Partnering in the Dynamic Environment: The Role of Trust in Asymmetric Technology Partnership Formation

The purpose of this study was to increase the understanding of the role and nature of trust in asymmetric technology partnership formation. In the knowledge-based "learning race" knowledge is considered as a primary source for competitive advantage. In the emerging ICT sector the high pace of technological change, the convergence of technologies and industries as well as the increasing complexity and uncertainty have forced even the largest players to seek cooperation for complementary knowledge and capabilities. Small technology firms need the complementary resources and legitimacy of the large firms to grow and compete in the global market place. Most of the earlier research indicates, however, that partnerships with asymmetric size, managerial resources and cultures have failed. A basic assumption supported by earlier research was that trust is a critical factor in asymmetric technology partnership formation. Asymmetric technology partnership formation is a dynamic and multi-dimensional process, and consequently a holistic research approach was selected. Research issue was approached from different levels: the individual decision-maker, the firm and the relationship between the parties. Also the impact of the dynamic environment and technology content was analyzed. A multitheoretical approach and a qualitative research method with in-depth interviews in five large ICT companies and eight small ICT companies enabled a holistic and rich view of the research issue. Study contributes on the scarce understanding on the nature and evolution of trust in asymmetric technology partnership formation. It sheds also light on the specific nature of asymmetric technology partnerships. The partnerships were found to be tentative and the diverse strategic intent of small and large technology firms appeared as a major challenge. The role of the boundary spanner was highlighted as a possibility to match the incompatible organizational cultures. A shared vision was found to be a pre-condition for individual-based fast trust leading to intuitive decision-making and experimentation. The relationships were tentative and they were continuously re-evaluated through the key actors' sense making of the technology content, asymmetry and the dynamic environment. A multi-dimensional conceptualization for trust was created and propositions on the role and nature of trust for further research are given. The purpose of this study was to increase the understanding of the role and nature of trust in asymmetric technology partnership formation. In the knowledge-based "learning race" knowledge is considered as a primary source for competitive advantage. In the emerging ICT sector the high pace of technological change, the convergence of technologies and industries as well as the increasing complexity and uncertainty have forced even the largest players to seek cooperation for complementary knowledge and capabilities. Small technology firms need the complementary resources and legitimacy of the large firms to grow and compete in the global market place. Most of the earlier research indicates, however, that partnerships with asymmetric size, managerial resources and cultures have failed. A basic assumption supported by earlier research was that trust is a critical factor in asymmetric technology partnership formation. Asymmetric technology partnership formation is a dynamic and multi-dimensional process, and consequently a holistic research approach was selected. Research issue was approached from different levels: the individual decision-maker, the firm and the relationship between the parties. Also the impact of the dynamic environment and technology content was analyzed. A multitheoretical approach and a qualitative research method with in-depth interviews in five large ICT companies and eight small ICT companies enabled a holistic and rich view of the research issue. Study contributes on the scarce understanding on the nature and evolution of trust in asymmetric technology partnership formation. It sheds also light on the specific nature of asymmetric technology partnerships. The partnerships were found to be tentative and the diverse strategic intent of small and large technology firms appeared as a major challenge. The role of the boundary spanner was highlighted as a possibility to match the incompatible organizational cultures. A shared vision was found to be a pre-condition for individual-based fast trust leading to intuitive decision-making and experimentation. The relationships were tentative and they were continuously re-evaluated through the key actors' sense making of the technology content, asymmetry and the dynamic environment. A multi-dimensional conceptualization for trust was created and propositions on the role and nature of trust for further research are given.

Dynamic Ownership in Family Business System – A Portfolio Business Approach

Family businesses are among the longest-lived most prevalent institutions in the world and they are an important source of economic development and growth. Ownership is a key to the business life of the firm and also one main key in family business definition. There is only a little portfolio entrepreneurship or portfolio business research within family business context. The absence of empirical evidence on the long-term relationship between family ownership and portfolio development presents an important gap in the family business literature. This study deals with the family business ownership changes and the development of portfolios in the family business and it is positioned in to the conversation of family business, growth, ownership, management and strategy. This study contributes and expands the existing body of theory on family business and ownership. From the theoretical point of view this study combines insights from the fields of portfolio entrepreneurship, ownership, and family business and integrate them. This crossfertilization produces interesting empirical and theoretical findings that can constitute a basis for solid contributions to the understanding of ownership dynamics and portfolio entrepreneurship in family firms. The research strategy chosen for this study represents longitudinal, qualitative, hermeneutic, and deductive approaches.The empirical part of study is using a case study approach with embedded design, that is, multiple levels of analysis within a single study. The study consists of two cases and it begins with a pilot case which will form a preunderstanding on the phenomenon. Pilot case develops the methodology approach to build in the main case and the main case will deepen the understanding of the phenomenon. This study develops and tests a research method of family business portfolio development focusing on investigating how ownership changes are influencing to the family business structures over time. This study reveals the linkages between dimensions of ownership and how they give rise to portfolio business development within the context of the family business. The empirical results of the study suggest that family business ownership is dynamic and owners are using ownership as a tool for creating business portfolios.

