The international business literature has already acknowledged a number of positive outcomes for companies actively engaged in strategic alliances, such as higher return on equity, better return on investment, and higher success rates, compared with integration through mergers and acquisitions, or companies in the Fortune 500 list that avoid building inter-corporate relationships (Booz-Alle…
One way to learn about business is to read the textbooks, learn the definitions, discuss case studies, and pass the exam. In Foundation: A Hands-on Introduction to Business Fundamentals we take a less theoretical and more hands-on approach. We’re going to learn business by managing a business. The approach makes sense for two reasons. First, business itself is practical. If there were a sing…
Even as attention is increasingly paid to “going green” and to the role business can play to help solve sustainability problems, the flip side of the business-and-sustainability relationship has gone underexamined. Forget how management can affect sustainability. How will sustainability change management? The difference between the questions isn’t as subtle as it might sound. The …
Woody Allen, comedian, screenwriter, and director, once said: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” If this was ever true, it certainly isn’t anymore. Success today requires a good bit more than good attendance. Yet, multiple studies in different countries and across industries show that employees who are passionate about their jobs and the organizations in which they work are in th…
In today's business environment, and under the influence of globalization and advances in the field of information technology, organizations are facing increasing demands for information processing. In order to respond to the demands of the current business context, modern organization are finding the solution in creating adequate capacity and infrastructure to support the establishment of harm…
This thesis aims to contribute to strategic planning process research. Currently, practitioners as well as academics liken strategic planning with making strategy. This, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding that has further been limited by the lack of empirical investigation of the phenomenon itself. The uniqueness of this work can first be seen in its theoretical approach. This thesi…
The paper provides a broad and multifaceted review of the received literature on business models in which we examine the business model concept through multiple disciplinary and subject-matter lenses.
After more than a decade Michael Porter’s book Competitive Advantage of Nations stays ahead of the other books, in particular as alternative framework from the comparative advantage idea inspired by Adam Smith. This small book is merely an alternative proposition, a postscript perhaps, to Porter’s book, with basic idea that one cannot rely merely on industrial processes alone to keep …
The article marries Michael Porter’s industrial cluster theory of traded and local clusters to Richard Florida’s occupational approach of creative and routine workers to gain a better understanding of the process of economic development. By combining these two approaches, four major industrial-occupational categories are identified. The shares of U.S. Employment in each – creative-in-…
Given the current economic challenges facing many countries across the globe, the notion of engendering greater entrepreneurial activity has become a prominent goal for many national governments. The relevance of entrepreneurship to economic development has been highlighted by many researchers (e.g. Davidsson et al, 2006) and it is now well-recognised that education and training opportunities p…
‘… the process of conducting research on the business environment within which an organisation operates and on the organisation itself, in order to formulate strategy.’ BNET Business Dictionary ‘… a theoretically informed understanding of the environment in which an organisation is operating, together with an understanding of the organisation’s interaction with its environment in …
There are two common definitions of statistics. The first is "turning data into information", the second is "making inferences about populations from samples". These two definitions are quite different, but between them they capture most of what you will learn in most introductory statistics courses. The first, "turning data into information," is a good definition of descriptive statistics…
What is ‘business development’? This is usually the first question I have to answer whenever I’m asked what I do for a living by people outside the pharmaceutical industry. The answers I try to give are oen tailored to the audience and what they are likely to quickly understand from their own experience. However, as few people have any idea that such a role exists beyond some hazy idea …
This paper reconsiders influence of intellectual capital on competitiveness of a company (micro- competitiveness) and national economy (macro-competitiveness). Bearing in mind that competitiveness of national economy has been dominantly defined by competitiveness of its companies, this research focuses on analysis of different aspects of intellectual capital in the light of micro-competitivenes…
The notion of business model has been used by strategy scholars to refer to “the logic of the firm, the way it operates and how it creates value for its stakeholders.” On the surface, this notion appears to be similar to that of strategy. We present a conceptual framework to separate and relate business model and strategy. Business model, we argue, is a reflection of the firm’s realized s…
Before we get started with analyzing malware, you need to start at the baseline, which will involve reviewing some fundamental tenets of computer science. Malware analysis essentially deals with an in-depth investigation of a malicious software program, usually in some binary form procured through collection channels/ repositories/infected systems or even your own Frankenstein creations in a …
This Companion to Sociolinguistics has been collected together for anyone who is interested in how and why diverse people speak and write differently: in other words, it is aimed at everyone. Anyone who has ever noticed an accent, or puzzled over a dialect phrase, or wondered why road signs are in several languages; anyone who adjusts their speech or writing in different situations, or cannot i…
The theory of univariate splines began its rapid development in the early sixties, resulting in several thousand research papers and a number of books. This development was largely over by 1980, and the bulk of what is known today was treated in the classic monographs of deBoor [Boo78] and Schu- maker [Sch81]. Univariate splines have become an essential tool in a wide variety of application are…