Directing the technology intelligence activity: An ‘information needs’ template for initiating the search

In technology-intensive sectors, strategic planning requires relevant and timely information about new/emerging technologies – this is a critical input. Therefore, technology intelligence activities should be directed to capture and deliver pertinent technological information. However, there is a distinct lack of tools for helping organizations to determine what constitutes useful/appropriate information for their needs. To address this issue, an ‘information needs’ template has been developed to support the process of eliciting and articulating meaningful search queries to guide those who will conduct and provide the necessary intelligence. The use of the template also acts as a means of priming the technology intelligence as it identifies and points to potentially useful sources of knowledge. It covers the spectrum of sources from leveraging internal information, through spanning organizational boundaries to access external sources across the specific industry and neighboring industries, to more distant fields of knowledge. Additionally, the template has sections for distinguishing ‘who to watch’ versus ‘who to talk to’. The deployment of the template can be integrated with roadmapping, using the roadmap landscape to feed hotspots/themes/gaps/white spaces into the template, which are then unpacked to determine the information needs of the organization.Non

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Moderne opvoeding : nieuwe inzichten omtrent het zieleleven van het kind

143 hal.; 20 cm

Positioning of X in the mobile payment network to leap ahead of competition

Technology, Policy and Managemen

Strategic decision-making processes : the role of information

The focus of this dissertation is on the use of information in the strategic decision-making process by executives in industrial organisations and how these processes have changed in recent years e.g. under the influence of increased availability of information resources. The emphasis thereby was on the process, not on the resulting decision itself. The executive that follows a rational approach collects and uses ample information in a structured decision-making process passing through a number of distinct phases in time. For our fieldwork, we interviewed 14 executives, Board members of large (&gt; 300M€ turnover) chemical and food processing industries in The Netherlands and Germany discussing by which process they have reached some recent decisions. The value of information for strategic decision-making is supported by the results of our research. We observed that in rational decision-making, information relevant to the issues that have to be decided plays a crucial role in each phase of this process; executives have to acknowledge the facts in order to be able to consider an issue. The main reason for the use of information is a reduction of uncertainty needed to obtain the answer to an issue at hand. We tested the rationality of the actual processes followed by observing whether there were arguments that pointed to other than the rational approach to strategic decision-making. We did not observe during our interviews any indication of these arguments, such as unduly great time pressure, ‘satisficing’ solutions or ‘bounded rational’ decisions due to limited cognitive capabilities of executives or of lack of information that might have resulted in intuitive approaches. <br/