The impact of government policy on technology transfer: An aircraft industry case study

This case study explores the interaction between domestic and foreign governmental policy on technology transfer with the goal of exploring the long-term impacts of technology transfer. Specifically, the impact of successive licensing of fighter aircraft manufacturing and design to Japan in the development of Japan's aircraft industry is reviewed. Results indicate Japan has built a domestic aircraft industry through sequential learning with foreign technology transfers from the United States, and design and production on domestic fighter aircraft. This process was facilitated by governmental policies in both Japan and the United States. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Industry perceptions of barriers to commercialization of regenerative medicine products in the UK.

AIMS: Regenerative medicine is an emerging field with the potential to provide widespread improvement in healthcare and patient wellbeing via the delivery of therapies that can restore, regenerate or repair damaged tissue. As an industry, it could significantly contribute to economic growth if products are successfully commercialized. However, to date, relatively few products have reached the market owing to a variety of barriers, including a lack of funding and regulatory hurdles. The present study analyzes industry perceptions of the barriers to commercialization that currently impede the success of the regenerative medicine industry in the UK. MATERIALS & METHODS: The analysis is based on 20 interviews with leading industrialists in the field. RESULTS: The study revealed that scientific research in regenerative medicine is thriving in the UK. Unfortunately, lack of access to capital, regulatory hurdles, lack of clinical evidence leading to problems with reimbursement, as well as the culture of the NHS do not provide a good environment for the commercialization of regenerative medicine products. CONCLUSION: Policy interventions, including increased translational government funding, a change in NHS and NICE organization and policies, and regulatory clarity, would likely improve the general outcomes for the regenerative medicine industry in the UK.

RFID: The concept and the impact

Introduction Radio frequency identification, or RFID, has sprung into prominence in the last five years with the promise of providing a relatively low-cost means for connecting nonelectronic objects to an information network. In particular, the retail supply chain has been established as a key sector for a major deployment of RFID technology. This chapter provides a background to the technology and its position with regard to competing technologies. A range of applications is reviewed and the chapter concludes with some comments on the likely societal impact of RFID and potential barriers to deployment. The report is aimed at a nontechnical audience - namely, senior staff from a spectrum of areas including insurance, banking, telecommunications, government institutions and academia. It does not cover any technologies other than RFID, and in particular does not address technologies that may be candidates for tracking people.

Manufacturing clarity

A framework has been developed for the UK economy that categorizes companies who provides a more defined perspective on the structure of the economy in order to help decision makers, government and industry to achieve sustained economic growth. The Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) has established a broader definition of manufacturing that equates manufacturing to the full cycle of activities from research and development, through design, production, logistics and services, to end of life management, within an economic and social context. This approach recognizes that manufacturing firms turn ideas into products and services and that they are inventors, innovators, global supply chain managers and service providers. It is hoped that this categorization provides policy-makers with a clear frame of reference for discussing measures to adapt interventions to address the needs of the diverse set of companies.

Widening engineering horizons: Addressing the complexity of sustainable development

The complex, fragmented and diverse aspects of a sustainable development perspective are translated into an eight-point framework that defines a problem boundary larger than that traditionally adopted by civil engineers. This leads to practical questions intended to inform engineers who ask 'am I being sustainable?' during project implementation. The value of the questions is tested against a case history of a wastewater treatment project. This demonstrates the relevance of the questions to successive project delivery phases of defining the problem, choosing a solution and implementing that solution through design, construction and operation. The case history highlights that answers to several of the additional questions raised by considering this wider problem space are currently buried within government and clients' policies, regulations and standard practice; these answers may not be accessible to the professional engineer.

Architectural research and its enemies

Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the 'winners' tend to approve of the method of allocation and the 'losers' denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naivety and a depth of ignorance about the fundamentals of research that is deeply damaging to the credibility of architecture as a research-based discipline. With the recent consultation process towards a new cycle of research assessment, the REF, getting under way, I aim to draw attention to the risk of repeating past mistakes. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010.

Improving productivity - Opening the black box

Hourly productivity levels in the UK still remain behind those in some competitor countries. The government devotes much policy attention to enhancing productivity and continues to emphasise its five drivers - investment, innovation, skills, enterprise, and competition. This article argues that it is investment broadly defined that is the key to sustained productivity improvement. The emphasis should be on improving productivity simultaneously with improving the quality of production. Only thus will the gains be widely shared. In achieving these aims there are two prerequisites for policy-makers. The first is to ensure better coordination of policy than appears to be currently achieved by the present departmental structures in Whitehall. The second is to recognize fully the long and complex chain of causation that can be triggered by pulling on one policy lever. Such complexity can only be fully understood by more research on what actually goes on inside the black box of the organization. © 2006 Oxford University Press.

