Establishing a model of proactive spin-offs effectiveness on the basis of corporate entrepreneurship: (enterprise project)

Corporate organizations face multiple strategic challenges that imply a paradox in strategic decisions due to an equivalent need to both specialize on the core business and diversify activities. Such apparent contradiction in terms requires innovative answer which we believe lies in proactive spin-offs. In order to explore this path, this thesis is set to establish a model of proactive spin-offs effectiveness based on corporate entrepreneurship. The rational of the project is founded in the literature review on corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, business unit model organization and corporate spin-offs. The analysis reveals different ways organizations can undertake to growth. From a project perspective, we explored a specific non-strategic business line potential to emerge within an organization as a successful strategic spin-off promoted by corporate entrepreneurship. The analysis disclosed different ways organizations can undertake to succeed in this growth strategy, from which one can infer a set of context-dependent guidelines for future corporate spin-off policies.As Organizações enfrentam múltiplos desafios estratégicos que implicam decisões paradoxais por estarem ligadas a necessidades equivalentes para se especializarem no core business organizacional e simultaneamente diversificarem atividades. Esta aparente contradição requere uma resposta inovadora que acreditamos estar nos spin-offs proactivos. De modo a explorar este caminho, esta tese visa o estabelecimento de um modelo de spinoffs proactivos com base no empreendedorismo corporativo. O racional deste projeto baseia-se na revisão de literatura sobre empreendedorismo corporativo, inovação, modelos de organização empresarial e spin-offs corporativos. A análise revela que as organizações podem escolher diferentes formas de crescimento.Numa perspetiva de projeto, exploramos o potencial de uma linha de negócios específica não relacionada com o core-business da organização de modo a fazê-la emergir como um spin-off estratégico de sucesso promovido pelo empreendedorismo corporativo. A análise revela diferentes formas que as organizações podem optar para ter sucesso nesta estratégia de crescimento, sobre os quais se pode inferir um conjunto de orientações para futuras políticas de spin-offs corporativos

Does waiting times decrease or increase operational costs? Evidence from Portuguese Public Hospitals

The Portuguese National Health System (SNS) is composed of all public entities offering health services. There has been a successive increase in expenditure in recent years due to a variety of factors which have contributed to a high degree of uncertainty about the evolution of operating costs in Public Business Hospitals (EPE). In this problem of operating costs, we take into account the problem of waiting times, in both consultations and hospital surgeries. The main objective of this research is, therefore, to study the nexus between costs and waiting times between hospitals. Further, we also empirically assess whether this relationship presents a U-shaped behaviour. In this study, we have included a total of 38 Hospitals considered in the SNS, whose monthly period of analysis comprises January 2015 through December 2019 and divides the panel into five groups. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag panel model (ARDL) was used. Thus, the results of this study highlight that longer waiting times have significant effects on hospital costs and suggest that longer waiting times do not merely increase absence rates. At the same time, patients wait for external consultation and/or surgery. Instead, there appear to be significant long-run effects that last beyond the short-run waiting period.O Sistema Nacional de Saúde (SNS) português é composto por todas as entidades públicas que prestam serviços de saúde. Tem-se verificado um aumento sucessivo de gastos nos últimos anos devido a vários factores, o que tem gerado uma elevada incerteza quanto à evolução das despesas operacionais nos Hospitais Empresariais Públicos (EPE). Neste contexto de custos operacionais consideramos a problemática dos tempos de espera, quer nas consultas quer nas cirurgias hospitalares, pelo que o principal objetivo para a realização deste trabalho de investigação constitui no estudo do nexus entre custos e tempos de espera, entre os diferentes hospitais. Pretendemos também avaliar empiricamente se esta relação apresenta um comportamento em forma de U. Nesta investigação analisámos 38 EPE considerados no SNS, numa análise temporal mensal durante o período de Janeiro de 2015 a Dezembro de 2019, divindo o painel em 5 grupos. Aplicámos o modelo painel Autoregressivo com Desfasamentos Distribuidos (ARDL). Os resultados deste estudo salientam que os tempos de espera mais longos têm efeitos significativos nos custos hospitalares e sugerem e que tempos de espera mais longos não simplesmente aumentam as taxas de ausência enquanto os pacientes esperam pela consulta externa e ou cirurgia. Em vez disso, parece haver efeitos significativos de longo prazo que duram além do período de espera de curto prazo

Potential M&A between TIM Brazil and Oi S.A: the irreversible force of Telecommunications convergence

The intrinsic forces of market aiming for telecom industry convergence has arrived to Brazil. This case presents real characters, a sequence of events and other public information that has been impacting two corporations studied in this case. TIM Brazil and Oi S.A, two top players in the Brazilian telecom industry mobile and fixed segment respectively. While a merge between the two of them looks perfect and simple in an operational perspective due to its vertical complementarity, bring to them opportunities to win over a bundle offer (multi service package) that will consolidate their market predominance. Macroeconomic and internal corporate contrasts between these companies’ environment might signal that an impulsive could have a high price to pay in the future.UNL - NSB

