When form follows function ? Financial centres as starting points for researching the interrelationship of financial intermediaries and the management of firms

Scince the 1990ies a multiplicity of young technology firms tried to enter the new markets. Some MNE`s merged or established through spin-offs new competitive firms, SME `s often found themselves in the middle of a consolidation process, developing under a strong pressure of competition new ways of legal forms and management structures such as Management-buy-outs. Capitalization, raising of capital, managing and hedging risks have become a strategic factor of success to participate in the global innovation competition. This links the system of financial intermediaries with the production- and innovation system. Firms are raising capital from the financial markets to finance their innovation and production processes through credits, bonds, stocks, venture capital, private equity and other financial products (derivates). A successful transaction is dependent on a knowledge intensive, technology based and worldwide operating system of financial intermediaries. Through ratings, risk analysis, monitoring, information processing, pricing and further more tools financial intermediaries act in their role as middlemen centres. ?Intermediaries help markets to grow by creating products that form the basis of new markets. In turn, markets help intermediaries to innovate new more customized products by lowering costs of producing them? Merton and Bodie 1995, 26). The financial innovation spiral builds up complex structures within financial markets evolve. Today, after a fatal crash of the international financial markets and the bankruptcy of hundred of national and worldwide operating firms, this has left a strong mark on the international financial landscape map. New concepts of corporate governance with demand for a stronger transparency, information policy and risk control have to be developed for a future relationship between investors, financial intermediaries and the firms management. What consequences will follow? This paper will discuss these issues from a different perspective while concentrating on some systemic backgrounds of the financial system, which shape those complex interrelationships and put them into a dynamic process. In a first step the paper is introducing a functional approach to explain institutional changes within the financial systems. Followed by the second step, some consequences and trends for financial centres with regard to their structure, functions, participants and activities will be discussed. In a third step, I try to give a framework how a financial centre could be analysed. This will open up starting points for a future research of Innovation, Financial Industry and Space (IFIS)

Total variation regularization of multi-material topology optimization

This work is concerned with the determination of the diffusion coefficient from distributed data of the state. This problem is related to homogenization theory on the one hand and to regularization theory on the other hand. An approach is proposed which involves total variation regularization combined with a suitably chosen cost functional that promotes the diffusion coefficient assuming prespecified values at each point of the domain. The main difficulty lies in the delicate functional-analytic structure of the resulting nondifferentiable optimization problem with pointwise constraints for functions of bounded variation, which makes the derivation of useful pointwise optimality conditions challenging. To cope with this difficulty, a novel reparametrization technique is introduced. Numerical examples using a regularized semismooth Newton method illustrate the structure of the obtained diffusion coefficient.

Characterization and loss analyses of passivated emitter and rear cells

This work presents characterization methods and simulation-based loss analyses for passivated emitter and rear (PERC) solar cells. Furthermore, it discusses possible ways of introducing poly-Si on thin inter-facial oxides (POLO) junctions into industrial solar cells. Achieving a further efficiency increase of industrial \gls{PERC} cells is becoming more and more difficult because the margin to the theoretical limit is reduced step by step. Identifying the major loss channel in terms of a potential efficiency gain, thus, plays an increasingly important role in solar cell optimization. The free energy loss analysis (FELA) and the synergistic efficiency gain analysis (SEGA) as simulation-based loss analyses can address this task. The basis for both the FELA and the SEGA are numerical device simulations based on experimentally determined input parameters. The determination of most of these input parameters can be achieved with measurement and data analysis tools, which are commonly used in PV-research. The recombination at local metal contacts, however, has not been studied to the same extent and standard techniques do not apply. In this work, we study the determination of contact recombination parameters. We first analyze the required sample structures and develop an analytical model to calculate the length scale on which regions of different charge carrier lifetimes affect each other. We find that a metallization pattern with three metallized and one non-metallized quarters fits our requirements best. In the analysis of suitable measurement setups we find that photoconductance-calibrated photoluminescence imaging is best suited because of the low uncertainty. For the extraction of contact recombination parameters we study the analytical model by Fischer and find an excellent agreement of better than 5% deviation with numerical device simulations, provided the assumptions of low level injection and either full line or periodic point contacts are fulfilled. For arbitrary contact layouts and for the full injection dependence we introduce an approach based on numerical device simulations. In this context, we develop a new model for injection dependent contact recombination currents. The model is based on the superposition of recombination at the Si-metal interface and within the highly doped layer underneath. We use standard measurement and evaluation techniques and determine contact recombination parameters to perform a complete characterization of a PERC cell batch. In this characterization we determine all input parameters required for a SEGA along with the respective uncertainties. From the uncertainties of the input parameters we determine the uncertainties of the SEGA results using a Monte-Carlo simulation. We also analyze the differences between SEGA and FELA and introduce a graphical user interface for automatic SEGA simulations. Finally we discuss different cell structures for integrating POLO junctions into industrial solar cells by means of SEGA simulations and hypothetical process flows. We identify cells featuring conventional screen-printed Al base contacts and n-type POLO (n-POLO) junctions as promising candidates for industrial integration in the near future. A further development step are solar cells with POLO junctions for both polarities, which show an absolute efficiency benefit between 0.3% and 0.4% compared to similar cells with Al base contacts. However, further research in structuring POLO layers and screen-printed contacting of p-type POLO (p-POLO) is required. From the SEGA simulations and the hypothetical process flows a cell development roadmap was derived, in order to focus research activities on the most promising cell concepts

