Corporate use of competitive intelligence persists despite its high risks

Firms face high costs, stigma and unproven benefits, argue Patrick Reinmoeller and Shaz Ansar

Radical Innovation, Paradigm Shift and Incumbent’s Dilemma The Case of the Auto Industry

Radical innovations often upend the incumbents firms and even render them obsolete (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Benner, 2010), as these firms often have great difficulties in addressing the challenge posed by these innovations due to inertia (Ghemawat, 1991), tendencies to exploit existing competences (Levinthal & March, 1993; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008), organizational rigidity (Beonard-Barton, 1992), complacency and internal culture (Tellis, 2006), problems in the incentive system and resource allocation process (Christensen, 1997), and gap in the organizational capabilities required for embracing the new technology (Henderson, 2006; Tushman & Anderson, 1986). However, as radical innovations become increasingly frequent across industries, responding to this serious threat has become a strategic priority for many incumbent firms.Research shows that incumbents survive or even prosper in the face of radical innovations by forging effective partnerships with challenger firms (Ansari & Krop, 2012), establishing a separate entity to fend off the threat (Christensen, 1997; Christensen, Raynor & McDonald, 2015), better evaluation and investment approach (Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), appropriately configuring organizational form and structure (Ansari & Krop, 2012), coupling their basic research function with applied research functions (Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), possessing downstream complementary assets critical for the commercialization of the new technology (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), and more importantly by possessing a high willingness to cannibalize their core business (Chandy and Tellis, 1998). Incumbents can also thrive or overcome the so-called incumbent’s curse by pioneering radical innovations by themselves (Chandy and Tellis, 2000).Previous studies on radical innovations focus primarily on a single product (e.g., Chandy and Tellis, 1998, 2000), technological or business model innovation (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Christensen, 1997; Hill & Rothaermel, 2003). These innovations may have the potential to shrink the incumbents’ marketspace, e.g., Gemesis’ synthetic diamonds challenging the natural diamonds (McAdams and Reavis, 2008), EasyJet challenging mainstream airlines such as BA, Netflix challenging the traditional movie rental business (Leonhartdt, 2006), or displace the incumbent market leader, e.g., IBM PC and its clones destroyed minicomputer makers such as DEC, Wang, Apollo and so on. Yet, they do not often disrupt the entire industry. But in recent years, more industry-wide disruptions have occurs due to emerge of not a single radical innovation but an array of them simultaneously from within or outside of a particular industry. In this process, it is not just the incumbent market leader or a few incumbent firms but the entire value chain, ecosystem or industry get displaced, the so-called paradigm shift, e.g., GPS device by software companies such as Google and Waze, desktop computing by mobile devices, and the traditional auto industry centered around the internal combustion engine by peer-to-peer service provider (e.g., Uber), consumer electronics (e.g., Apple), battery-driven vehicle (e.g., Tesla), and software companies (e.g., Google, Amazon). When this happens, incumbents are not fighting against a particular firm or a few firms that have introduced radical innovations based on similar technologies, but an army of very diverse entrants that are disrupting the entire industries from various directions, some of which are from remote industries with vastly different organizational capabilities, mindset and business model. How incumbents of the existing ecosystem should best cope with the massive and dramatic industry-level disruption induced by multiple radical innovations along a number of fronts or paradigm shift has largely remained unexamined. In the face of paradigm shift, can the above mentioned strategies or tactics for incumbents to combat single radical innovation or firm be adequate to deal with the fundamental existential threat? If not, what should be the appropriate strategies for them to survive or even thrive in the advent of a paradigm shift? In this paper, we attempt to sketch out a research framework to investigate this important issue

LIPIcs

Synchronous programs are easy to specify because the side effects of an operation are finished by the time the invocation of the operation returns to the caller. Asynchronous programs, on the other hand, are difficult to specify because there are side effects due to pending computation scheduled as a result of the invocation of an operation. They are also difficult to verify because of the large number of possible interleavings of concurrent computation threads. We present synchronization, a new proof rule that simplifies the verification of asynchronous programs by introducing the fiction, for proof purposes, that asynchronous operations complete synchronously. Synchronization summarizes an asynchronous computation as immediate atomic effect. Modular verification is enabled via pending asynchronous calls in atomic summaries, and a complementary proof rule that eliminates pending asynchronous calls when components and their specifications are composed. We evaluate synchronization in the context of a multi-layer refinement verification methodology on a collection of benchmark programs

Review on Security Aspects for Cloud Architecture

Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing and popular technology in the field of computing. As the concept of cloud computing was introduced in 2006. Since then large number of IT industries join the queue to develop many cloud services and put sensitive information over cloud. In fact cloud computing is no doubt the great innovation in the field of computing but at the same time also poses many challenges. Since a large number of organizations migrate their business to cloud and hence it appears as an attractive target for the malicious attack. The purpose of the paper is to review the available literature for security concerns and highlight a relationship between vulnerabilities, attacks and threats in SaaS model. A mapping is being presented to highlight the impact of vulnerabilities and attacks

IST Austria Technical Report

Synchronous programs are easy to specify because the side effects of an operation are finished by the time the invocation of the operation returns to the caller. Asynchronous programs, on the other hand, are difficult to specify because there are side effects due to pending computation scheduled as a result of the invocation of an operation. They are also difficult to verify because of the large number of possible interleavings of concurrent asynchronous computation threads. We show that specifications and correctness proofs for asynchronous programs can be structured by introducing the fiction, for proof purposes, that intermediate, non-quiescent states of asynchronous operations can be ignored. Then, the task of specification becomes relatively simple and the task of verification can be naturally decomposed into smaller sub-tasks. The sub-tasks iteratively summarize, guided by the structure of an asynchronous program, the atomic effect of non-atomic operations and the synchronous effect of asynchronous operations. This structuring of specifications and proofs corresponds to the introduction of multiple layers of stepwise refinement for asynchronous programs. We present the first proof rule, called synchronization, to reduce asynchronous invocations on a lower layer to synchronous invocations on a higher layer. We implemented our proof method in CIVL and evaluated it on a collection of benchmark programs

Spin-Peierls transition in TiOCl

Temperature-dependent x-ray diffraction of the low-dimensional spin 1/2 quantum magnet TiOCl shows that the phase transition at T_{c2} = 90 K corresponds to a lowering of the lattice symmetry. Below T_{c1} = 66 K a twofold superstructure develops, that indicates the formation of spin-singlet pairs via direct exchange between neighboring Ti atoms, while the role of superexchange is found to be negligible. TiOCl thus is identified as a spin-Peierls system of pure 1D chains of atoms. The first-order character of the transition at T_{c1} is explained by the competition between the structurally deformed state below T_{c2} and the spin-Peierls state below T_{c1}.Comment: Phys. Rev. B (Rapid Communications) in pres

Roles of two successive phase transitions in new spin-Peierls system TiOBr

In this sturdy, we determine the roles of two successive phase transitions in the new spin-Peierls system TiOBr by electron and synchrotron X-ray diffraction analyses. Results show an incommensurate superstructure along the h- and k-directions between Tc1=27K and Tc2=47K, and a twofold superstructure which is related to a spin-Peierls lattice distortion below Tc1. The diffuse scattering observed above Tc2 indicates that a structural correlation develops at a high temperature. We conclude that Tc2 is a second-order lock-in temperature, which is related to the spin-Peierls lattice distortion with the incommensurate structure, and that Tc1 is from incommensurate to commensurate phase transition temperature accompanying the first-order spin-Peierls lattice distortion.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure