Innovation in public services: the case of Spanish local government

The present paper aims to determine the level of implementation of innovations in Spanish local government as well as to identify which types of innovations are most common. The paper also considers the link between innovative behavior and organizational size. However, since innovations cannot occur as isolated phenomena but rather as a part of corporate strategy, the study compares the innovative behavior of the local governments analyzed with their typologies or strategic profiles. In order to achieve the aforementioned aims, the paper uses a survey of the Human Resource Managers of Town Halls in the largest Spanish municipalities. The results of this survey show that the most frequent innovations in the local governments analyzed are collaborative; the largest town halls show more propensities to innovate and they focus on external relationships which are collaborative and on the basis on Information and Communication Technologies. The study reconfirms that town halls with a prospective profile are the most innovative.

Providing Collaborative Support to Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the student's hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience from the teacher to students, overcoming physical distance and isolation. This paper describes the extension of two open source tools: (1) the learning management system Moodle, and (2) the tool to create VRLs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides: (1) synchronous collaborative support to any VRL developed with EJS (i.e., any existing VRL written in EJS can be automatically converted into a collaborative lab with no cost), and (2) support to deploy synchronous collaborative VRLs into Moodle. Using our approach students and/or teachers can invite other users enrolled in a Moodle course to a real-time collaborative experimental session, sharing and/or supervising experiences at the same time they practice and explore experiments using VRLs.

Importance of the Support Properties for Immobilization or Purification of Enzymes

Immobilization and purification of enzymes are usual requirements for their industrial use. Both purification and immobilization have a common factor: they use a solid activated support. Using a support for enzyme purification means having mild conditions for enzyme release and a selective enzyme–support interaction is interesting. When using a support for immobilization, however, enzyme desorption is a problem. The improvement of enzyme features through immobilization is a usual objective (e.g., stability, selectivity). Thus, a support designed for enzyme purification and a support designed for enzyme immobilization may differ significantly. In this review, we will focus our attention on the requirements of a support surface to produce the desired objectives. The ideal physical properties of the matrix, the properties of the introduced reactive groups, the best surface activation degree to reach the desired objective, and the properties of the reactive groups will be discussed.