New Product Development in Small Food Enterprises

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how small businesses may deploy a formalised Stage-Gate approach to new product development (NPD). The original Stage-Gate framework was modified to better suit a small business B2B environment in the seafood industry, and was subsequently applied to a small vertically-integrated crab catching, processing and marketing business.Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a case study methodology. The method used at each stage of the Stage-Gate framework, as well as the time and location details, the people and skills involved, and the evaluative criteria applied for NPD are outlined and discussed; and subsequently synthesized in a modified framework.Findings – The modified Stage-Gate approach was shown to be an effective NPD method, allowing for 92 initial product concepts to be narrowed down to three commercially viable and acceptable products, over a period of less than 11 months. Cost and time were minimised by the four-day ideation process. Furthermore, repeated evaluation of the sensory and market acceptability resulted in strengthened confidence in market attractiveness, while ensuring that appearance, portion size and packaging were based on expert market opinion. Moreover, this approach was successfully completed at less than 25% of the cost of the previous unsuccessful NPD undertaken by the firm.Originality/value – This study advances our understanding of how small businesses may use a formal NPD process to increase the success rate of new products, through development of a modified Stage-Gate approach

Dynamic Capability Building through partnering: An Australian Mobile handset case Study

Dynamic capabilities are increasingly seen as an organisational characteristic for innovation and are regarded as a source of competitive advantage. In a quest for sustainability, service organisations are partnering with their stakeholders, and subsequently are aptly bringing innovation in services to market. Most of existing empirical research regarding dynamic capabilities seeks to define and identify specific dynamic capabilities, as well as their organizational antecedents or effects. Yet, the extent to which the antecedents of success in particular dynamic capabilities, contribute to innovation in service organisations remains less researched. This study advances the understanding of such dynamic capability building process through effective collaboration, and highlights the detailed mechanisms and processes of capability building within a service value network framework to deliver innovation in services. Deploying a case study methodology, transcribing interviews with managers and staff from an Australian telco and its partnering organisations, results show that collaboration, collaborative organisational learning, collaborative innovative capacity, entrepreneurial alertness and collaborative agility are all core to fostering innovation in services. Practical implications of this research are significant, and that the impacts of collaboration and the dynamic capabilities mentioned above are discussed in the context of a mobile handset case study

Revitalizing a Declining Residential Area -Samanbahçe- in the Walled City of Nicosia

Traditional historic urban quarters, which are special places not only due to the cultural heritage that they house but also due to their urban pattern, are in danger of losing their traditional character, if relevant measures fail to exist to ensure the continuity of this character. Just like the island of Cyprus as a whole, as being ruled by many different conquerors, the Walled City of Nicosia, which is the core of the capital of the island, has undergone substantial changes throughout history, to fit the requirements of different cultures. As a spatial reflection of different socioeconomic life or attitude of the rulers - Lusignan {1192- 1489); Venetian {1489-1571); Ottoman {1571-1878); British {1878-1960) -the urban pattern as well as the buildings and their functions have been modified through time. Consequently, the traditional historic areas became places of intermingling cultures.Through ages, the Walled City of Nicosia, with its organic urban tissue, has always been a pole of attraction in terms of administrative, economic and cultural activities. However, due to the clashes between the two communities living on the Island {the Greeks and the Turks), "a green line" divided the Walled City of Nicosia into two parts in 1963: the Turkish sector in the North and the Greek sector in the South. Until then, the two parts have been developing independently. After 1970s, due to the political and socio-economic changes on the Island, and thus, accordingly the changes in the population and its physical distribution and mobility, the North part of the Walled City has lost its attractiveness. Since then, it is in a process of decay and deterioration, and its functionally distinctive areas are severely threatened by physical, functional, locational and image obsolescence at varying degrees, as many other historic quarters elsewhere in the world.Considering the revitalization of the Walled G)ty in a longterm perspective, these differences should ge taken into account for successful decisions for its· sustainability. Samanbahce, a unique traditional residential area at the edge of the Kyrenia Avenue in the Walled City of Nicosia, is a unique place not only due to its distinctive physical, urban and architectural characteristics, but also as being the first mass-housing area on the Island developed in 1930's by the British. Although being located next to the most lively area of the Walled City, today, Samanbahce area is suffering from physical and social decay. The aim of this paper is to propose conservation and revitalization measures to address the deterioration and obsolescence process of Samanbahce area, based on a thorough study at both architectural and urban levels. The method of the analysis will include a field and a questionnaire survey, which will convey to an understanding of the environmental and socio-cultural qualities

