Thanatos Empresarial : evolución del Sector de la construcción en Colombia.

Esta investigación está orientada hacia la identificación de características de la internacionalización de la economía colombiana, específicamente en el sector de la construcción, los cuales han logrado otorgarle un especial dinamismo durante esta última década. En el desarrollo del documento se evalúan los modelos de internacionalización basados principalmente en tres temas fundamentales; el primero es la teoría económica, el segundo es la teoría como proceso, y por último la teoría de redes. Cada uno de estos modelos basados en su respectiva teoría, enseñan conceptos de cómo podrían las empresas implementar planes para entrar a otros mercados, empezando por países similares tanto en aspectos sociales, económicos, culturales, y políticos, logrando así de esta manera una posición aventajada frente a sus competidores. Al lograr este posicionamiento pueden empezar su expansión a países más lejanos puesto que ya han conocido y fortalecido sus ventajas competitivas, obteniendo una mayor experiencia de adaptación a nuevos mercados, con esto alcanzando captar mayores recursos económicos, de conocimiento y de otras índoles que ayudan a disminuir el riesgo de inversión que realizan las organizaciones en diferentes naciones.

El enfoque del neuromarketing aplicado al mercado colombiano

GLOSARIO • Neuromarketing: El Neuromarketing consiste en la aplicación de las técnicas de investigación de las Neurociencias a la investigación de marketing tradicional. A través de técnicas de medición de la actividad cerebral (como el EGG o la fMRI), las “respuestas” de los entrevistados a distintos estímulos (por ejemplo, anuncios publicitarios) son leídas directamente de su actividad cerebral (Neuromarca) • Neurociencia: La neurociencia estudia la estructura y la función química, farmacología, y patología del sistema nervioso y de cómo los diferentes elementos del sistema nervioso interactúan y dan origen a la conducta (Neurologia y ove) • Mercadeo: Según la American Marketing Asociation (A.M.A.), el marketing es una forma de organizar un conjunto de acciones y procesos a la hora de crear un producto “para crear, comunicar y entregar valor a los clientes, y para manejar las relaciones” y su finalidad es beneficiar a la organización satisfaciendo a los clientes (Revista PYM) • Cerebro: Es la parte más evolucionada y grande del encéfalo. En el cerebro se dan la cognición, el pensamiento y las emociones; también la memoria y el lenguaje. Tiene dos hemisferios, cada uno con 4 lóbulos: frontal, temporal, parietal y occipital. La parte más externa es el cortex cerebral, que tiene unos repliegues que forman circunvoluciones y cisuras (Enciclopedia Salud) • Estrategia Empresarial: Es la que define las diferentes líneas de acción que debe asumir cada uno de los individuos que desempeñan las funciones dentro de la misma y permite a toda organización generar una ventaja competitiva en el mercado en el que desenvuelve sus actividades, generando mayores utilidades y permitiendo aprovechar cada una de las oportunidades dándole un valor agregado (Emagister) • Integración sensorial: Es un proceso Neurológico por el cual las sensaciones que provienen de nuestro entornoy de nuestro cuerpo, son organizadas e interpretadas para su uso (Enciclopedia Salud) • Top of Mind: Es el indicador que revela cuál es la marca que, cuando le preguntan por una categoría específica, se le viene a la mente en primer lugar al mayor porcentaje de personas (Gerente) • Valor Agregado: Valor agregado o valor añadido, en términos de marketing, es una característica o servicio extra que se le da a un producto o servicio, con el fin de darle un mayor valor comercial; generalmente se trata de una característica o servicio poco común, o poco usado por los competidores, y que le da al negocio o empresa cierta diferenciación (Crece Negocios)

Productividad, innovación y uso de tecnologías de información y las comunicaciones (tic) como factores de desarrollo de la micro, pequeña y mediana empresa (mipyme) en Bogotá.

