Strategic Turnaround in the Paper Industry: A New Model for the Procurement of Recycled Paper

In recent decades, the paper industry has undergone many changes, making this industry more lucrative, “greener”, and thus more attractive. Today, recycled paper is a key raw material for paper production. However, this intense growth has also increased the number of market players, making competition more intense and dynamic and causing frequent turmoil. In such an environment, planning procurement and forecasting the price of recycled paper is a big challenge, even for highly experienced procurement managers. In addition, paper production itself is a dynamic process that requires all key grades of recycled paper to be available at all times. Accordingly, managing the optimal level of recycled paper stocks is also a difficult task faced by the procurement unit. The goal of this paper is to address these challenges by developing a new model for the sustainable procurement of recycled paper in the paper industry with the help of the principles of strategic management. Specifically, we aim to enhance our understanding of the factors driving the complexity of recycled paper procurement management. To this end, we conducted a comparative case study in four European companies. To build cases, we collected secondary data on the sampled companies as well as primary data from interviews with top executives at these companies. On the basis of the results from the comparative case study, we propose a new model for the procurement of recycled paper that helps increase the accuracy of forecasting price trends and by extension overall procurement performance. In a nutshell, this paper seeks to improve procurement processes by reducing the complexity of the enterprise procurement unit as well as by offering guidelines for the maintenance of optimal stock levels of recycled paper

Towards Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Approach in International Projects—Review of South-South Cooperation: A Case Study of Chinese Projects in Angola

This paper offers a modified theoretical approach towards corporate social responsibility (CSR), adjusted to the specifics of South-South cooperation (SSC). Developing economies are becoming important actors and the number of their companies willing to implement projects in other developing nations is rising. This entrance of developing countries into international projects poses a question whether their companies adhere to basic CSR obligations and their CSR approaches are strategically oriented or if they present an umbrella, covering up their activities. Though the issue of CSR in SSC projects attracts attention, the number of studies on this topic is limited. This paper presents an attempt to work out a theoretical basis to a CSR approach in SSC projects by adjusting a widely accepted CSR model of Carroll (1979, 1991) to the specific conditions of developing economies. For the purpose of this paper, the authors analyzed CSR activities of Chinese companies in Angola. The results lead to the conclusion that governments of countries, participating in SSC projects need a more active approach towards making basic CSR responsibilities (economic, ethical, legal) legally binding. This will allow such international projects to be more beneficial not only for directly interested parties (companies, governments), but also for the local community

KEY ASPECTS OF MANAGING AN INNOVATION PROJECT IN THE EU FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME HORIZON 2020

The program EU Horizon 2020 (ec.europa.eu) is the largest source of resources for all legal entities from Europe, with the budget of 80 billion €. It is possible to use donations from the EU for various proposals and themes, from the 91 calls for projects, with subjects differing from sustainable transport to the innovation support of the SME sector. A group of Serbian authors decided to enter into somewhat of an ambitious endeavour (authors had individual experience on projects), they decided to send a project proposal in the framework of the „SME Instrument“ call, which is directed to inovation support project in the SME sector. The projects that are proposed for the financing by the EU Horizon 2020 program, are in the group of complex and very specific projects, so the authors presented the review of key aspects of projects that are engaged in realization of the inovation process that starts with a certain idea on paper, and ends with a verified product which is placed on the competitive EU market. The special chapter of this paper deals with the sinergy of the inovation project explorers, which must answer to the multidisciplinarity of research problems. The possibilities are examined in the research of the technical-technological sciences, by using organizational-informatic tools, developed for the needs of managing projects. The main use of this work for readers are illuminating of numerous unknown technical details regarding the proposal itself, and the process of connecting with the project partners, because the large number of proposals quits off right at the beginning. Then contribution is reflected in the fact that the paper signifies a sort of basis for a knowledge base, which can be served to higher education institutions and economy to focus a part of their intentions on lifting their own capacity for the struggle with the massive competition of EU that is expected in years and decades to come

Reducing Risks in Energy Innovation Projects: Complexity Theory Perspective

The aim of this paper is to contribute to existing work on project risk management, and energy innovation projects, using the lens of complexity theory. By regarding energy innovation projects as complex adaptive systems, and linking complexity theory elements to the possibilities for reducing risks of energy innovation projects, the authors conducted empirical research on a representative sample of 100 subjects. The authors used a questionnaire that was formed on the basis of a previously designed research model, which unifies several different management fields, and a large number of phenomena previously studied independently. Therefore, it has a holistic approach to the topic. The results of this research suggest that considering the elements of complexity theory had a positive impact on reducing risks in energy innovation projects, in all analyzed aspects including specific, operational, and especially regarding social and behavioral aspects. This paper strives to support and encourage better results in energy innovation projects by reducing their risks, and hopes to bring additional value by introducing a new risk philosophy, based on complexity theory. Lessons learnt regarding each issue of this research are points of concern for project managers