444 research outputs found
An Audit of export services in England: developing business focused support
One of the key thresholds in the development of small and medium sized enterprises is exporting and trading internationally. A brief review of the academic and practitioner literature highlights a number of benefits associated with exporting that include exposure to differing ways of ‘how to do’ business and opportunities for the development of joint ventures and strategic alliances. However, several regions within the United Kingdom perceive that they have too few SMEs who trade internationally. Recent estimates suggest that approximately three per cent of the SMEs in the United Kingdom are actively exporting (Bank of England, 1999). Government policy makers have responded to such concerns by providing a range of support programmes to increase the number of SMEs who trade internationally and enhance the skills and capabilities of those SMEs who export, so that they can efficiently and effectively manage the exporting and market development process.
Therefore, in the majority of the English regions, there are a range of publicly funded organisations providing advice, consultancy, information and training to SMEs wishing to trade internationally and those businesses already exporting. In addition, SMEs can access a number of export services from private sector organisations such as banks, accountants, freight forwarders and export agents.
There has been no overall national ‘stocktake’ or audit of such provision. However, the need for such a stocktake is becoming increasingly important due to the introduction of a number of new support organisations into the institutional landscape and the re-organisation and re-branding of British Trade International as Trade Partners UK and the appointment of a series of Regional International Trade Directors. The introduction of the Small Business Service will have a major impact on the coverage and nature of provision for exporting SMEs within each of the English regions. The introduction of the Small Business Service, however, provides an opportunity to explore and examine alternative configurations of small business support and the types of organisation that are best placed to satisfy the needs of exporting SMEs.
This paper presents the key findings to emerge from an audit of export services within each of the English regions. Based on a research and development project undertaken in conjunction with Trade Partners UK, the paper offers insights into:
• The coverage of export services available to SMEs within England;
• The effectiveness and appropriateness of current configuration of export services;
• The ways in which the effectiveness of the current configuration of export services could be enhanced.
The audit was based on a series of face-to-face and telephone interviews with local, regional and national providers of export provision. A key argument within the paper is that effective configurations of export and trade development support arise from insights into, and appropriate responses to, the exporting and trade development process as experienced by SMEs. The paper concludes with a number of implications in terms of how business-driven forms of support can be developed.</p
Heterogeneous nucleation near a metastable vapour-liquid transition: the effect of wetting transitions
Phase transformations such as freezing typically start with heterogeneous
nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation near a wetting transition, of a
crystalline phase is studied. The wetting transition occurs at or near a
vapour-liquid transition which occurs in a metastable fluid. The fluid is
metastable with respect to crystallisation, and it is the crystallisation of
this fluid phase that we are interested in. At a wetting transition a thick
layer of a liquid phase forms at a surface in contact with the vapour phase.
The crystalline nucleus is then immersed in this liquid layer, which reduces
the free energy barrier to nucleation and so dramatically increases the
nucleation rate. The variation in the rate of heterogeneous nucleation close to
wetting transitions is calculated for systems in which the longest-range forces
are dispersion forces.Comment: 11 pages including 3 figure
Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components
Inside living cells are complex mixtures of thousands of components. It is
hopeless to try to characterise all the individual interactions in these
mixtures. Thus, we develop a statistical approach to approximating them, and
examine the conditions under which the mixtures phase separate. The approach
approximates the matrix of second virial coefficients of the mixture by a
random matrix, and determines the stability of the mixture from the spectrum of
such random matrices.Comment: 4 pages, uses RevTeX 4.