Building Dynamic Data Centers for Fast Delivery of New Data and Data Updates

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Dynamic Modelling of Circulating Fluidized Bed Plant with Gas Turbine Repowering

Increasing amount of renewable energy source based electricity production has set high load control requirements for power grid balance markets. The essential grid balance between electricity consumption and generation is currently hard to achieve economically with new-generation solutions. Therefore conventional combustion power generation will be examined in this thesis as a solution to the foregoing issue. Circulating fluidized bed (CFB) technology is known to have sufficient scale to acts as a large grid balancing unit. Although the load change rate of the CFB unit is known to be moderately high, supplementary repowering solution will be evaluated in this thesis for load change maximization. The repowering heat duty is delivered to the CFB feed water preheating section by smaller gas turbine (GT) unit. Consequently, steam extraction preheating may be decreased and large amount of the gas turbine exhaust heat may be utilized in the CFB process to reach maximum plant electrical efficiency. Earlier study of the repowering has focused on the efficiency improvements and retrofitting to maximize plant electrical output. This study however presents the CFB load change improvement possibilities achieved with supplementary GT heat. The repowering study is prefaced with literature and theory review for both of the processes to maximize accuracy of the research. Both dynamic and steady-state simulations accomplished with APROS simulation tool will be used to evaluate repowering effects to the CFB unit operation. Eventually, a conceptual level analysis is completed to compare repowered plant performance to the state-of-the-art CFB performance. Based on the performed simulations, considerably good improvements to the CFB process parameters are achieved with repowering. Consequently, the results show possibilities to higher ramp rate values achieved with repowered CFB technology. This enables better plant suitability to the grid balance markets.

A speculative systems model of the dynamic interaction among students, faculty and administration in the community college, with particular reference to intrinsic motivation and the teacher-administrator interface

The challenge the community college faces in helping meet the needs of the living open system of society is examined in this study. It is postulated that internalization student outcomes are required by society to reduce entropy and remain self-renewing. Such behavior is characterized as having an intrinsically motivated energy source and displays the seeking and conquering of challenge, the development of reflective knowledge and skill, full use of all capabilities, internal control, growth orientation, high self-esteem, relativistic thinking and competence. The development of a conceptual systems model that suggests how transactions among students, faculty and administration might occur to best meet the needs of internalization outcomes in students, and intrinsic motivation in faculty is a major purpose of this study. It is a speculative model that is based on a synthesis of a wide variety of variables. Empirical evidence, theoretical considerations, and speculative ideas are gathered together from researchers and theoretici.ans who are working on separate answers to questions of intrinsic motivation, internal control and environments that encourage their development. The model considers the effect administrators·have on faculty anq the corresponding effect faculty may have on students. The major concentration is on the administrator--teacher interface.For administrators the model may serve as a guide in planning effective transactions, and establishing system goals. The teacher is offered a means to coordinate actions toward a specific overall objective, and the administrator, teacher and researcher are invited to use the model to experiment, innovate, verify the assumptions on which the model is based, and raise additional hypotheses. Goals and history of the community colleges in Ontario are examined against current problems, previous progress and open system thinking. The nature of the person as a five part system is explored with emphasis on intrinsic motivation. The nature, operation, conceptualization, and value of this internal energy source is reviewed in detail. The current state of society, education and management theory are considered and the value of intrinsically motivating teaching tasks together with "system four" leadership style are featured. Evidence is reviewed that suggests intrinsically motivated faculty are needed, and "system four" leadership style is the kind of interaction-influence system needed to nurture intrinsic motivation in faculty.

