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The US Government is challenged to maintain pace as the world’s de facto provider of space object cataloging data. Augmenting capabilities with nontraditional sensors present an expeditious and low-cost improvement. However, the large tradespace and unexplored system of systems performance requirements pose a challenge to successful capitalization. This paper aims to better define and assess the utility of augmentation via a multi-disiplinary study.

Hypothetical telescope architectures are modeled and simulated on two separate days, then evaluated against performance measures and constraints using multi-objective optimization in a heuristic algorithm. Decision analysis and Pareto optimality identifies a set of high-performing architectures while preserving decision-maker design flexibility.

Capacity, coverage and maximum time unobserved are recommended as key performance measures. A total of 187 out of 10¹⁷ architectures were identified as top performers. A total of 29% of the sensors considered are found in over 80% of the top architectures. Additional considerations further reduce the tradespace to 19 best choices which collect an average of 49–51 observations per space object with a 595–630 min average maximum time unobserved, providing redundant coverage of the Geosynchronous Orbit belt. This represents a three-fold increase in capacity and coverage and a 2 h (16%) decrease in the maximum time unobserved compared to the baseline government-only architecture as-modeled.

This study validates the utility of an augmented network concept using a physics-based model and modern analytical techniques. It objectively responds to policy mandating cataloging improvements without relying solely on expert-derived point solutions.

To augment sales revenue, B2B digital start-ups aim to create and sustain commercial relationships with industry incumbents. However, since these incumbents have traditionally struggled with implementing disruptive digital artifacts, most studies have almost exclusively concentrated on their challenges, leaving the digital start-ups' side underexplored. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how digital start-ups navigate digital implementation (DI) hardships to ultimately achieve digital entrepreneurship success.

An abductive explanatory multi-case study of four industries that pose a variety of implementation challenges for B2B digital start-ups (agriculture, insurance, real estate and construction, and healthcare) was conducted using data collected from 40 interviews with Israeli experts and relevant digital data observations.

This study articulates two main observations. (1) Throughout their journeys, digital start-ups have utilized newly created and/or refined dynamic capabilities (DC) to successfully implement their digital artifacts. Simultaneously, successful DI has enabled digital start-ups to create new DC or sustain and evolve current DC. (2) We provide empirical evidence outlining how digital start-ups using continuous learning have combined causation and effectuation logic throughout their DI journeys.

This study answers a call to explore more explicit digital-related drivers (i.e. DI) for digital entrepreneurship success by studying a highly-ranked country on the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) to achieve this. Moreover, it illustrates how digital start-ups evolve throughout their commercial relationships with industry incumbents, thereby enabling an effective approach for successful DI. Such an approach can be considered very valuable for both practitioners and policymakers. Consequently, it advances digital entrepreneurship as an independent research topic.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the current manufacturing methods for three-dimensional textile preforms while providing experimental data on the emerging techniques of combining yarn interlocking with yarn interlooping.

The paper describes the key textile technologies used for composite manufacture: braiding, weaving and knitting. The various textile preforming methods are suited to different applications; their capabilities and end performance characteristics are analysed.

Such preforms are used in composites in a wide range of industries, from aerospace to medical and automotive to civil engineering. The paper highlights how the use of knitting technology for preform manufacture has gained wider acceptance due to its flexibility in design and shaping capabilities. The tensile properties of glass fibre knit structures containing inlay yarns interlocked between knitted loops are given, highlighting the importance of reinforcement yarns.

The future trends of reinforcement yarns in knitted structures for improved tensile properties are discussed, with initial experimental data.

Manufacturers face various challenges and risks during their digital servitization (DS), due to the complexity caused by introducing breakthrough technologies, increasingly complex product-service solutions and new stakeholders in the business network. The process necessitates the implementation of various changes that usually happen over a long period of time. Using complexity management as a theoretical lens, this paper delves into manufacturers’ DS journeys and explores how manufacturers manage the associated complexities.

This paper investigates the DS journey of two manufacturers in a longitudinal case study from 2014 to 2021.

Three main complexity management actions during the DS journey were identified: shaping the digital service system, shaping the organization and shaping the network. Tied to different types of complexities, these actions demonstrate how manufacturers navigate their journey. The findings also reveal different complexity management approaches used at the different stages of this journey.

This paper offers a comprehensive framework for understanding complexity management in the DS journey, including the types of complexities, complexity management actions and complexity management approaches and their rationale. This paper shows that different requirements are created during emerge, consolidate and evolve stages of the DS journey. Manufacturers need a dynamic approach that considers changes in complexities and actions over time.

The purpose of this article is to investigate if and how social capital offline – stemming from face-to-face interactions – and social capital online – stemming from social digital media – can influence early-stage entrepreneurs, i.e. ventures with up to 42 months of existence.

The authors used herein a qualitative research approach. The method used was the case study. The authors investigated three early-stage entrepreneurs in order to achieve the objective of the paper. These entrepreneurs are both the unit of analysis and the unit of observation.

The outcomes of this research indicate (1) the combined importance of social capital offline and online; (2) the different performance of the two different types of social capital (they seem to operate in relatively distinct ways) and (3) the existence of recursiveness between resources stemming from the two social spheres (offline and online).