Las TIC han impactado en el funcionamiento de las organizaciones y han aportado a su proceso evolutivo, generando diversos efectos de acuerdo a la función que estas cumplen dentro de la organización. Las TIC como consecuencia se convierten en una estrategia de gestión en un entorno complejo donde permiten alcanzar mejoras en la organización social, la actividad económica, el bienestar y el acceso a la información y el conocimiento. (Cáceres Carrasco & Aceytuno Pérez, 2008)Con el fin de entender los beneficios de las TIC, se deben brindar a los directores herramientas que permitan formular modelos de negocios efectivos de cara a los mercados y enfocadas a la satisfacción de los clientes. Adicionalmente, para las organizaciones el añadir valor, no sólo hace referencia al servicio que están prestando; hay otros factores diferentes al uso de herramientas TIC y la innovación que también son igual de importantes como: los procesos de apoyo, de gestión que se encuentran de fondo y que hacen posible brindar un servicio al mercado, en estos procesos se encuentran aplicaciones de procedimientos amigables y fáciles de articular, temas como la responsabilidad empresarial, relación y comunicación con competidores dentro del mismo sector, es justamente en las relaciones con los clientes, que las TIC y el uso de Internet puede tener incidencia en los modelos de negocios a través de actividades como el comercio electrónico, el mercadeo electrónico, el mercadeo en línea entre otros. Existen investigaciones acerca de estos temas: innovación, TI, pero no se han establecido relaciones entre ellos, debido a su novedad. Diferentes experiencias laborales de los investigadores en el uso de las TIC como herramienta en la organización de información permiten que surja la idea de llevar a cabo este proyecto abarcando la realidad bogotana de las MiPyme. La presente investigación con un enfoque cualitativo hace una revisión bibliográfica, y bajo la mirada teórica se analiza la relación que tienen los factores de desarrollo que se evidenciaron como son la innovación y el uso de herramientas TIC, como variables dependientes de la productividad de las MiPyme en Bogotá, Colombia, involucrando temas que se relacionan con distintos campos como la tecnología, políticas gubernamentales, y economía.

The extrapolation problem and how population modeling can help

We argue that population modeling can add value to ecological risk assessment by reducing uncertainty when extrapolating from ecotoxicological observations to relevant ecological effects. We review other methods of extrapolation, ranging from application factors to species sensitivity distributions to suborganismal (biomarker and "-omics'') responses to quantitative structure activity relationships and model ecosystems, drawing attention to the limitations of each. We suggest a simple classification of population models and critically examine each model in an extrapolation context. We conclude that population models have the potential for adding value to ecological risk assessment by incorporating better understanding of the links between individual responses and population size and structure and by incorporating greater levels of ecological complexity. A number of issues, however, need to be addressed before such models are likely to become more widely used. In a science context, these involve challenges in parameterization, questions about appropriate levels of complexity, issues concerning how specific or general the models need to be, and the extent to which interactions through competition and trophic relationships can be easily incorporated.

Benchmarking consensus model quality assessment for protein fold recognition

Background: Selecting the highest quality 3D model of a protein structure from a number of alternatives remains an important challenge in the field of structural bioinformatics. Many Model Quality Assessment Programs (MQAPs) have been developed which adopt various strategies in order to tackle this problem, ranging from the so called "true" MQAPs capable of producing a single energy score based on a single model, to methods which rely on structural comparisons of multiple models or additional information from meta-servers. However, it is clear that no current method can separate the highest accuracy models from the lowest consistently. In this paper, a number of the top performing MQAP methods are benchmarked in the context of the potential value that they add to protein fold recognition. Two novel methods are also described: ModSSEA, which based on the alignment of predicted secondary structure elements and ModFOLD which combines several true MQAP methods using an artificial neural network. Results: The ModSSEA method is found to be an effective model quality assessment program for ranking multiple models from many servers, however further accuracy can be gained by using the consensus approach of ModFOLD. The ModFOLD method is shown to significantly outperform the true MQAPs tested and is competitive with methods which make use of clustering or additional information from multiple servers. Several of the true MQAPs are also shown to add value to most individual fold recognition servers by improving model selection, when applied as a post filter in order to re-rank models. Conclusion: MQAPs should be benchmarked appropriately for the practical context in which they are intended to be used. Clustering based methods are the top performing MQAPs where many models are available from many servers; however, they often do not add value to individual fold recognition servers when limited models are available. Conversely, the true MQAP methods tested can often be used as effective post filters for re-ranking few models from individual fold recognition servers and further improvements can be achieved using a consensus of these methods.

