Identifying the core competence as a key requirement for business model innovation. The case of Airlines as a service industry

Core competencies form the basis of an organization’s skills and the basic element of a successful strategic execution. Identifying and strengthening the core competencies enhances flexibility thereby strategically positioning a firm for responding to competition in the dynamic marketplace and can be the difference in quality among firms that follow the same business model. A correct understanding of the concept of business models, employing the right core competencies, organizing them effectively and building the business model around the competencies that are constantly gained and assimilated can result in enhanced business performance and thus having implications for firms that want to innovate their business models. Flexibility can be the firm’s agility to shift focus in response to external factors such as changing markets, new technologies or competition and a firm’s success can be gauged by the ability it displays in this transition. Although industry transformations generally emanate from technological changes, recent examples suggests they may also be due to the introduction of new business models and nowhere is it more relevant than in the airline industry. An analysis of the business model flexibility of 17 Airlines from Asia, Europe and Oceania, that is done with core competence as the indicator reveals a picture of inconsistencies in the core competence strategy of certain airlines and the corresponding reduction in business performance. The performance variations are explained from a service oriented core competence strategy employed by airlines that ultimately enables them in having a flexible business model that not only increases business performance but also helps in reducing the uncertainties in the internal and external operating environments. This is more relevant in the case of airline industry, as the product (the air transportation of passengers) minus the service competence is all the same.

Building functional surfaces for biosensors development

Polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEM) built by layer-by-layer technique have been extensively studied over the last years, resulting in a wide variety of current and potential applications. This technique can be used to construct thin films with different functionalities, or to functionalize surfaces with substantial different properties of those of the underlying substrates. The multilayering process is achieved by the alternate adsorption of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes. In this work we get advantage of the protein resistant property of the Poly (l-lysine)-graft-(polyethyleneglycol) to create protein patterns. Proteins can be immobilized on a surface by unspecific physical adsorption, covalent binding or through specific interactions. The first protein used in this work was laccase, a copper-containing redox enzyme that catalyse the oxidation of a broad range of polyphenols and aromatic substrates, coupled to the reduction of O2 to H2O without need of cofactors. Applications of laccases have been reported in food, pulp, paper, and textile industry, and also in biosensor development. Some uses require the immobilization of the enzyme on solid supports by adsorption, covalent attachment, entrapment, etc, on several substrates. Especially for biosensor development, highly active, stable and reproducible immobilization of laccase is required.

‘State-of-the-art’ of building integrated photovoltaic products

During the last decades, the photovoltaic (PV) modules and their associated architectural materials are increasingly being incorporated into the construction of the building envelope such as façade, roof and skylights in the urban centers. This paper analyzes the-state-of-the-art of the PV elements and construction materials which are advertised as BIPV-products at the most important companies in the world. For this purpose 136 companies and 445 PV elements have been investigated and analyzed from a technical and architectural point of view. Also, the study has been divided into two main groups according to industry which producing the product: BIPV-Modules, which comes from the PV modules manufacturers and consist of standard PV-modules with some variations in its aesthetic features, support or dimensions; and PV-Constructions Elements, which consist of conventional constructive elements with architectural features intentionally manufactured for photovoltaic integration. In advance for conclusions, the solar tile is the most common PV-constructions element, the Si-crystalline is the most widely used PV technology, and the BIPV-urban furniture is the fastest growing market experienced in recent years. However, it is clear the absences of innovative elements which meet at the same time both the constructive purpose as the quality standards of PV technology.

Building lean thinking in a telecom software development organization: strengths and challenges.

The potential shown by Lean in different domains has aroused interest in the software industry. However, it remains unclear how Lean can be effectively applied in a domain such as software development that is fundamentally different from manufacturing. This study explores how Lean principles are implemented in software development companies and the challenges that arise when applying Lean Software Development. For that, a case study was conducted at Ericsson R&D Finland, which successfully adopted Scrum in 2009 and subsequently started a comprehensible transition to Lean in 2010. Focus groups were conducted with company representatives to help devise a questionnaire supporting the creation of a Lean mindset in the company (Team Amplifier). Afterwards, the questionnaire was used in 16 teams based in Finland, Hungary and China to evaluate the status of the transformation. By using Lean thinking, Ericsson R&D Finland has made important improvements to the quality of its products, customer satisfaction and transparency within the organization. Moreover, build times have been reduced over ten times and the number of commits per day has increased roughly five times.The study makes two main contributions to research. First, the main factors that have enabled Ericsson R&D?s achievements are analysed. Elements such as ?network of product owners?, ?continuous integration?, ?work in progress limits? and ?communities of practice? have been identified as being of fundamental importance. Second, three categories of challenges in using Lean Software Development were identified: ?achieving flow?, ?transparency? and ?creating a learning culture?

A user-focused integrated system for sustainable refurbishment.

