Industry evolution and cross-sectoral skill transfers:a comparative analysis of the video game industry in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom

In this paper we explore the interrelationship between technological progress and the formation of industry-specific skills by analysing the evolution of the video-game industry in three countries: Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We argue that the cross-sectoral transfer of skills occurs differently depending on national contexts, such as the social legitimacy and strength of preexisting industries, the socioeconomic status of entrepreneurs or pioneer firms in an emerging industry, and the sociocultural cohesiveness between the preexisting and emerging industries. Each country draws on a different set of creative resources, which results in a unique trajectory. Whereas Japan's video-game industry emerged out of corporate sponsorships in arcades, toys, and consumer electronics industries and drew skills from the comic book and animated-film sectors, the video-game industry in the United States evolved from arcades and personal computers. In the United Kingdom the video-game industry developed bottom-up, through a process of skills formation in the youth culture of 'bedroom coders' that nurtured self-taught programmers in their teens throughout the country.

The missing ingredient:inter-municipal cooperation and central-local relations in the UK

The thrust of the argument presented in this chapter is that inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in the United Kingdom reflects local government's constitutional position and its exposure to the exigencies of Westminster (elected central government) and Whitehall (centre of the professional civil service that services central government). For the most part councils are without general powers of competence and are restricted in what they can do by Parliament. This suggests that the capacity for locally driven IMC is restricted and operates principally within a framework constructed by central government's policy objectives and legislation and the political expediencies of the governing political party. In practice, however, recent examples of IMC demonstrate that the practices are more complex than this initial analysis suggests. Central government may exert top-down pressures and impose hierarchical directives, but there are important countervailing forces. Constitutional changes in Scotland and Wales have shifted the locus of central- local relations away from Westminster and Whitehall. In England, the seeding of English government regional offices in 1994 has evolved into an important structural arrangement that encourages councils to work together. Within the local government community there is now widespread acknowledgement that to achieve the ambitious targets set by central government, councils are, by necessity, bound to cooperate and work with other agencies. In recent years, the fragmentation of public service delivery has affected the scope of IMC. Elected local government in the UK is now only one piece of a complex jigsaw of agencies that provides services to the public; whether it is with non-elected bodies, such as health authorities, public protection authorities (police and fire), voluntary nonprofit organisations or for-profit bodies, councils are expected to cooperate widely with agencies in their localities. Indeed, for projects such as regeneration and community renewal, councils may act as the coordinating agency but the success of such projects is measured by collaboration and partnership working (Davies 2002). To place these developments in context, IMC is an example of how, in spite of the fragmentation of traditional forms of government, councils work with other public service agencies and other councils through the medium of interagency partnerships, collaboration between organisations and a mixed economy of service providers. Such an analysis suggests that, following changes to the system of local government, contemporary forms of IMC are less dependent on vertical arrangements (top-down direction from central government) as they are replaced by horizontal modes (expansion of networks and partnership arrangements). Evidence suggests, however that central government continues to steer local authorities through the agency of inspectorates and regulatory bodies, and through policy initiatives, such as local strategic partnerships and local area agreements (Kelly 2006), thus questioning whether, in the case of UK local government, the shift from hierarchy to network and market solutions is less differentiated and transformation less complete than some literature suggests. Vertical or horizontal pressures may promote IMC, yet similar drivers may deter collaboration between local authorities. An example of negative vertical pressure was central government's change of the systems of local taxation during the 1980s. The new taxation regime replaced a tax on property with a tax on individual residency. Although the community charge lasted only a few years, it was a highpoint of the then Conservative government policy that encouraged councils to compete with each other on the basis of the level of local taxation. In practice, however, the complexity of local government funding in the UK rendered worthless any meaningful ambition of councils competing with each other, especially as central government granting to local authorities is predicated (however imperfectly) on at least notional equalisation between those areas with lower tax yields and the more prosperous locations. Horizontal pressures comprise factors such as planning decisions. Over the last quarter century, councils have competed on the granting of permission to out-of-town retail and leisure complexes, now recognised as detrimental to neighbouring authorities because economic forces prevail and local, independent shops are unable to compete with multiple companies. These examples illustrate tensions at the core of the UK polity of whether IMC is feasible when competition between local authorities heightened by local differences reduces opportunities for collaboration. An alternative perspective on IMC is to explore whether specific purposes or functions promote or restrict it. Whether in the principle areas of local government responsibilities relating to social welfare, development and maintenance of the local infrastructure or environmental matters, there are examples of IMC. But opportunities have diminished considerably as councils lost responsibility for services provision as a result of privatisation and transfer of powers to new government agencies or to central government. Over the last twenty years councils have lost their role in the provision of further-or higher-education, public transport and water/sewage. Councils have commissioning power but only a limited presence in providing housing needs, social care and waste management. In other words, as a result of central government policy, there are, in practice, currently far fewer opportunities for councils to cooperate. Since 1997, the New Labour government has promoted IMC through vertical drivers and the development; the operation of these policy initiatives is discussed following the framework of the editors. Current examples of IMC are notable for being driven by higher tiers of government, working with subordinate authorities in principal-agent relations. Collaboration between local authorities and intra-interand cross-sectoral partnerships are initiated by central government. In other words, IMC is shaped by hierarchical drivers from higher levels of government but, in practice, is locally varied and determined less by formula than by necessity and function. © 2007 Springer.