FunFOLDQA: a quality assessment tool for protein-ligand binding site residue predictions

The estimation of prediction quality is important because without quality measures, it is difficult to determine the usefulness of a prediction. Currently, methods for ligand binding site residue predictions are assessed in the function prediction category of the biennial Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiment, utilizing the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) and Binding-site Distance Test (BDT) metrics. However, the assessment of ligand binding site predictions using such metrics requires the availability of solved structures with bound ligands. Thus, we have developed a ligand binding site quality assessment tool, FunFOLDQA, which utilizes protein feature analysis to predict ligand binding site quality prior to the experimental solution of the protein structures and their ligand interactions. The FunFOLDQA feature scores were combined using: simple linear combinations, multiple linear regression and a neural network. The neural network produced significantly better results for correlations to both the MCC and BDT scores, according to Kendall’s τ, Spearman’s ρ and Pearson’s r correlation coefficients, when tested on both the CASP8 and CASP9 datasets. The neural network also produced the largest Area Under the Curve score (AUC) when Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) analysis was undertaken for the CASP8 dataset. Furthermore, the FunFOLDQA algorithm incorporating the neural network, is shown to add value to FunFOLD, when both methods are employed in combination. This results in a statistically significant improvement over all of the best server methods, the FunFOLD method (6.43%), and one of the top manual groups (FN293) tested on the CASP8 dataset. The FunFOLDQA method was also found to be competitive with the top server methods when tested on the CASP9 dataset. To the best of our knowledge, FunFOLDQA is the first attempt to develop a method that can be used to assess ligand binding site prediction quality, in the absence of experimental data.

Building from scratch a marketing services giant by acquisition: case study and interview with Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP

Purpose – Mergers and acquisitions are among the most intensely used strategic decisions. Yet research by both academics and consulting groups suggests that many mergers and acquisitions fail to add value. On the other hand there are many companies that successfully use mergers and acquisition to grow and add shareholder value. One such company is WPP. The aim of this paper is to explore why WPP has been successful in its acquisition strategy while so many other companies fail. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on documentary evidence and a semi-structured interview with Sir Martin Sorrell – Chief Executive and founder of WPP. Research limitations/implications – The case study offers a unique insight into thinking of a successful acquirer and sheds light on how mergers and acquisitions are managed by WPP. However, because of its design the findings are not generalisable. Originality/value – This case study sheds light on how mergers and acquisitions can be used to create a £9 billion company from a standing start. Furthermore, very few case studies offer insight into the thinking of entrepreneurial Chief Executives who established the business, grew it to become the largest and most profitable marketing services company in the world and engineered close to 300 acquisitions.

Informing operational flood management with ensemble predictions: lessons from Sweden.

This paper highlights some communicative and institutional challenges to using ensemble prediction systems (EPS) in operational flood forecasting, warning, and civil protection. Focusing in particular on the Swedish experience, as part of the PREVIEW FP6 project, of applying EPS to operational flood forecasting, the paper draws on a wider set of site visits, interviews, and participant observation with flood forecasting centres and civil protection authorities (CPAs) in Sweden and 15 other European states to reflect on the comparative success of Sweden in enabling CPAs to make operational use of EPS for flood risk management. From that experience, the paper identifies four broader lessons for other countries interested in developing the operational capacity to make, communicate, and use EPS for flood forecasting and civil protection. We conclude that effective training and clear communication of EPS, while clearly necessary, are by no means sufficient to ensure effective use of EPS. Attention must also be given to overcoming the institutional obstacles to their use and to identifying operational choices for which EPS is seen to add value rather than uncertainty to operational decision making by CPAs.