Nowadays, it is urgent to renovate a great number of residential buildings. The necessity of improving energy efficiency must also be considered as an opportunity to improve indoor comfort. To achieve this goal, it is essential to develop tools to be used in the decision-making process, aiming to refurbish buildings in an integrated, efficient and sustainable way. The integrated system developed is based on a set of indicators. Sustainability indicators are useful to synthesize and organize complex information. They can provide data to evaluate a process in different stages: evaluation, diagnosis, comparison and tracing. The set of proposed indicators aims to accomplish the holistic approach pursued by sustainable development. So, these indicators are divided into three groups: environmental, social and economic. However, the main innovation of the system of indicators is the social ones. The sustainable refurbishment system aims to be a user-focused one. Therefore, the starting point is the needs of the user and social indicators are developed around this. The system tackles the sustainable refurbishment of buildings beyond energy problems. It proposes incorporating users in the decision-making process involving them in the refurbishment and so, contributing to the success of the renovation. In order to achieve this target, three social indicators are used, divided into 10 sub-indicators, and a ?Questionnaire about Sustainable Refurbishment? is drawn up. This research has been carried out in the framework of ?Sustainable Refurbishment? Research and Development Project, an integrated project under the supervision of the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial (CDTI) from the Spanish Government, in which University and the Construction Industry collaborate. This research project aims to develop an integrated system for the retrofitting of existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency. Accordingly, an additional objective of the project is to improve quality of life of residents.

Sustainability assessment of energy saving measures: A multi-criteria approach for residential buildings retrofitting—A case study of the Spanish housing stock

The building sector is well known to be one of the key energy consumers worldwide. The renovation of existing buildings provides excellent opportunities for an effective reduction of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions but it is essential to identify the optimal strategies. In this paper a multi-criteria methodology is proposed for the comparative analysis of retrofitting solutions. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) are combined by expressing environmental impacts in monetary values. A Pareto optimization is used to select the preferred strategies. The methodology is exemplified by a case study: the renovation of a representative housing block from the 1960s located in Madrid. Eight scenarios have been proposed, from the Business as Usual scenario (BAU), through Spanish Building Regulation requirements (for new buildings) up to the Passive House standard. Results show how current renovation strategies that are being applied in Madrid are far from being optimal solutions. The required additional investment, which is needed to obtain an overall performance improvement of the envelope compared with the common practice to date, is relatively low (8%) considering the obtained life cycle environmental and financial savings (43% and 45%, respectively).

La roca magica: Uses of natural zeolites in agriculture and industry

For nearly 200 years since their discovery in 1756, geologists considered the zeolite minerals to occur as fairly large crystals in the vugs and cavities of basalts and other traprock formations. Here, they were prized by mineral collectors, but their small abundance and polymineralic nature defied commercial exploitation. As the synthetic zeolite (molecular sieve) business began to take hold in the late 1950s, huge beds of zeolite-rich sediments, formed by the alteration of volcanic ash (glass) in lake and marine waters, were discovered in the western United States and elsewhere in the world. These beds were found to contain as much as 95% of a single zeolite; they were generally flat-lying and easily mined by surface methods. The properties of these low-cost natural materials mimicked those of many of their synthetic counterparts, and considerable effort has made since that time to develop applications for them based on their unique adsorption, cation-exchange, dehydration–rehydration, and catalytic properties. Natural zeolites (i.e., those found in volcanogenic sedimentary rocks) have been and are being used as building stone, as lightweight aggregate and pozzolans in cements and concretes, as filler in paper, in the take-up of Cs and Sr from nuclear waste and fallout, as soil amendments in agronomy and horticulture, in the removal of ammonia from municipal, industrial, and agricultural waste and drinking waters, as energy exchangers in solar refrigerators, as dietary supplements in animal diets, as consumer deodorizers, in pet litters, in taking up ammonia from animal manures, and as ammonia filters in kidney-dialysis units. From their use in construction during Roman times, to their role as hydroponic (zeoponic) substrate for growing plants on space missions, to their recent success in the healing of cuts and wounds, natural zeolites are now considered to be full-fledged mineral commodities, the use of which promise to expand even more in the future.

Green Building along the Colorado Front Range

Conventional residential construction results in a variety of local, regional, and global environmental impacts. It also may lead to unhealthy interior environments for building inhabitants. Green building, on the contrary, is a practice that reduces the environmental impacts of residential development, that produces healthier indoor environments, and that yields better long-term financial investments. This Capstone Project applies empirical research and analysis to identify the history and benefits of green building, to support the hypothesis that Colorado Front Range communities benefit most from municipal green-build programs, and to make subsequent program recommendations. Ultimately, this project may assist communities with implementing their own municipal green-build programs.

