This paper demonstrates the importance of knowledge for effective
management of outsourcing. Drawing on an empirical study on automakers?
management of supplier involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows
that the level of own knowledge is critical for…

Drawing on an empirical study on automakers? management of supplier
involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows that when the design of
a component is outsourced to a supplier, how much and what automakers know about
the component…

Context can be described as the totality of ideas, situations and information that (a) related to, (b) provide the origins for, and (c) influence our response, perspective or judgment of a thing. Design always takes place in a context. However,…

The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization,
growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of
economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global
politics. This rapidly changing environment…

Two-electron mixed-valence complexes of rhodium may be supported by diphosphazane ligands (RN(PY2)2). Whereas diphosphazane ligands with strongly [pi]-acidic phosphine groups (Y = F, OCH2CF3) react with RhI starting materials to afford binuclear Rh20,II complexes, Rh20,II(MeN(PY)2)3X2(L) or Rh2"II(MeN(PY),)3X2 (X = Cl,…

In plasma etching process it is critical to know when the film being etched has cleared to the underlying film, i.e. to detect endpoint, in order to achieve the desired device performance in the resulting integrated circuit. The most highly…

All intelligence relies on search - for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

In this thesis, I examine how spinning off new ventures from academic institutions works in an environment outside developed high tech clusters and how it affects models of ventures. I examine these questions by studying the case of Belgium. There…

We consider the scheduling problem of minimizing the average weighted completion time of n jobs with release dates on a single machine. We first study two linear programming relaxations of the problem, one based on a time-indexed formulation, the other…

Industrial Ecology (IE) is a systems approach to efficient resource use and protection of the
environment. Instead of just devising improved methods of waste treatment and disposal, we look for the best
opportunities to reduce waste throughout the total material…