A semiotic framework for information representation of energy consumption in office buildings

Taking a perspective from a whole building lifecycle, occupier's actions could account for about 50% of energy. However occupants' activities influence building energy performance is still a blind area. Building energy performance is thought to be the result of a combination of building fabrics, building services and occupants' activities, along with their interactions. In this sense, energy consumption in built environment is regarded as a socio-technical system. In order to understand how such a system works, a range of physical, technical and social information is involved that needs to be integrated and aligned. This paper has proposed a semiotic framework to add value for Building Information Modelling, incorporating energy-related occupancy factors in a context of office buildings. Further, building information has been addressed semantically to describe a building space from the facility management perspective. Finally, the framework guides to set up building information representation system, which can help facility managers to manage buildings efficiently by improving their understanding on how office buildings are operated and used.

Ensemble downscaling in coupled solar wind-magnetosphere modeling for space weather forecasting

Advanced forecasting of space weather requires simulation of the whole Sun-to-Earth system, which necessitates driving magnetospheric models with the outputs from solar wind models. This presents a fundamental difficulty, as the magnetosphere is sensitive to both large-scale solar wind structures, which can be captured by solar wind models, and small-scale solar wind “noise,” which is far below typical solar wind model resolution and results primarily from stochastic processes. Following similar approaches in terrestrial climate modeling, we propose statistical “downscaling” of solar wind model results prior to their use as input to a magnetospheric model. As magnetospheric response can be highly nonlinear, this is preferable to downscaling the results of magnetospheric modeling. To demonstrate the benefit of this approach, we first approximate solar wind model output by smoothing solar wind observations with an 8 h filter, then add small-scale structure back in through the addition of random noise with the observed spectral characteristics. Here we use a very simple parameterization of noise based upon the observed probability distribution functions of solar wind parameters, but more sophisticated methods will be developed in the future. An ensemble of results from the simple downscaling scheme are tested using a model-independent method and shown to add value to the magnetospheric forecast, both improving the best estimate and quantifying the uncertainty. We suggest a number of features desirable in an operational solar wind downscaling scheme.

The perceived impact of the National Health Service on personalised nutrition service delivery among the UK public

Personalised nutrition (PN) has the potential to reduce disease risk and optimise health and performance. Although previous research has shown good acceptance of the concept of PN in the UK, preferences regarding the delivery of a PN service (e.g. online v. face-to-face) are not fully understood. It is anticipated that the presence of a free at point of delivery healthcare system, the National Health Service (NHS), in the UK may have an impact on end-user preferences for deliverances. To determine this, supplementary analysis of qualitative data obtained from focus group discussions on PN service delivery, collected as part of the Food4Me project in the UK and Ireland, was undertaken. Irish data provided comparative analysis of a healthcare system that is not provided free of charge at the point of delivery to the entire population. Analyses were conducted using the 'framework approach' described by Rabiee (Focus-group interview and data analysis. Proc Nutr Soc 63, 655-660). There was a preference for services to be led by the government and delivered face-to-face, which was perceived to increase trust and transparency, and add value. Both countries associated paying for nutritional advice with increased commitment and motivation to follow guidelines. Contrary to Ireland, however, and despite the perceived benefit of paying, UK discussants still expected PN services to be delivered free of charge by the NHS. Consideration of this unique challenge of free healthcare that is embedded in the NHS culture will be crucial when introducing PN to the UK.

Faster, richer, better: rapid appraisal techniques for the study of IS implementation in virtual communities