Design and simulation of a smart bottle with fill-level sensing based on oxide TFT technology

Packaging is an important element responsible for brand growth and one of the main rea-sons for producers to gain competitive advantages through technological innovation. In this re-gard, the aim of this work is to design a fully autonomous electronic system for a smart bottle packaging, being integrated in a European project named ROLL-OUT. The desired application for the smart bottle is to act as a fill-level sensor system in order to determine the liquid content level that exists inside an opaque bottle, so the consumer can exactly know the remaining quantity of the product inside. An in-house amorphous indium–gallium–zinc oxide thin-film transistor (a-IGZO TFT) model, previously developed, was used for circuit designing purposes. This model was based in an artificial neural network (ANN) equivalent circuit approach. Taking into account that only n-type oxide TFTs were used, plenty of electronic building-blocks have been designed: clock generator, non-overlapping phase generator, a capacitance-to-voltage converter and a comparator. As it was demonstrated by electrical simulations, it has been achieved good functionality for each block, having a final system with a power dissipation of 2.3 mW (VDD=10 V) not considering the clock generator. Four printed circuit boards (PCBs) have been also designed in order to help in the testing phase. Mask layouts were already designed and are currently in fabrication, foreseeing a suc-cessful circuit fabrication, and a major step towards the design and integration of complex trans-ducer systems using oxide TFTs technology

Forecasting long-term government bond yields: an application of statistical and ai models

This paper evaluates several artificial intelligence and classical algorithms on their ability of forecasting the monthly yield of the US 10-year Treasury bonds from a set of four economic indicators. Due to the complexity of the prediction problem, the task represents a challenging test for the algorithms under evaluation. At the same time, the study is of particular significance for the important and paradigmatic role played by the US market in the world economy. Four data-driven artificial intelligence approaches are considered, namely, a manually built fuzzy logic model, a machine learned fuzzy logic model, a self-organising map model and a multi-layer perceptron model. Their performance is compared with the performance of two classical approaches, namely, a statistical ARIMA model and an econometric error correction model. The algorithms are evaluated on a complete series of end-month US 10-year Treasury bonds yields and economic indicators from 1986:1 to 2004:12. In terms of prediction accuracy and reliability of the modelling procedure, the best results are obtained by the three parametric regression algorithms, namely the econometric, the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron model. Due to the sparseness of the learning data samples, the manual and the automatic fuzzy logic approaches fail to follow with adequate precision the range of variations of the US 10-year Treasury bonds. For similar reasons, the self-organising map model gives an unsatisfactory performance. Analysis of the results indicates that the econometric model has a slight edge over the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron models. This suggests that pure data-driven induction may not fully capture the complicated mechanisms ruling the changes in interest rates. Overall, the prediction accuracy of the best models is only marginally better than the prediction accuracy of a basic one-step lag predictor. This result highlights the difficulty of the modelling task and, in general, the difficulty of building reliable predictors for financial markets

A strategy within the context of the Arab Spring to strenghten Portuguese energy security regarding import of hydrocarbon from Algeria

Energy plays a crucial role in the survival of the current civilizational model and the dispute regarding its control present a constant challenge to State security. Portugal is highly dependent on other countries in terms of energy supply. Moreover, Algeria was the sixth biggest Oil exporting country in 2011 and is the second biggest exporter of Natural Gas to Portugal. Considering this and the effects of the Arab Spring in northern Africa, the situation requires assessment so as to determine strategies to reduce the risk for Portugal. This paper is divided into 4 parts: introduction and 3 chapters. After making evident the relevance of the discussed theme, we present the concepts of security and energy safety and analyze the current situation in Portugal and in Algeria. In the final chapter, we propose a strategy for Portugal to contribute to the stabilization of Algeria and face the situation of Algerian supply of Oil and Natural Gas being reduced/interrupted; we suggest three Strategic Actions to strengthen the energy safety in Portugal regarding importation of hydrocarbons from Algeria within the context of the Arab Spring. So that Portugal can maintain energy safety regarding Algerian hydrocarbon supply, a critical approach should be used to influence Algeria towards progress, greater democracy and stability and a neo-realistic approach based on a more diverse hydrocarbon supply source, enhancement of renewable endogenous resources, maintenance and development of strategic reserves and planning alternatives of energy supply. Thus, three Strategic Actions (LAE) are identified: LAE 1 - Support the Algerian development and improve the Portuguese trade balance; LAE 2 - Invest in endogenous resources for energy production; LAE 3 – Widen the options for importing Natural Gas. The best option for the Portuguese situation is an integrated approach by means of adopting policies that allow for the three LAES simultaneously