Modelling and benchmarking business processes: The supply-line example

Benchmarking techniques have evolved over the years since Xerox’s pioneering visits to Japan in the late 1970s. The focus of benchmarking has also shifted during this period. By tracing in detail the evolution of benchmarking in one specific area of business activity, supply and distribution management, as seen by the participants in that evolution, creates a picture of a movement from single function, cost-focused, competitive benchmarking, through cross-functional, cross-sectoral, value-oriented benchmarking to process benchmarking. As process efficiency and effectiveness become the primary foci of benchmarking activities, the measurement parameters used to benchmark performance converge with the factors used in business process modelling. The possibility is therefore emerging of modelling business processes and then feeding the models with actual data from benchmarking exercises. This would overcome the most common criticism of benchmarking, namely that it intrinsically lacks the ability to move beyond current best practice. In fact the combined power of modelling and benchmarking may prove to be the basic building block of informed business process re-engineering.

Network lifetime maximization with cross-layer design in wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates a cross-layer design approach for minimizing energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime (NL) of a multiple-source and single-sink (MSSS) WSN with energy constraints. The optimization problem for MSSS WSN can be formulated as a mixed integer convex optimization problem with the adoption of time division multiple access (TDMA) in medium access control (MAC) layer, and it becomes a convex problem by relaxing the integer constraint on time slots. Impacts of data rate, link access and routing are jointly taken into account in the optimization problem formulation. Both linear and planar network topologies are considered for NL maximization (NLM). With linear MSSS and planar single-source and single-sink (SSSS) topologies, we successfully use Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions to derive analytical expressions of the optimal NL when all nodes are exhausted simultaneously. The problem for planar MSSS topology is more complicated, and a decomposition and combination (D&C) approach is proposed to compute suboptimal solutions. An analytical expression of the suboptimal NL is derived for a small scale planar network. To deal with larger scale planar network, an iterative algorithm is proposed for the D&C approach. Numerical results show that the upper-bounds of the network lifetime obtained by our proposed optimization models are tight. Important insights into the NL and benefits of cross-layer design for WSN NLM are obtained.

Investigation of a cross-layer link adaptation algorithm for IEEE 802.11n networks

Link adaptation is a critical component of IEEE 802.11 systems, which adapts transmission rates to dynamic wireless channel conditions. In this paper we investigate a general cross-layer link adaptation algorithm which jointly considers the physical layer link quality and random channel access at the MAC layer. An analytic model is proposed for the link adaptation algorithm. The underlying wireless channel is modeled with a multiple state discrete time Markov chain. Compared with the pure link quality based link adaptation algorithm, the proposed cross-layer algorithm can achieve considerable performance gains of up to 20%.