A Comparative Review of Existing Data and Methodologies for Calculating Embodied Energy and Carbon of Buildings

In the Climate Change Act of 2008 the UK Government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. As one step towards this, regulations are being introduced requiring all new buildings to be ‘zero carbon’ by 2019. These are defined as buildings which emit net zero carbon during their operational lifetime. However, in order to meet the 80% target it is necessary to reduce the carbon emitted during the whole life-cycle of buildings, including that emitted during the processes of construction. These elements make up the ‘embodied carbon’ of the building. While there are no regulations yet in place to restrict embodied carbon, a number of different approaches have been made. There are several existing databases of embodied carbon and embodied energy. Most provide data for the material extraction and manufacturing only, the ‘cradle to factory gate’ phase. In addition to the databases, various software tools have been developed to calculate embodied energy and carbon of individual buildings. A third source of data comes from the research literature, in which individual life cycle analyses of buildings are reported. This paper provides a comprehensive review, comparing and assessing data sources, boundaries and methodologies. The paper concludes that the wide variations in these aspects produce incomparable results. It highlights the areas where existing data is reliable, and where new data and more precise methods are needed. This comprehensive review will guide the future development of a consistent and transparent database and software tool to calculate the embodied energy and carbon of buildings.

Alternative approaches to slum upgrading in Kibera, Nairobi

This paper discusses the sustainability of two different approaches to upgrade water and sanitation infrastructure in Kenya’s largest informal settlement, Kibera. A background to the urbanization of poverty is outlined along with approaches to urban slums. Two case-studies of completed interventions of infrastructure upgrading have been investigated. In one case-study, the upgrading method driven by an NGO uses an integrated livelihoods and partnership technique at community level to create an individual project. in the other case-study, the method is a collaboration between the government and a multi-lateral agency to deliver upgraded services as a part of a country-wide programme. The ‘bottom-up’ (project) and ‘top-down’ (programme) approaches each seek sustainability and aim to achieve this in the same context using different techniques. This paper investigates the sustainability of each approach. The merits and challenges of the approaches are discussed with the projected future of Kibera. The paper highlights the valuable opportunity for the role of appropriate engineering infrastructure for sustainable urban development, as well as the alleviation of poverty in a developing context.

Sustainable buildings need integrated teams

This report is intended to contribute to strengthening the work of the Government, the Strategic Forum and the Specialist Engineering Alliance in bringing about a more integrated and a more sustainable industry. Its aim is to examine the potential for improving the sustainability of the built environment through an integrated approach to procurement and delivery, in which the role of the specialist engineering sector is recognised for its vital ability to improve building performance. Based on wide ranging knowledge and expertise across the construction sector, it puts forward a vision for sustainable buildings and sets out the actions needed from Government, clients, consultants, contractors and manufacturers to ensure the vision is realised. The report complements the Strategy for Sustainable Construction published by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (June 2008).

Designing for resilience: Using a Delphi study to identify resilience issues for hospital designs in a changing climate

Hospitals are facing a triple challenge - meeting mandatory climate change targets and refurbishing aging infrastructure while simultaneously providing quality of care. With the potential of more frequent disruptive weather events, a UK government-funded project was launched in 2009 to investigate practical strategies for the National Health Service to increase its resilience to climate change. This paper presents the process of defining resilience by using the Delphi method and demonstrates its applicability within healthcare design. A Delphi survey is nearing completion which has determined the significant resilience issues and temperature ranges for ideal and critical conditions. Our preliminary findings identified six priorities that lead towards increasing resilience. Using the Delphi method can be a useful tool in clarifying the focus for healthcare design considerations. Copyright © 2002-2012 The Design Society. All rights reserved.

Everywhere and nowhere: nearshore software development in the context of globalisation

Offshore software development has been identified as one of the most striking manifestations of contemporary globalisation and as evidence of placelessness, the idea that information and communication technologies have rendered location irrelevant. Research in the International Business and Information Systems fields, in contrast, has suggested that all locations are not equal and has identified a number of characteristics that may influence the attractiveness of a location for multinational investment and offshoring, respectively. These literatures, however, focus almost exclusively on quantitative, economic characteristics that are seen as fixed and applying uniformly throughout a whole country. They therefore offer little guidance on the suitability of particular locations as offshoring destinations, especially in countries without a track record in offshore software development. Drawing on two cases of nearshore software development centres set up by offshore service providers in the Caribbean, this paper illustrates that, while the initial decision to establish the ventures reflected a logic of placelessness, characteristics of these particular locations affected their subsequent success. Through the findings, we therefore develop a typology of espoused, unanticipated and remediable locational characteristics, which illustrates that locational attractiveness may vary significantly within countries and that offshore service providers and government agencies can modify locational characteristics to their advantage.