A Systematic Approach to Developing National Technology Policy and Strategy for Emerging technologies

As the pace of global competition increases, a country\u27s competitiveness becomes of greater concern. Technology drives competitiveness and is a crucial factor for economic development in developed and developing economies. This poses a need for governments to be involved in supporting technology research and development in their countries. A government must not only provide support when an emerging technology is being considered, it should also nurture and guide its development. The effective national technology policies and strategies should go beyond merely identifying the critical technologies. This research has developed a systematic and comprehensive approach for policy makers to strategically define the national technology policy for emerging technologies. A hierarchical decision model was built and expert opinions were quantified. There are four levels in the hierarchy: mission, objectives, technological goals, and research strategies. This research has also demonstrated several approaches for the validation and analysis of results. The inconsistency measure, intraclass correlation coefficient, and statistical test for the reliability of the experts and group agreement were used for this purpose. Finally, HDM sensitivity analysis was used to study the robustness of the rankings, especially at the technology level. Change may be caused at this level when the national policies change, which is a relatively common occurrence. The approach developed in this research was applied to the assessment of nanotechnologies for Thailand\u27s agriculture. The seven nanotechnologies such as nanosensors, nanodevices for identity preservation and historical tracking, novel tools, smart treatment delivery system, nanomaterials, nanoparticles, and agro-environment were assessed and evaluated with respect to the national mission, Be the world leader in developing a sustainable food and agricultural-based economy. According to the experts, the top three nanotechnologies supporting Thailand\u27s agricultural development are novel tools (26%), smart treatment delivery systems (24%), and nanosensors (23%). Research strategies supporting specific nanotechnologies were also identified and evaluated. As a result, a ranking of research strategies according to theirs contributions to the overall mission was developed

Identification of the Literature Gaps on Technology Foresight in Developing Economy

The easier and more rapid availability of information on basic research has increased the growing integration of science and technology as well as shortened the innovation cycle. Each individual decisions has more and far-reaching impacts on the interdependencies within and among nations. The costs of errors in decisionmaking caused by using inadequate information or applying inappropriate analysis have also increased. To address the impacts of these concerns in resource allocation policies at national level, many governments have begun taking a new approach addressing longer-term research planning as a way to strengthen their capability in global economic competition. To achieve this goal, the most prominent question is whether it is possible for government to accurately identify future development of new emerging areas of strategic research that will provide the knowledge-base for the technologies and industries of tomorrow with an effective use of the limited government R&D funding

Increase in the Customer Satisfaction of Users of the PSU Computer Labs by Increasing the Quality of Service and Equipment

The CIP project targeted customer satisfaction issues at the PSU computer labs. Various areas of improvement were evaluated using interviews, surveys and Delphi analysis system. Cause analysis was done and countermeasures were planned. The plan was implemented and the results measured and compared against the pre-implementation metrics. The plan was then standardized across all the labs. This study has utilized the basic concepts of TQM and CIP process to apply learning to various situations, to target the customers, get management buy-offs and implement CIP plans and gain positive results

Team #2: Team T&T Presentation: PowerPoint Presentation

For the presentation: Goals? – how some of the success ingredients work out for a team. – have fun

Report # 2 Team Self Diagnosis

Executive Summary This report is an analysis of the evolving and learning process for team T&T throughout the accomplishment of a specific time limited project via a continuous teamwork. The performance of the team right through this process is evaluated from the early forming stage to becoming a real team. To carry out this analysis, the course material of Team Building & Communication class, the literature, and our individual and team observations are used. If we analyze the successful teams in the world, we can easily see that the most successful ones are not the ones composed of the best team players. Individual’s qualities don’t mean everything for success. Therefore, for this analysis it is necessary to realize that our team members don’t exhibit the excellent combination for success but there is an important process of becoming a high performing team throughout this process. The method used to examine this evolving process is application of a model, which was created by our own team. Also in this report, we focused on the factors that either contributed to or detracted from our team’s performance. By using our model, based on our observations, we tried to point out some important issues, which affected especially our learning process. In the “learning process” section, we tried to find answers of why and how the things happened in terms of a common language, the language of team building and communication

Key Success Factors of Communication in Virtual Teams

Executive Summary: The rapid development of information and communication technologies during the last two decades of the past millennium created new organizational structures to build for companies. Today, many companies all over the world have an increasing number of virtual teams. These teams are generally composed of members with distinctive skills at dispersed locations. However, despite all the technological improvements, not every virtual team becomes successful because there are many critical issues for virtual team success. The purpose of this paper is to study the key success factors of communication in Virtual Teams as a part of midterm project in Communication and Team Building class, EMGT 522. In this paper, we start colleting and analyzing all information via a wide literature search. After determination of three major key success factors--technology, conflict and trust-- through some decision making tools, these factors are analyzed in terms of their effects on communication in virtual teams, and examples from real world are also presented in terms of those factors

Selection of US Candidate City for 2012 Summer Olympic Host City

Selection of US Candidate City for 2012 Summer Olympic Host City, using hierarchical decision modeling

Vehicle Routing Optimization

Transportation costs, including all stages of manufacturing and distribution, account for 10% to 20% of the final cost of a consumer good. Obviously, methods that would reduce this cost are highly desirable for any organization. The problems faced, in planning and carrying out the transportation of goods, are very complex, and therefore lend themselves well to optimization methods. Optimization methods have been successfully applied to many of the logistics problems faced by the trucking industry, and in general shipping. This paper describes an optimization model of a classic routing problem in the trucking industry: the “Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows” (VRPTW). The basic vehicle routing problem was first described by Danzig and Ramser over 40 years ago, but implementation of decision support tools based on optimization models have only appeared in widespread use over the past 15 years. The basic objective of a vehicle routing problem is to select the best set of routes so that overall cost is minimized. Data for the model presented in this report was provided by Con-Way Transportation Services, Inc., specifically from their local city route deliveries. The total city route problem of Con-Way was modeled in two parts: Trip Optimization and Route Optimization. In the first part, the total set of shipments was partitioned into sub-sets of individual truckloads. The model took into account truck capacity, as well as total miles traveled per truckload. The objective being to minimize the number of trucks required. In the second part, the best route for each truckload was determined. Time windows for each shipment were taken into account, and the objective was to minimize total miles traveled