A major issue in Information Systems (IS) research is how to combine relevance and rigor (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999) and reduce the widening gap between research results and adoption (Dunn, 1994). Qualitative researchers make use of interpretivist methods to add richness and depth to their understanding of user problems. Interpretivist methods applied to IS implementations can thus result in research which communicates those findings more effectively. However standard interpretivist data-collection and analysis methods can be time-consuming and expensive. Findings based on these methods may be irrelevant to practitioners by the time they reach publication stage. A potential solution to this problem lies in Rapid Appraisal or RA, a qualitative appraisal methodology derived from rural development-related research. It offers IS researchers an additional technique for learning and acquiring relevant information in a limited period of time that  supplements current data collection and analysis techniques. RA adds value to the traditional approach for studying diffusion of innovation, supporting and extending the IS researcher’s qualitative ‘tool-kit’. In this paper we review an electronic gateway designed to facilitate the diffusion of an Australian government to business [G2B] export documentation system, EXDOC, which was first implemented with meat producers. RA techniques were used to collect and analyse data regarding the implementation of the first regional Electronic Trade Facilitation Center [ETFC] successfully established for Australian exporters in the horticulture sector. The findings from the original EXDOC implementation in the meat sector were confirmed and extended through this study. These include the importance of developing a governance structure that ensures all community members share the benefits of an implementation and the fact that virtual trading communities are attractive to users only if they add value to their business and extend standard ways of operating. Interactive interviews, part of the RA approach; also enabled us to expand our understanding of the way in which procedures developed in the course of implementing an electronic market represent value-adding opportunities for virtual trading communities. The paper has special relevance for researchers investigating adoption and diffusion issues experienced by small-scale producers with low exposure to technology in remote and rural settings.

Can knowledge management save regional development?

Australia needs to create innovative regions to sustain economic prosperity and regional development. In order to do this, regions will need to systematically address their knowledge needs and identify tools that are appropriate in maximising their effectiveness. Many initiatives have focused on information and communication technology (ICT) to enable knowledge exchange and stimulate knowledge generation, but active knowledge management (KM) strategies are required if ICTs are to be used effectively. These strategies must respond to the regional economic and social environments which incorporate small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper outlines the importance of KM for supporting regional cluster development and the key ways in which communities of practice (CoPs), a KM technique, have been used to add value in similar contexts. How CoPs and their online counterpart, virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), can be used and developed in regional areas of Australia is considered along with a program for further research.

From efficiency to effectiveness :a new management model of social inclusion

This paper challenges the tendency in the contemporary management literature to conceptualize management within a micro-framework that focuses on short-term efficiency and privatized economic gain. Based on a literature review of social-relation theories, we propose a new management model of social inclusion for general management across contexts with a particular concern for profit-for organizations. The model conceptualizes management within a systemic societal framework where its effectiveness is demonstrated for society, organizations, groups and individuals.  We suggest that management based on the collectivistic values of shared humanity and social inclusion (not only organization) is expected to reduce management-led systematic marginalization in the workplace and social whole. For the purpose of this paper, we define management as “mutually interdependent activities that add value to individuals’, groups’, organizations’ and societal wellbeing by ensuring social inclusion at each of these dimensions.” We term this management process ‘Management Process of Social Inclusion’ as it extends management perspectives to not only organizational effectiveness but societal effectiveness. The paper concludes by proposing several propositions and implications for future research.

Crime-prevention jurisprudence? A response to Andrews and Dowden

Recently Andrews and Dowden (2007) published an article proposing that both offender and victim well-being could be enhanced by utilizing the risk–need–responsivity model to guide the legal and court systems in crime prevention (rather than therapy). Consequently, crime-prevention jurisprudence (defined as a law-and-justice objective reflecting the language of personality and social psychology) was proposed as an alternative to therapeutic jurisprudence (defined as a mental-health objective reflecting the clinical language of forensic mental health). The authors erroneously claim that therapeutic jurisprudence is a mental-health concept whose aim is to provide therapy that improves well-being in offenders rather than to demonstrate concern for victims. In fact, therapeutic jurisprudence is a legal concept that utilizes social-science knowledge to highlight the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic impacts of the law, legal procedures, and legal roles on all individuals, including victims. This article will respond to Andrews and Dowden by challenging three assumptions they make regarding the role of therapeutic jurisprudence. This response concludes that the focus of offender rehabilitation should be on enhancing community protection by balancing offender rights and victim rights. Therapeutic jurisprudence already provides such a framework and, therefore, the promise of crime-prevention jurisprudence fails to add value.