A layered JavaScript virtual machine supporting dynamic instrumentation

L’observation de l’exécution d’applications JavaScript est habituellement réalisée en instrumentant une machine virtuelle (MV) industrielle ou en effectuant une traduction source-à-source ad hoc et complexe. Ce mémoire présente une alternative basée sur la superposition de machines virtuelles. Notre approche consiste à faire une traduction source-à-source d’un programme pendant son exécution pour exposer ses opérations de bas niveau au travers d’un modèle objet flexible. Ces opérations de bas niveau peuvent ensuite être redéfinies pendant l’exécution pour pouvoir en faire l’observation. Pour limiter la pénalité en performance introduite, notre approche exploite les opérations rapides originales de la MV sous-jacente, lorsque cela est possible, et applique les techniques de compilation à-la-volée dans la MV superposée. Notre implémentation, Photon, est en moyenne 19% plus rapide qu’un interprète moderne, et entre 19× et 56× plus lente en moyenne que les compilateurs à-la-volée utilisés dans les navigateurs web populaires. Ce mémoire montre donc que la superposition de machines virtuelles est une technique alternative compétitive à la modification d’un interprète moderne pour JavaScript lorsqu’appliqué à l’observation à l’exécution des opérations sur les objets et des appels de fonction.

Energy-Efficient Cluster based Routing Schemes for Static and Mobile Sensor Networks

The theme of the thesis is centred around one important aspect of wireless sensor networks; the energy-efficiency.The limited energy source of the sensor nodes calls for design of energy-efficient routing protocols. The schemes for protocol design should try to minimize the number of communications among the nodes to save energy. Cluster based techniques were found energy-efficient. In this method clusters are formed and data from different nodes are collected under a cluster head belonging to each clusters and then forwarded it to the base station.Appropriate cluster head selection process and generation of desirable distribution of the clusters can reduce energy consumption of the network and prolong the network lifetime. In this work two such schemes were developed for static wireless sensor networks.In the first scheme, the energy wastage due to cluster rebuilding incorporating all the nodes were addressed. A tree based scheme is presented to alleviate this problem by rebuilding only sub clusters of the network. An analytical model of energy consumption of proposed scheme is developed and the scheme is compared with existing cluster based scheme. The simulation study proved the energy savings observed.The second scheme concentrated to build load-balanced energy efficient clusters to prolong the lifetime of the network. A voting based approach to utilise the neighbor node information in the cluster head selection process is proposed. The number of nodes joining a cluster is restricted to have equal sized optimum clusters. Multi-hop communication among the cluster heads is also introduced to reduce the energy consumption. The simulation study has shown that the scheme results in balanced clusters and the network achieves reduction in energy consumption.The main conclusion from the study was the routing scheme should pay attention on successful data delivery from node to base station in addition to the energy-efficiency. The cluster based protocols are extended from static scenario to mobile scenario by various authors. None of the proposals addresses cluster head election appropriately in view of mobility. An elegant scheme for electing cluster heads is presented to meet the challenge of handling cluster durability when all the nodes in the network are moving. The scheme has been simulated and compared with a similar approach.The proliferation of sensor networks enables users with large set of sensor information to utilise them in various applications. The sensor network programming is inherently difficult due to various reasons. There must be an elegant way to collect the data gathered by sensor networks with out worrying about the underlying structure of the network. The final work presented addresses a way to collect data from a sensor network and present it to the users in a flexible way.A service oriented architecture based application is built and data collection task is presented as a web service. This will enable composition of sensor data from different sensor networks to build interesting applications. The main objective of the thesis was to design energy-efficient routing schemes for both static as well as mobile sensor networks. A progressive approach was followed to achieve this goal.

Routing protocol enhancement for handling node mobility in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the routing algorithms currently available assume that the sensor nodes are stationary. Therefore when mobility modulation is applied to the wireless sensor networks, most of the current routing algorithms suffer from performance degradation. The path breaks in mobile wireless networks are due to the movement of mobile nodes, node failure, channel fading and shadowing. It is desirable to deal with dynamic topology changes with optimal effort in terms of resource and channel utilization. As the nodes in wireless sensor medium make use of wireless broadcast to communicate, it is possible to make use of neighboring node information to recover from path failure. Cooperation among the neighboring nodes plays an important role in the context of routing among the mobile nodes. This paper proposes an enhancement to an existing protocol for accommodating node mobility through neighboring node information while keeping the utilization of resources to a minimum.

Routing Protocol Enhancement for handling Node Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the routing algorithms currently available assume that the sensor nodes are stationary. Therefore when mobility modulation is applied to the wireless sensor networks, most of the current routing algorithms suffer from performance degradation. The path breaks in mobile wireless networks are due to the movement of mobile nodes, node failure, channel fading and shadowing. It is desirable to deal with dynamic topology changes with optimal effort in terms of resource and channel utilization. As the nodes in wireless sensor medium make use of wireless broadcast to communicate, it is possible to make use of neighboring node information to recover from path failure. Cooperation among the neighboring nodes plays an important role in the context of routing among the mobile nodes. This paper proposes an enhancement to an existing protocol for accommodating node mobility through neighboring node information while keeping the utilization of resources to a minimum.