Evaluation and Redesign of Hazard Evaluation Tools for Hanover Insurance Group

This project redesigned The Hanover Insurance Group\u27s fire sprinkler evaluation tool. By working closely with Hanover\u27s Loss Consultants, we determined the necessary changes and modifications needed to produce an organized and user friendly software that integrates the functions of Microsoft Excel and Hydrograph to determine the adequacy of sprinkler systems. This newly designed tool helps Loss Consultants more efficiently gather and evaluate sprinkler data at a potential client\u27s property

Combining exclusive semi-leptonic and hadronic B decays to measure |V_ub|

The Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element |V_ub| can be extracted from the rate for the semi-leptonic decay B -> pi + l + antineutrino_l, with little theoretical uncertainty, provided the hadronic form factor for the B -> pi transition can be measured from some other B decay. In here, we suggest using the decay B -> pi J\psi. This is a color suppressed decay, and it cannot be properly described within the usual factorization approximation; we use instead a simple and very general phenomenological model for the b d J\psi vertex. In order to relate the hadronic form factors in the B -> pi J\psi and B -> pi + l + antineutrino_l decays, we use form factor relations that hold for heavy-to-light transitions at large recoil.Comment: Latex, 7 pages, no figure

Fatigue-induced changes of impedance and performance in target tracking

Kinematic variability is caused, in part, by force fluctuations. It has been shown empirically and numerically that the effects of force fluctuations on kinematics can be suppressed by increasing joint impedance. Given that force variability increases with muscular fatigue, we hypothesized that joint impedance would increase with fatigue to retain a prescribed accuracy level. To test this hypothesis, subjects tracked a target by elbow flexion and extension both with fatigued and unfatigued elbow flexor and extensor muscles. Joint impedance was estimated from controlled perturbations to the elbow. Contrary to the hypothesis, elbow impedance decreased, whereas performance, expressed as the time-on-target, was unaffected by fatigue. Further analysis of the data revealed that subjects changed their control strategy with increasing fatigue. Although their overall kinematic variability increased, task performance was retained by staying closer to the center of the target when fatigued. In conclusion, the present study reveals a limitation of impedance modulation in the control of movement variability

GTM: A principled alternative to the self-organizing map

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm has been extensively studied and has been applied with considerable success to a wide variety of problems. However, the algorithm is derived from heuristic ideas and this leads to a number of significant limitations. In this paper, we consider the problem of modelling the probability density of data in a space of several dimensions in terms of a smaller number of latent, or hidden, variables. We introduce a novel form of latent variable model, which we call the GTM algorithm (for Generative Topographic Mapping), which allows general non-linear transformations from latent space to data space, and which is trained using the EM (expectation-maximization) algorithm. Our approach overcomes the limitations of the SOM, while introducing no significant disadvantages. We demonstrate the performance of the GTM algorithm on simulated data from flow diagnostics for a multi-phase oil pipeline

Metabolic profiling reveals reprogramming of lipid metabolic pathways in treatment of polycystic ovary syndrome with 3-iodothyronamine

Complex diseases such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are associated with intricate pathophysiological, hormonal, and metabolic feedbacks that make their early diagnosis challenging, thus increasing the prevalence risks for obesity, cardiovascular, and fatty liver diseases. To explore the crosstalk between endocrine and lipid metabolic pathways, we administered 3-iodothyronamine (T1AM), a natural analog of thyroid hormone, in a mouse model of PCOS and analyzed plasma and tissue extracts using multidisciplinary omics and biochemical approaches. T1AM administration induces a profound tissue-specific antilipogenic effect in liver and muscle by lowering gene expression of key regulators of lipid metabolism, PTP1B and PLIN2, significantly increasing metabolites (glucogenic, amino acids, carnitine, and citrate) levels, while enhancing protection against oxidative stress. In contrast, T1AM has an opposing effect on the regulation of estrogenic pathways in the ovary by upregulating STAR, CYP11A1, and CYP17A1. Biochemical measurements provide further evidence of significant reduction in liver cholesterol and triglycerides in post-T1AM treatment. Our results shed light onto tissue-specific metabolic vs. hormonal pathway interactions, thus illuminating the intricacies within the pathophysiology of PCOS. This study opens up new avenues to design drugs for targeted therapeutics to improve quality of life in complex metabolic diseases