to control drug delivery, release and biochemical and genetic functionality at the target. The field of functional nanomaterials for medicine, and in particular of light responsive nanocarriers, polymers and biomolecules offer new therapeutic options but also requires substantial further research to render this approach broadly applicable in clinical practic

A Benchmark Framework for Data Compression Techniques

Lightweight data compression is frequently applied in main memory database systems to improve query performance. The data processed by such systems is highly diverse. Moreover, there is a high number of existing lightweight compression techniques. Therefore, choosing the optimal technique for a given dataset is non-trivial. Existing approaches are based on simple rules, which do not suffice for such a complex decision. In contrast, our vision is a cost-based approach. However, this requires a detailed cost model, which can only be obtained from a systematic benchmarking of many compression algorithms on many different datasets. A naïve benchmark evaluates every algorithm under consideration separately. This yields many redundant steps and is thus inefficient. We propose an efficient and extensible benchmark framework for compression techniques. Given an ensemble of algorithms, it minimizes the overall run time of the evaluation. We experimentally show that our approach outperforms the naïve approach

Enjoy FRDM - play with a schema-flexible RDBMS

Relational database management systems build on the closed world assumption requiring upfront modeling of a usually stable schema. However, a growing number of today's database applications are characterized by self-descriptive data. The schema of self-descriptive data is very dynamic and prone to frequent changes; a situation which is always troublesome to handle in relational systems. This demo presents the relational database management system FRDM. With flexible relational tables FRDM greatly simplifies the management of self-descriptive data in a relational database system. Self-descriptive data can reside directly next to traditionally modeled data and both can be queried together using SQL. This demo presents the various features of FRDM and provides first-hand experience of the newly gained freedom in relational database systems