Energy Aware Cluster-based Multihop Routing Protocol for Sensor Networks

Clustering combined with multihop communication is a promising solution to cope with the energy requirements of large scale Wireless Sensor Networks. In this work, a new cluster based routing protocol referred to as Energy Aware Cluster-based Multihop (EACM) Routing Protocol is introduced, with multihop communication between cluster heads for transmitting messages to the base station and direct communication within clusters. We propose EACM with both static and dynamic clustering. The network is partitioned into near optimal load balanced clusters by using a voting technique, which ensures that the suitability of a node to become a cluster head is determined by all its neighbors. Results show that the new protocol performs better than LEACH on network lifetime and energy dissipation

Routing Protocol Enhancement for handling Node Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the routing algorithms currently available assume that the sensor nodes are stationary. Therefore when mobility modulation is applied to the wireless sensor networks, most of the current routing algorithms suffer from performance degradation. The path breaks in mobile wireless networks are due to the movement of mobile nodes, node failure, channel fading and shadowing. It is desirable to deal with dynamic topology changes with optimal effort in terms of resource and channel utilization. As the nodes in wireless sensor medium make use of wireless broadcast to communicate, it is possible to make use of neighboring node information to recover from path failure. Cooperation among the neighboring nodes plays an important role in the context of routing among the mobile nodes. This paper proposes an enhancement to an existing protocol for accommodating node mobility through neighboring node information while keeping the utilization of resources to a minimum.

New Architectural Models for Visibly Controllable Computing: The Relevance of Dynamic Object Oriented Architectures and Plan Based Computing Models

Traditionally, we've focussed on the question of how to make a system easy to code the first time, or perhaps on how to ease the system's continued evolution. But if we look at life cycle costs, then we must conclude that the important question is how to make a system easy to operate. To do this we need to make it easy for the operators to see what's going on and to then manipulate the system so that it does what it is supposed to. This is a radically different criterion for success. What makes a computer system visible and controllable? This is a difficult question, but it's clear that today's modern operating systems with nearly 50 million source lines of code are neither. Strikingly, the MIT Lisp Machine and its commercial successors provided almost the same functionality as today's mainstream sytsems, but with only 1 Million lines of code. This paper is a retrospective examination of the features of the Lisp Machine hardware and software system. Our key claim is that by building the Object Abstraction into the lowest tiers of the system, great synergy and clarity were obtained. It is our hope that this is a lesson that can impact tomorrow's designs. We also speculate on how the spirit of the Lisp Machine could be extended to include a comprehensive access control model and how new layers of abstraction could further enrich this model.

Optimizing the Dynamic Distribution of Data-stream for High Speed Communications

The performances of high-speed network communications frequently rest with the distribution of data-stream. In this paper, a dynamic data-stream balancing architecture based on link information is introduced and discussed firstly. Then the algorithms for simultaneously acquiring the passing nodes and links of a path between any two source-destination nodes rapidly, as well as a dynamic data-stream distribution planning are proposed. Some related topics such as data fragment disposal, fair service, etc. are further studied and discussed. Besides, the performance and efficiency of proposed algorithms, especially for fair service and convergence, are evaluated through a demonstration with regard to the rate of bandwidth utilization. Hoping the discussion presented here can be helpful to application developers in selecting an effective strategy for planning the distribution of data-stream.

Plugin de routing para JOSM

Presentació del plugin de càlcul de rutes per a JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap)

QoS online routing and MPLS multilevel protection: a survey

A survey of MPLS protection methods and their utilization in combination with online routing methods is presented in this article. Usually, fault management methods pre-establish backup paths to recover traffic after a failure. In addition, MPLS allows the creation of different backup types, and hence MPLS is a suitable method to support traffic-engineered networks. In this article, an introduction of several label switch path backup types and their pros and cons are pointed out. The creation of an LSP involves a routing phase, which should include QoS aspects. In a similar way, to achieve a reliable network the LSP backups must also be routed by a QoS routing method. When LSP creation requests arrive one by one (a dynamic network scenario), online routing methods are applied. The relationship between MPLS fault management and QoS online routing methods is unavoidable, in particular during the creation of LSP backups. Both aspects are discussed in this article. Several ideas on how these actual technologies could be applied together are presented and compared