A coil-globule transition of a semiflexible polymer driven by the addition of spherical particles
The phase behaviour of a single large semiflexible polymer immersed in a
suspension of spherical particles is studied. All interactions are simple
excluded volume interactions and the diameter of the spherical particles is an
order of magnitude larger than the diameter of the polymer. The spherical
particles induce a quite long ranged depletion attraction between the segments
of the polymer and this induces a continuous coil-globule transition in the
polymer. This behaviour gives an indication of the condensing effect of
macromolecular crowding on DNA.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Phase behaviour of a model of colloidal particles with a fluctuating internal state
Colloidal particles are not simple rigid particles, in general an isolated
particle is a system with many degrees of freedom in its own right, e.g., the
counterions around a charged colloidal particle.The behaviour of model
colloidal particles, with a simple phenomenological model to account for these
degrees of freedom, is studied. It is found that the interaction between the
particles is not pairwise additive. It is even possible that the interaction
between a triplet of particles is attractive while the pair interaction is
repulsive. When this is so the liquid phase is either stable only in a small
region of the phase diagram or absent altogether.Comment: 12 pages including 4 figure
Effects of polymer polydispersity on the phase behaviour of colloid-polymer mixtures
We study the equilibrium behaviour of a mixture of monodisperse hard sphere
colloids and polydisperse non-adsorbing polymers at their -point, using
the Asakura-Oosawa model treated within the free-volume approximation. Our
focus is the experimentally relevant scenario where the distribution of polymer
chain lengths across the system is fixed. Phase diagrams are calculated using
the moment free energy method, and we show that the mean polymer size at which gas-liquid phase separation first occurs decreases with increasing
polymer polydispersity . Correspondingly, at fixed mean polymer size,
polydispersity favours gas-liquid coexistence but delays the onset of
fluid-solid separation. On the other hand, we find that systems with different
but the same {\em mass-averaged} polymer chain length have nearly
polydispersity-independent phase diagrams. We conclude with a comparison to
previous calculations for a semi-grandcanonical scenario, where the polymer
chemical potentials are imposed, which predicted that fluid-solid coexistence
was over gas-liquid in some areas of the phase diagram. Our results show that
this somewhat counter-intuitive result arose because the actual polymer size
distribution in the system is shifted to smaller sizes relative to the polymer
reservoir distribution.Comment: Changes in v2: sketch in Figure 1 corrected, other figures improved;
added references to experimental work and discussion of mapping from polymer
chain length to effective radiu
Interactions between proteins bound to biomembranes
We study a physical model for the interaction between general inclusions
bound to fluid membranes that possess finite tension, as well as the usual
bending rigidity. We are motivated by an interest in proteins bound to cell
membranes that apply forces to these membranes, due to either entropic or
direct chemical interactions. We find an exact analytic solution for the
repulsive interaction between two similar circularly symmetric inclusions. This
repulsion extends over length scales of order tens of nanometers, and contrasts
with the membrane-mediated contact attraction for similar inclusions on
tensionless membranes. For non circularly symmetric inclusions we study the
small, algebraically long-ranged, attractive contribution to the force that
arises. We discuss the relevance of our results to biological phenomena, such
as the budding of caveolae from cell membranes and the striations that are
observed on their coats.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure
Domestication alone does not lead to inequality: intergenerational wealth transmission among horticulturalists
We present empirical measures of wealth inequality and its intergenerational transmission among four horticulturalist populations. Wealth is construed broadly as embodied somatic and neural capital, including body size, fertility and cultural knowledge, material capital such as land and household wealth, and relational capital in the form of coalitional support and field labor. Wealth inequality is moderate for most forms of wealth, and intergenerational wealth transmission is low for material resources and moderate for embodied and relational wealth. Our analysis suggests that domestication alone does not transform social structure; rather, the presence of scarce, defensible resources may be required before inequality and wealth transmission patterns resemble the familiar pattern in more complex societies. Land ownership based on usufruct and low‐intensity cultivation, especially in the context of other economic activities such as hunting and fishing, is associated with more egalitarian wealth distributions as found among hunter‐gatherers
Free energy of colloidal particles at the surface of sessile drops
The influence of finite system size on the free energy of a spherical
particle floating at the surface of a sessile droplet is studied both
analytically and numerically. In the special case that the contact angle at the
substrate equals a capillary analogue of the method of images is
applied in order to calculate small deformations of the droplet shape if an
external force is applied to the particle. The type of boundary conditions for
the droplet shape at the substrate determines the sign of the capillary
monopole associated with the image particle. Therefore, the free energy of the
particle, which is proportional to the interaction energy of the original
particle with its image, can be of either sign, too. The analytic solutions,
given by the Green's function of the capillary equation, are constructed such
that the condition of the forces acting on the droplet being balanced and of
the volume constraint are fulfilled. Besides the known phenomena of attraction
of a particle to a free contact line and repulsion from a pinned one, we
observe a local free energy minimum for the particle being located at the drop
apex or at an intermediate angle, respectively. This peculiarity can be traced
back to a non-monotonic behavior of the Green's function, which reflects the
interplay between the deformations of the droplet shape and the volume
constraint.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figure
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