As research limitations, the authors point out the following: (1) the use of semistructured interviews as the only data collection instrument; (2) the limitation of the outcomes to entrepreneurs only (3) the absence of information on the performance of the business ventures; the focus of the paper was only on establishing causality between social capital offline and online and entrepreneurial performance.

This paper provides important research contributions. Initially, the paper presents a range of offline and online variables, which can be used in further research. At the same time, the paper emphasizes the combined impact of social capital offline and online, expanding the literature related to entrepreneurship. Moreover, this study proposes the creation of an integrative model. Finally, the authors point out the need for new theoretical and empirical studies on the subject, which still presents a gap in the literature.

Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on, monitoring services became one of the major interests, including sensing technologies, and then more actuation for remote control-type of IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities and Industry 4.0. In this paper, the authors focus on the RFID technology impairment. They propose to take advantage of the mature IoT technologies that offer native service discovery such as blutooth or LTE D2D ProSe or Wifi Direct. Using the automatic service discovery in the new framework will make heterogeneous readers aware of the presence of other readers and this will be used by the proposed distributed algorithm to better control the multiple RFID reader interference problem. The author clearly considers emerging Industry 4.0 use case, where RFID technology is of major interest for both identification and tracking. To enhance the RFID tag reading performance, collisions in the RFID frequency should be minimized with reader-to-reader coordination protocols. In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation.

In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation to study its behavior in very dense and heterogeneous RFID environments. Specifically, the author explores the coexistence of powerful static readers and small mobile readers, comparing the proposal with a standard ETSI CSMA method. The proposal reduces significantly the number of access attempts, which are resource-expensive for the readers. The results show that the objectives of DiSim are met, producing low reader collision probability and, however, having lower average readings per reader per time.

DiSim is evaluated with the ETSI standard LBT protocol for multi-reader environments in several environments with varied levels of reader and tag densities, having both static powerful RFID readers and heterogeneous randomly moving mobile RFID readers. It effectively reduces the number of backoffs or contentions for the RFID channel. This has high reading success rate due to the avoided collisions; however, the readers are put to wait, and DiSim has less average readings per reader per time. As an additional side evaluation, the ETSI standard LBT mechanism was found to present a good performance for low-density mid-coverage scenarios, however, with high variability on the evaluation results.

To show more results, the author needs to do real experimentation in a warehouse, such as Amazon warehouse, where he expects to have more and more robots, start shelves, automatic item finding on the shelve, etc.

Future work considers experimentation in a real warehouse equipped with heterogeneous RFID readers and real-time analysis of RFID reading efficiency also combined with indoor localization and navigation for warehouse mobile robots.

More automatization is expected in the future; this work makes the use of RFID technology more efficient and opens more possibilities for services deployment in different domains such as the industry which was considered not only in this paper but also in smart cites and smart homes.

Compared to the literature, the proposal offers the advantage to not be dependent on a centralized server controlling the RFID readers. It also offers the possibility for an existing RFID architecture to add new readers from a different manufacturer, as the readers using the approach will have the possibility to discover the capabilities of the new interaction other RFID readers. This solution takes advantage of the available proximity service that will be more and more offered by the IoT technologies.

The United States Air Force often provides effective airlift for cargo distribution, but is at times inefficient. This paper aims to address the under-utilization of military airlift cargo compartments that plagues the airlift system.

The authors examine seven techniques designed to increase cargo compartment utilization and increase airlift utilization rates. The techniques were applied through load planning software to 30 real-world movements consisting of 159 sorties. They then ran each post-technique movement through a modeled flight environment to obtain cycle movement data. The metrics gained from both the load planning software and the modeled environment were regressed to provide statistical understanding regarding how well each technique influenced cost savings.

The results showed a 24 per cent elimination of aircraft required and a savings of $14.5m. Extrapolation of the authors’ findings to four years of airlift mission data revealed an estimated annual savings of $1.6bn.

This research effort provides multiple options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of military airlift.

The study aims to explore the benefits of service productisation to provide further understanding on the productisation concept as support for business processes and service management. The concept has been deficiently discussed regardless of the potential significance to the whole formed by service products, business processes, information technology (IT), people and data.

In the study, the exploratory empirical evidence is presented from 16 cases, 4 of which are from companies that are globally well-known.

The key findings of the paper include an overview of the benefits of service productisation and the relation to service offering, service processes and related resources. The concept links to the management of the whole formed by service products, business processes, IT, people and data. The noted benefits seem to be applicable to productisation of different service types, whilst some service characteristics may affect the specific emphasis.

The limitations involve using secondary data, which, however, makes the cases less biased regarding the aims. Primary data are required to gain further insights into the phenomena and the identified benefits.

The findings provide support for issues that are commonly discussed by practitioners on a concept that is less studied by the scientific literature. Practitioners can work towards organisational efficiency and effectiveness by understanding the benefits of productisation. Understanding service productisation can support the effective management of business processes and work towards prosperity in the service business.

The study is the first one to analyse the benefits of service productisation by exploring the issue through multiple cases and attempting to identify aspects for further attention by the academic community.