Mixture density networks

Minimization of a sum-of-squares or cross-entropy error function leads to network outputs which approximate the conditional averages of the target data, conditioned on the input vector. For classifications problems, with a suitably chosen target coding scheme, these averages represent the posterior probabilities of class membership, and so can be regarded as optimal. For problems involving the prediction of continuous variables, however, the conditional averages provide only a very limited description of the properties of the target variables. This is particularly true for problems in which the mapping to be learned is multi-valued, as often arises in the solution of inverse problems, since the average of several correct target values is not necessarily itself a correct value. In order to obtain a complete description of the data, for the purposes of predicting the outputs corresponding to new input vectors, we must model the conditional probability distribution of the target data, again conditioned on the input vector. In this paper we introduce a new class of network models obtained by combining a conventional neural network with a mixture density model. The complete system is called a Mixture Density Network, and can in principle represent arbitrary conditional probability distributions in the same way that a conventional neural network can represent arbitrary functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Mixture Density Networks using both a toy problem and a problem involving robot inverse kinematics.

Affect networks:a structural analysis of the relationship between work ties and job-related affect

The relationship between organizational networks and employees' affect was examined in 2 organizations. In Study 1, social network analysis of work ties and job-related affect for 259 employees showed that affect converged within work interaction groups. Similarity of affect between employees depended on the presence of work ties and structural equivalence. Affect was also related to the size and density of employees' work networks. Study 2 used a 10-week diary study of 31 employees to examine a merger of 2 organizational divisions and found that negative changes in employees' affect were related to having fewer cross-divisional ties and to experiencing greater reductions in network density. The findings suggest that affect permeates through and is shaped by organizational networks.

The interplay between microscopic and mesoscopic structures in complex networks

Understanding a complex network's structure holds the key to understanding its function. The physics community has contributed a multitude of methods and analyses to this cross-disciplinary endeavor. Structural features exist on both the microscopic level, resulting from differences between single node properties, and the mesoscopic level resulting from properties shared by groups of nodes. Disentangling the determinants of network structure on these different scales has remained a major, and so far unsolved, challenge. Here we show how multiscale generative probabilistic exponential random graph models combined with efficient, distributive message-passing inference techniques can be used to achieve this separation of scales, leading to improved detection accuracy of latent classes as demonstrated on benchmark problems. It sheds new light on the statistical significance of motif-distributions in neural networks and improves the link-prediction accuracy as exemplified for gene-disease associations in the highly consequential Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database. © 2011 Reichardt et al.

Adaptive congestion control for DSRC vehicle networks

Dedicated short range communications (DSRC) was proposed for collaborative safety applications (CSA) in vehicle communications. In this article we propose two adaptive congestion control schemes for DSRC-based CSA. A cross-layer design approach is used with congestion detection at the MAC layer and traffic rate control at the application layer. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed rate control scheme for adapting to dynamic traffic loads.

Nonlinear penalties in long-haul optical networks employing dynamic transponders

We report for the first time, the impact of cross phase modulation in WDM optical transport networks employing dynamic 28 Gbaud PM-mQAM transponders (m = 4, 16, 64, 256). We demonstrate that if the order of QAM is adjusted to maximize the capacity of a given route, there may be a significant degradation in the transmission performance of existing traffic for a given dynamic network architecture. We further report that such degradations are correlated to the accumulated peak-to-average power ratio of the added traffic along a given path, and that managing this ratio through pre-distortion reduces the impact of adjusting the constellation size of neighboring channels. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America

Investigation of EDFA power transients in circuit-switched and packet-switched optical networks

Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA’s) are a key technology for the design of all optical communication systems and networks. The superiority of EDFAs lies in their negligible intermodulation distortion across high speed multichannel signals, low intrinsic losses, slow gain dynamics, and gain in a wide range of optical wavelengths. Due to long lifetime in excited states, EDFAs do not oppose the effect of cross-gain saturation. The time characteristics of the gain saturation and recovery effects are between a few hundred microseconds and 10 milliseconds. However, in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks with EDFAs, the number of channels traversing an EDFA can change due to the faulty link of the network or the system reconfiguration. It has been found that, due to the variation in channel number in the EDFAs chain, the output system powers of surviving channels can change in a very short time. Thus, the power transient is one of the problems deteriorating system performance. In this thesis, the transient phenomenon in wavelength routed WDM optical networks with EDFA chains was investigated. The task was performed using different input signal powers for circuit switched networks. A simulator for the EDFA gain dynamicmodel was developed to compute the magnitude and speed of the power transients in the non-self-saturated EDFA both single and chained. The dynamic model of the self-saturated EDFAs chain and its simulator were also developed to compute the magnitude and speed of the power transients and the Optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). We found that the OSNR transient magnitude and speed are a function of both the output power transient and the number of EDFAs in the chain. The OSNR value predicts the level of the quality of service in the related network. It was found that the power transients for both self-saturated and non-self-saturated EDFAs are close in magnitude in the case of gain saturated EDFAs networks. Moreover, the cross-gain saturation also degrades the performance of the packet switching networks due to varying traffic characteristics. The magnitude and the speed of output power transients increase along the EDFAs chain. An investigation was done on the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) or the WDM Internet protocol (WDM-IP) traffic networks using different traffic patterns based on the Pareto and Poisson distribution. The simulator is used to examine the amount and speed of the power transients in Pareto and Poisson distributed traffic at different bit rates, with specific focus on 2.5 Gb/s. It was found from numerical and statistical analysis that the power swing increases if the time interval of theburst-ON/burst-OFF is long in the packet bursts. This is because the gain dynamics is fast during strong signal pulse or with long duration pulses, which is due to the stimulatedemission avalanche depletion of the excited ions. Thus, an increase in output power levelcould lead to error burst which affects the system performance.

Knowledge mediation and overlapping in interfirm networks

Purpose – The literature on interfirm networks devotes scant attention to the ways collaborating firms combine and integrate the knowledge they share and to the subsequent learning outcomes. This study aims to investigate how motorsport companies use network ties to share and recombine knowledge and the learning that occurs both at the organizational and dyadic network levels. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a qualitative and inductive approach with the aim of developing theory from an in-depth examination of the dyadic ties between motorsport companies and the way they share and recombine knowledge. Findings – The research shows that motorsport companies having substantial competences at managing knowledge flows do so by getting advantage of bridging ties. While bridging ties allow motorsport companies to reach distant and diverse sources of knowledge, their strengthening and the formation of relational capital facilitate the mediation and overlapping of that knowledge. Research limitations/implications – The analysis rests on a qualitative account in a single industry and does not take into account different types of inter-firm networks (e.g. alliances; constellations; consortia etc.) and governance structures. Cross-industry analyses may provide a more fine-grained picture of the practices used to recombine knowledge and the ideal composition of inter-firm ties. Practical implications – This study provides some interesting implications for scholars and managers concerned with the management of innovation activities at the interfirm level. From a managerial point of view, the recognition of the different roles played by network spanning connections is particularly salient and raises issues concerning the effective design and management of interfirm ties. Originality/value – Although much of the literature emphasizes the role of bridging ties in connecting to diverse pools of knowledge, this paper goes one step further and investigates in more depth how firms gather and combine distant and heterogeneous sources of knowledge through the use of strengthened bridging ties and a micro-context conducive to high quality relationships.

A multihop peer-communication protocol with fairness guarantee for IEEE 802.16-based vehicular networks

Wireless-communication technology can be used to improve road safety and to provide Internet access inside vehicles. This paper proposes a cross-layer protocol called coordinated external peer communication (CEPEC) for Internet-access services and peer communications for vehicular networks. We assume that IEEE 802.16 base stations (BS) are installed along highways and that the same air interface is equipped in vehicles. Certain vehicles locating outside of the limited coverage of their nearest BSs can still get access to the Internet via a multihop route to their BSs. For Internet-access services, the objective of CEPEC is to increase the end-to-end throughput while providing a fairness guarantee in bandwidth usage among road segments. To achieve this goal, the road is logically partitioned into segments of equal length. A relaying head is selected in each segment that performs both local-packet collecting and aggregated packets relaying. The simulation results have shown that the proposed CEPEC protocol provides higher throughput with guaranteed fairness in multihop data delivery in vehicular networks when compared with the purely IEEE 802.16-based protocol.