Implementation Feasibility of a Digital Nervous System for the Construction Industry: For Efficient and Effective Information Management across the Project Lifecycle

The construction industry has long been considered as highly fragmented and non-collaborative industry. This fragmentation sprouted from complex and unstructured traditional coordination processes and information exchanges amongst all parties involved in a construction project. This nature coupled with risk and uncertainty has pushed clients and their supply chain to search for new ways of improving their business process to deliver better quality and high performing product. This research will closely investigate the need to implement a Digital Nervous System (DNS), analogous to a biological nervous system, on the flow and management of digital information across the project lifecycle. This will be through direct examination of the key processes and information produced in a construction project and how a DNS can provide a well-integrated flow of digital information throughout the project lifecycle. This research will also investigate how a DNS can create a tight digital feedback loop that enables the organisation to sense, react and adapt to changing project conditions. A Digital Nervous System is a digital infrastructure that provides a well-integrated flow of digital information to the right part of the organisation at the right time. It provides the organisation with the relevant and up-to-date information it needs, for critical project issues, to aid in near real-time decision-making. Previous literature review and survey questionnaires were used in this research to collect and analyse data about information management problems of the industry – e.g. disruption and discontinuity of digital information flow due to interoperability issues, disintegration/fragmentation of the adopted digital solutions and paper-based transactions. Results analysis revealed efficient and effective information management requires the creation and implementation of a DNS.

Intelligent Decision-Making System Frameworks for a Digital Plan of Work: A Theoretical Investigation for the Construction Industry

The construction industry is characterised by fragmentation and suffers from lack of collaboration, often adopting adversarial working practices to achieve deliverables. For the UK Government and construction industry, BIM is a game changer aiming to rectify this fragmentation and promote collaboration. However it has become clear that there is an essential need to have better controls and definitions of both data deliverables and data classification. Traditional methods and techniques for collating and inputting data have shown to be time consuming and provide little to improve or add value to the overall task of improving deliverables. Hence arose the need in the industry to develop a Digital Plan of Work (DPoW) toolkit that would aid the decision making process, providing the required control over the project workflows and data deliverables, and enabling better collaboration through transparency of need and delivery. The specification for the existing Digital Plan of Work (DPoW) was to be, an industry standard method of describing geometric, requirements and data deliveries at key stages of the project cycle, with the addition of a structured and standardised information classification system. However surveys and interviews conducted within this research indicate that the current DPoW resembles a digitised version of the pre-existing plans of work and does not push towards the data enriched decision-making abilities that advancements in technology now offer. A Digital Framework is not simply the digitisation of current or historic standard methods and procedures, it is a new intelligent driven digital system that uses new tools, processes, procedures and work flows to eradicate waste and increase efficiency. In addition to reporting on conducted surveys above, this research paper will present a theoretical investigation into usage of Intelligent Decision Support Systems within a digital plan of work framework. Furthermore this paper will present findings on the suitability to utilise advancements in intelligent decision-making system frameworks and Artificial Intelligence for a UK BIM Framework. This should form the foundations of decision-making for projects implemented at BIM level 2. The gap identified in this paper is that the current digital toolkit does not incorporate the intelligent characteristics available in other industries through advancements in technology and collation of vast amounts of data that a digital plan of work framework could have access to and begin to develop, learn and adapt for decision-making through the live interaction of project stakeholders.

Building from building waste: The development of an instrument to determine the circularity of materials from the existing building stock in order to maximise high quality reuse

On a global level the population growth and increase of the middle class lead to a growing demand on material resources. The built environment has an enormous impact on this scarcity. In addition, a surplus of construction and demolition waste is a common problem. The construction industry claims to recycle 95% of this waste but this is in fact mainly downcycling. Towards the circular economy, the quality of reuse becomes of increasing importance. Buildings are material warehouses that can contribute to this high quality reuse. However, several aspects to achieve this are unknown and a need for more insight into the potential for high quality reuse of building materials exists. Therefore an instrument has been developed that determines the circularity of construction waste in order to maximise high quality reuse. The instrument is based on three principles: ‘product and material flows in the end of life phase’, ‘future value of secondary materials and products’ and ‘the success of repetition in a new life cycle’. These principles are further divided into a number of criteria to which values and weighting factors are assigned. A degree of circularity can then be determined as a percentage. A case study for a typical 70s building is carried out. For concrete, the circularity is increased from 25% to 50% by mapping out the potential for high quality reuse. During the development of the instrument it was clarified that some criteria are difficult to measure. Accurate and reliable data are limited and assumptions had to be made. To increase the reliability of the instrument, experts have reviewed the instrument several times. In the long-term, the instrument can be used as a tool for quantitative research to reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste and contribute to the reduction of raw material scarcity.

Building regulatory practices and the courts /

Mode of access: Internet.

SCANS blueprint for action : building community coalitions.

Shipping list no.: 91-697-P.

Census of business: 1935. Construction industry...

Lithographed.

Asbestos standard for the shipyard employment industry.

Mode of access: Internet.