Knowledge-intensive business services as an element of learning regions - the case of Baden-Wurttemberg

In the globalizing process, the production of knowledge and the management of information gain increasing strategic importance for the competitiveness of regions. Theoretical conceptions of the learning economy and the learning region emphasise that the capability to learn is crucial for the economic success of firms, regions and national economies. Given this background, the proposal will focus on the significance of knowledge?intensive business services for innovation and learning. So far, knowledge about innovative activities of service firms and their significance in the technological change is existent only to a low extent. For a long time, research concerning technological change as well as innovations focussed on the manufacturing industry and the development and transfer of technological knowledge. The dynamic growth of business?related services has now been documented in numerous studies not only in Germany, but also in other European countries. Their role in innovativeness and competitiveness in the current situation of structural change has, however, received little attention. A major reason is that it is very difficult to establish the quantitative contribution these services make to innovation at both the macro and micro levels. The present state of the statistics for services and innovation make it impossible to determine what the contribution is. From a qualitative point of view, however, this service segment is an important element in the innovation system. The contribution of knowledge?intensive business service firms to innovation is not just the result of their own innovative activities. It also results from the indirect and positive feedback effects which originate on the demand side as a result of the use of the services by client firms. The speech will focus on specific development trends of knowledge?intensive business services in the regional innovation system of Baden?Wuerttemberg, and the role of these services in the present regional restructuring process will be examined.

The organisational decomposition of the innovation process : what does it mean for the global distribution of innovation activities?

The starting point for this paper is a fundamental change currently occurring in the way innovation is organised in the developed countries: it tended to be centralised at or near headquarters but is now much more decentralised within the company. Equally if not more significant, innovation activities that used to be carried out inhouse by innovating firms themselves are carried out by independent suppliers of knowledge intensive business services, or are transferred to key suppliers. The question driving this paper is how this ‘organisational decomposition of the innovation process’ changes the global distribution of innovation of activities. Does it contribute to their global dispersal to the developing world or does it strengthen the existing concentration? Since this is uncharted territory the paper seeks guidance from theory and lays out an agenda for empirical research. Keywords: innovation; outsourcing; global; knowledge; innovation system; global value chain

Multiplicative loops of 2-dimensional topological quasifields

We determine the algebraic structure of the multiplicative loops for locally compact $2$-dimensional topological connected quasifields. In particular, our attention turns to multiplicative loops which have either a normal subloop of positive dimension or which contain a $1$-dimensional compact subgroup. In the last section we determine explicitly the quasifields which coordinatize locally compact translation planes of dimension $4$ admitting an at least $7$-dimensional Lie group as collineation group.Comment: accepted for publication in Communications in Algebr

Imprimitive groups highly transitive on blocks

We classify imprimitive groups acting highly transitively on blocks and satisfying conditions common in geometry. They can be realized as suitable subgroups of twisted wreath products

Algebraic (2,2)-transformation groups

In this paper we determine all algebraic trans-formation groups G, defined over an algebraical-ly closed field k, which operate transitively, but not primitively, on a variety ­M, provided the following conditions are fulfilled. We ask that the (non-effective) action of G on the va-riety of blocks is sharply 2-transitive, as well as the action on a block X of the normalizer Gx. Also we require sharp transitivity on pairs (X,Y)of independent points of M­, i.e. points con-tained in different blocks