Polycentricity and metropolitan governance. A Swiss case study

The concept of ‘polycentric spatial development’, a central principle of the European Spatial Development Perspective, is closely linked to the concept of ‘sustainable urban development’. But ‘polycentricity’ has different significance at different spatial scales. Within a European context, polycentricity can refer to functional connectivity (supported by developments in ICT and transportation), between global “gateway” cities such as London, Paris and Frankfurt on the one hand, and the utilisation of global economic and knowledge flows coming into these cities for the benefit of other EU cities and regions on the other hand. At a finer geographical scale, ‚polycentricity’ refers to outward diffusion from major cities to smaller ones over a wide area, and focuses on the local linkages that arise from this process. POLYNET is a joint research program of eight European university institutes, funded by the EU program Interreg IIIB Northwestern Europe (NWE). The project is focusing attention on a new phenomenon as far as it refers to the polycentric ‘Mega-City-Region’ in NWE which in turn is characterised by connectivity in an ‘information’ or ‘network’ society. POLYNET examines functional relationships and information flows (material/transportation and virtual/ICT) associated with service sector business activity (banking, insurance, law, accounting, advertising, logistics, management and design consulting) within and between eight major Northwest European polycentric ‘Mega-City-Regions’: South East England; Delta Metropolis, Netherlands; Rhine-Main, Germany; Île-de-France; Dublin, Ireland; Northern Switzerland / Zurich; Rhine-Ruhr, Germany and Brussels, Belgium. The paper first presents the methodological and empirical approaches applied, secondly identifies the polycentric patterns of the European Metropolitan Region of Northern Switzerland / Zurich. A third section describes the analysis of connectivity and inter-relationship of the metropolitan region of Northern Switzerland with regard to other polycentric metropolitan regions. Section four presents an outlook on potential implications for sustainable management of the metropolitan region of Northern Switzerland.

Final state observability estimates and cost-uniform approximate null-controllability for bi-continuous semigroups

We consider final state observability estimates for bi-continuous semigroups on Banach spaces, i.e. for every initial value, estimating the state at a final time $T>0$ by taking into account the orbit of the initial value under the semigroup for $t\in [0,T]$, measured in a suitable norm. We state a sufficient criterion based on an uncertainty relation and a dissipation estimate and provide two examples of bi-continuous semigroups which share a final state observability estimate, namely the Gauss-Weierstrass semigroup and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup on the space of bounded continuous functions. Moreover, we generalise the duality between cost-uniform approximate null-controllability and final state observability estimates to the setting of locally convex spaces for the case of bounded and continuous control functions, which seems to be new even for the Banach spaces case

GroFi: Large-scale fiber placement research facility

GroFi is a large research facility operated by the German Aerospace Center’s Center for Lightweight-Production-Technology in Stade. A combination of dierent layup technologies namely (dry) ber placement and tape laying, allows the development and validation of new production technologiesand processes for large-scale composite components. Due to the use of coordinated and simultaneously working layup units a high exibility of the research platform is achieved. This allows the investigation of new materials, technologies and processes on both, small coupons, but also large components such as wing covers or fuselage skins