Business Model in Air Transport: Evolution of Innovation Concept

With the advent of the knowledge society, new opportunities, business models and concepts have emerged in most industrial sectors and in particular in the transport sector. The European air travel market, dominated by airlines, influenced to varying degrees from their countries of origin, has been, since the early nineties, completely revolutionized by the entrance in the competitive arena of several small companies, which, in accordance with the principles of „disruptive innovation‟, have completely changed the field of passenger transport. To understand how this was possible, it is necessary to investigate, just with the help of these new tools of Strategic Management as the business models, about the way in which these airlines are able to generate their business and create value. This work aims to analyse the close relationship between innovation of product / service and corporate business model in order to understand the dynamics of the relationship. Various contributions from literature showed how the concept of innovation within the company has evolved over the years and what were the approaches used to study it. This analysis begins with the study of the contributions of Schumpeter, the first economist to write about innovation and author of the dynamic development model and creator of the first distinction between innovation and invention. His theories have made a major contribution in this area, but none the less were also constructively criticized by other economists such as Freeman, who introduced the concept of incremental innovation and analysed the factors triggering innovation. Albernathy and Clark then added another fundamental element of analysis: the competitive environment. They studied the influence of innovation on those factors that are considered essential to achieve a competitive advantage. The same Albernathy, with Utterback, then studied the dynamics of innovations over time. Each of the cited authors analysed the phenomenon of innovation in a different light and all of their contributions allows for a broad and comprehensive concept. The picture is completed by adding the recent contributions of Christensen, who has taken up and deepened the concepts of "sustaining innovation" and " disruptive innovation" and, especially, began to highlight how essential it is that innovation is supported by a suitable business model. In this regard, he has shown that even the same business model can be object of innovation and that this type of innovation is one of the main drivers of the creation of competitive advantage

New Solutions to Covariant Non-equilibrium Dynamics

New solutions of 3+1D covariant kinetic theory are presented for nuclear collisions in the energy domain Ecm ~ 200 AGeV. They are obtained using MPC, a new Monte-Carlo parton transport technique that employs very high parton subdivision that is necessary to preserve covariance. The transport results are compared with ideal hydrodynamics solutions. We show that the transport evolution differs significantly from hydrodynamics. In addition, we compare the transport freeze-out distributions to those obtained from ideal hydrodynamics with the Cooper-Frye isotherm freeze-out prescription. The transport freeze-out four-volume is shown to be sensitive to the reaction rates and deviates from both time-like and space-like freeze-out 3D hypersurfaces commonly assumed. In particular, we find that there does not exist a universal freeze-out temperature. Finally, the transverse momentum distributions are found to deviate by up to an order of magnitude from (Cooper-Frye frozen) hydrodynamics for a wide range of possible initial conditions and reaction rates at RHIC energies.Comment: One figure - one file, revised version for PRC. 15 pages incl. 6 figures (6 eps files via epsf), 1 table. See parton cascade code at http://www-cunuke.phys.columbia.edu/people/molnar

Dissipation and elliptic flow at RHIC

We compare elliptic flow evolution from ideal hydrodynamics and covariant parton transport theory, and show that, for conditions expected at RHIC, dissipation significantly reduces elliptic flow even for extreme parton cross sections and/or densities sigma_gg * dN/d\eta(b=0) ~ 45 mb * 1000. The difference between transport and hydrodynamic elliptic flow is established rather early during the evolution of the system, but the buildup of elliptic flow is surprisingly insensitive to the choice of the initial (formation or thermalization) time in both models.Comment: 4 pages, 3 EPS fig

Models of Metal Poor Stars with Gravitational Settling and Radiative Accelerations: I. Evolution and Abundance Anomalies

Evolutionary models have been calculated for Pop II stars of 0.5 to 1.0$M_\odot$ from the pre-main-sequence to the lower part of the giant branch. Rosseland opacities and radiative accelerations were calculated taking into account the concentration variations of 28 chemical species, including all species contributing to Rosseland opacities in the OPAL tables. The effects of radiative accelerations, thermal diffusion and gravitational settling are included. While models were calculated both for Z=0.00017 and 0.0017, we concentrate on models with Z=0.00017 in this paper. These are the first Pop II models calculated taking radiative acceleration into account. It is shown that, at least in a 0.8$M_\odot$ star, it is a better approximation not to let Fe diffuse than to calculate its gravitational settling without including the effects of $g_{rad}(Fe)$. In the absence of any turbulence outside of convection zones, the effects of atomic diffusion are large mainly for stars more massive than 0.7$M_\odot$. Overabundances are expected in some stars with \teff \ge 6000K. Most chemical species heavier than CNO are affected. At 12 Gyr, overabundance factors may reach 10 in some cases (e.g. for Al or Ni) while others are limited to 3 (e.g. for Fe). The calculated surface abundances are compared to recent observations of abundances in globular clusters as well as to observations of Li in halo stars. It is shown that, as in the case of Pop I stars, additional turbulence appears to be present.Comment: 40 pages, 17 color figures, to appear in The Astrophysical Journal, April 2002 (paper with original high resolution figures can be found at http://www.cerca.umontreal.ca/~richer/Fichiersps/popII_1.ps

Raising the Datagram API to Support Transport Protocol Evolution

Some application developers can wield huge resources to build new transport protocols, for these developers the present UDP Socket API is perfectly fine. They have access to large test beds and sophisticated tools. Many developers do not have these resources. This paper presents a new high-level Datagram API that is for everyone else, this has an advantage of offering a clear evolutionary path to support new requirements. This new API is needed to move forward the base of the system, allowing developers with limited resources to evolve their applications while accessing new network services