Clusters as platforms for internationalization

Business cooperation and the exchange of information and knowledge are actions and decisions that companies can take in order to compete more effectively in globalized markets. These options are even more relevant for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) that decide to access and expand in new international markets. The existence of these networks, both at the home and host contexts, stimulates the creation and acquisition of social capital, which allows members to increase their international competitive capacity. The study of these interactions allows to improve the cluster effect efficiency and its mechanisms

NETEX and the pinnacle of E-LEARNING: in search of the American dream

It is a decisional business case study. The decision is about the process of internationalization of NETEX, an organization that develops e-learning solutions.The case shows the steps taken by the team led by Carlos Ezquerro, general director of NETEX, from the creation of the company in 1997 until the summer of 2014. NETEX's growth model is based on internal growth, at the pace of other investors and financial support, which was limited by the economic crisis of 2008.The case is described from the point of view of Carlos Ezquerro, founder and director of NETEX, along with some other comments from Ricardo Álvarez, director of internationalization of the firm.The learning objective for the students is to analyse the decisions to be taken by considering the history of a company that is very clear about its objectives and its positioning strategy, but that has several alternatives in its internationalization model

Evolutionary On-Line Self-Organization of Autonomous Robots

We review recent experiments in evolutionary robotics carried out in dynamic environments and across different robotic platforms. We then introduce a new evolutionary approach where robots are evolved for their ability to adapt online. Several experiments show that this new approach is much faster, more powerful, and scalable that the traditional approach

Artificial Evolution of Adaptive Software: An Application to Autonomous Robots

Artificial evolution of computer software (evolutionary neural networks, genetic programming, evolutionary fuzzy systems, etc.) has been shown to generate software that in many cases is more performant than that designed by engineers. Evolved software performs well under the same conditions used during evolutionary training. However, in situations where unpredictable change may affect normal operation, evolved systems often fail. In this paper we describe a new approach for evolving software that remains adaptive and is therefore very robust to unpredictable change after evolution. To illustrate the idea, we present the case of evolutionary robots that quickly and reliably adapt online to several types of new situations, including sensory, environmental, and mechanical change, while still performing their task. The core of the methodology consists of evolving the mechanisms of parameter adaptation instead of the parameters themselves. We shall conclude by showing how this methodology can be applied to a variety of other situations beyond robotics

Evolution of Plastic Control Networks

Evolutionary Robotics is a powerful method to generate efficient controllers with minimal human intervention, but its applicability to real-world problems remains a challenge because the method takes long time and it requires software simulations that do not necessarily transfer smoothly to physical robots. In this paper we describe a method that overcomes these limitations by evolving robots for the ability to adapt on-line in few seconds. Experiments show that this method requires less generations and smaller populations to evolve, that evolved robots adapt in a few seconds to unpredictable change - including transfers from simulations to physical robots - and display non-trivial behaviors. Robots evolved with this method can be dispatched to other planets and to our homes where they will autonomously and quickly adapt to the specific properties of their environments if and when necessary