Implementation of virtual manufacturing by a technology licensing company

NoThe paper considers the implementation of a virtual manufacturing system as an alternative to outward technology licensing in a high technology industrial sector. Brief theoretical definition and description of the two strategy options is provided to give background and context. This is followed by empirical material from a longitudinal case study of a company that has developed a virtual manufacturing system in addition to its pre-existing outward technology licensing business stream. A summary account of the company history and development is followed by description of the virtual manufacturing proposal. Analysis of this identified a number of competencies that would be required in order to succeed. The final part of the paper describes the company's response to this analysis and discusses early implementation of the virtual system. It is shown that implementation of the proposal has represented a positive response to the business challenges facing the company

Citizen Engineers: Leaders in Building a Sustainable World

As with the “citizen soldiers” of World War II, the engineering industry must produce “citizen engineers” who will accept the leadership challenge necessary to deliver a combination of technical, economic, social, and environmental values to its stakeholders that will truly improve people’s quality of life

Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development’, paper presented at the 4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ECEI), Antwerp, Belgium, 10-12 September, 2009.Increasingly the issues of entrepreneurship and new venture creation have become two of the most important drivers for future success of the UK economy, especially in the current climate of economic turbulence and uncertainty. The creation of an enterprise culture, one that depends on entrepreneurs, is one of the strategic goals of the UK Government’s action plan for micro- and small-enterprises. The development of these enterprise cultures will naturally create a marketplace ‘churn’, one that stimulates both continuous and radical innovations, and as a consequence of this contribute to the overall UK’s overall productivity and sustained economic performance. Yet research on entrepreneurs, and particularly third-age entrepreneurs, their abilities and motivation to start-up new enterprises within the environmental good and services sector is limited.Our research study utilizes qualitative data collection and analysis. We have engaged with 12 small enterprise entrepreneurs who are currently, or have already started-up a new enterprise in the EGS sector. Our research studies on how opportunities and threats influence third-age enterpreneurs’ values, attitudes and practices suggested that both, sector-wide values and practices, as well as the strength of sector-based systems of innovations, significantly influence the effective prediction of venture creation, development and creative destruction practices. It is these third- age entrepreneurs mindset Business Models (BMs), how they perceive they can generate business value and align their business practices around EGS sector opportunities and threats, that both determines their propensity to create new ventures, and their motivation and success in driving new venture creation and development oportunities. A framework is proposed based on our limited entrepreneurial mindset analysis that links their values, vision and actions with a more substantial evaluation of their overall mindset business model.Peer reviewe

East Midlands healthcare and bioscience sector strategy

The healthcare and bioscience sector is one of four priority sectors identified in the regional economic strategy, A Flourishing Region. This document sets out a strategy for maximising the contribution of the healthcare and biosciences sector to the economic development of the East Midlands

Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats’, paper presented at the 15th Annual Edineb Conference, Malaga, Spain, 15-18 June, 2008.Enterprises are presented with ever increasing challenges regarding marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity. They face competitive pressures from local and international sources, their competitors are constantly tweaking products and services to jostle ahead of them, and their customers expect responsiveness and innovativeness to their expressed and latent needs. The enterprises’ very success, and survival, depends on their ability to change their business, market and product strategies to fit these challenges. Underlying these business, market and product strategies is the enterprises’ business model. Simply, business models are an organisation’s understanding and interpretation of how they currently, and in the future, achieve their revenue and profit streams. These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders. In SMEs the creation, development and creative deconstruction of business models is most often driven by the founding entrepreneur, or subsequent corporate entrepreneurs brought in to provide professional management of these rapidly growing businesses. Interestingly, more recent research has strongly linked entrepreneurs’ mindset, or mental models (Zahra, Korri et al. 2005), associated with the challenges to the enterprise, with their drivers for innovation and changes in their enterprises’ business models. Certainly research has identified the potential value changes, business and customer, that can often facilitate the construction and deconstruction of business value-based innovations (Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst et al. 2004), and then reflecting these in their overall business processes. This paper discusses the research study, undertaken by the authors, to explore the link between entrepreneurs’ understanding and interpretation of business opportunities and threats, and the potential influence in challenging their mindset business model. The paper begins by discussing the two broad approaches to modelling enterprise strategies and the resulting integrated business models: innovation and process orientations.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

The Need and Requirements to a Strategy Ontology

The importance of strategy and strategy construct is not a new phenomenon. However as strategy work becomes less tangible, concerns with understanding, describing, and managing strategies develops into an increasingly complex subject. Current strategy concepts are dispersed and lack integration. Moreover, the enablement of modelling practices around strategy concepts considering the entire strategy lifecycle are also missing. Consequently, this paper focuses on issues with strategy in theory and practice, why a strategy ontology is needed and how this can be developed

Competences of IT Architects

The field of architecture in the digital world uses a plethora of terms to refer to different kinds of architects, and recognises a confusing variety of competences that these architects are required to have. Different service providers use different terms for similar architects and even if they use the same term, they may mean something different. This makes it hard for customers to know what competences an architect can be expected to have.\ud \ud This book combines competence profiles of the NGI Platform for IT Professionals, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), as well as a number of Dutch IT service providers in a comprehensive framework. Using this framework, the book shows that notwithstanding a large variety in terminology, there is convergence towards a common set of competence profiles. In other words, when looking beyond terminological differences by using the framework, one sees that organizations recognize similar types of architects, and that similar architects in different organisations have similar competence profiles. The framework presented in this book thus provides an instrument to position architecture services as offered by IT service providers and as used by their customers.\ud \ud The framework and the competence profiles presented in this book are the main results of the special interest group “Professionalisation” of the Netherlands Architecture Forum for the Digital World (NAF). Members of this group, as well as students of the universities of Twente and Nijmegen have contributed to the research on which this book is based