Applications across Co-located Devices

We live surrounded by many computing devices. However, their presence has yet to be fully explored to create a richer ubiquitous computing environment. There is an opportunity to take better advantage of those devices by combining them into a unified user experience. To realize this vision, we studied and explored the use of a framework, which provides the tools and abstractions needed to develop applications that distribute UI components across co-located devices. The framework comprises the following components: authentication and authorization services; a broker to sync information across multiple application instances; background services that gather the capabilities of the devices; and a library to integrate web applications with the broker, determine which components to show based on UI requirements and device capabilities, and that provides custom elements to manage the distribution of the UI components and the multiple application states. Collaboration between users is supported by sharing application states. An indoor positioning solution had to be developed in order to determine when devices are close to each other to trigger the automatic redistribution of UI components. The research questions that we set out to respond are presented along with the contributions that have been produced. Those contributions include a framework for crossdevice applications, an indoor positioning solution for pervasive indoor environments, prototypes, end-user studies and developer focused evaluation. To contextualize our research, we studied previous research work about cross-device applications, proxemic interactions and indoor positioning systems. We presented four application prototypes. The first three were used to perform studies to evaluate the user experience. The last one was used to study the developer experience provided by the framework. The results were largely positive with users showing preference towards using multiple devices under some circumstances. Developers were also able to grasp the concepts provided by the framework relatively well.Vivemos rodeados de dispositivos computacionais. No entanto, ainda não tiramos partido da sua presença para criar ambientes de computação ubíqua mais ricos. Existe uma oportunidade de combiná-los para criar uma experiência de utilizador unificada. Para realizar esta visão, estudámos e explorámos a utilização de uma framework que forneça ferramentas e abstrações que permitam o desenvolvimento de aplicações que distribuem os componentes da interface do utilizador por dispositivos co-localizados. A framework é composta por: serviços de autenticação e autorização; broker que sincroniza informação entre várias instâncias da aplicação; serviços que reúnem as capacidades dos dispositivos; e uma biblioteca para integrar aplicações web com o broker, determinar as componentes a mostrar com base nos requisitos da interface e nas capacidades dos dispositivos, e que disponibiliza elementos para gerir a distribuição dos componentes da interface e dos estados de aplicação. A colaboração entre utilizadores é suportada através da partilha dos estados de aplicação. Foi necessário desenvolver um sistema de posicionamento em interiores para determinar quando é que os dispositivos estão perto uns dos outros para despoletar a redistribuição automática dos componentes da interface. As questões de investigação inicialmente colocadas são apresentadas juntamente com as contribuições que foram produzidas. Essas contribuições incluem uma framework para aplicações multi-dispositivo, uma solução de posicionamento em interiores para computação ubíqua, protótipos, estudos com utilizadores finais e avaliação com programadores. Para contextualizar a nossa investigação, estudámos trabalhos anteriores sobre aplicações multi-dispositivo, interação proxémica e sistemas de posicionamento em interiores. Apresentámos quatro aplicações protótipo. As primeiras três foram utilizadas para avaliar a experiência de utilização. A última foi utilizada para estudar a experiência de desenvolvimento com a framework. Os resultados foram geralmente positivos, com os utilizadores a preferirem utilizar múltiplos dispositivos em certas circunstâncias. Os programadores também foram capazes de compreender a framework relativamente bem

Personalization platform for multimodal ubiquitous computing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWe currently live surrounded by a myriad of computing devices running multiple applications. In general, the user experience on each of those scenarios is not adapted to each user’s specific needs, without personalization and integration across scenarios. Moreover, developers usually do not have the right tools to handle that in a standard and generic way. As such, a personalization platform may provide those tools. This kind of platform should be readily available to be used by any developer. Therefore, it must be developed to be available over the Internet. With the advances in IT infrastructure, it is now possible to develop reliable and scalable services running on abstract and virtualized platforms. Those are some of the advantages of cloud computing, which offers a model of utility computing where customers are able to dynamically allocate the resources they need and are charged accordingly. This work focuses on the creation of a cloud-based personalization platform built on a previously developed generic user modeling framework. It provides user profiling and context-awareness tools to third-party developers. A public display-based application was also developed. It provides useful information to students, teachers and others in a university campus as they are detected by Bluetooth scanning. It uses the personalization platform as the basis to select the most relevant information in each situation, while a mobile application was developed to be used as an input mechanism. A user study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the application and to validate some design choices. The results were mostly positive

A flexible BIST strategy for SDR transmitters

International audienceSoftware-defined radio (SDR) development aims for increased speed and flexibility. The advent of these system level requirements on the physical layer (PHY) access hardware is leading to more complex architectures, which together with higher levels of integration pose a challenging problem for product testing. For radio units that must be field-upgradeable without specialized equipment, Built-in Self-Test (BIST) schemes are arguably the only way to ensure continued compliance to specifications. In this paper we introduce a loopback RF BIST technique that uses Periodically Nonuniform Sampling (PNS2) of the transmitter (TX) output to evaluate compliance to spectral mask specifications. No significant hardware costs are incurred due to the re-use of available RX resources (I/Q ADCs, DSP, GPP, etc.). Simulation results of an homodyne TX demonstrate that Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) can be accurately estimated. Future work will consist in validating our loopback RF BIST architecture on an in-house SDR testbed