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The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the mechanisms through which Chinese National Science Parks' (NSPs) services facilitate returnee entrepreneurs' (REs) acquisition of resources for their new ventures. Resource acquisition is crucial for new ventures, but it inevitably leads to significant costs increase. Although the NSPs offer various services to REs to reduce these costs, they still struggle to find the right mix of services.

From the transaction cost's perspective, an exploratory multiple-case study was conducted with data collected from six NSPs in China.

The results reveal that four types of NSP services (mentoring and training, social event, promotion of REs and accreditation of resource holders (RHs)) have both individual and joint effects on reducing REs' resource acquisition costs. Specifically, the “accreditation of RHs” service directly helps REs reduce search costs. The combination of “accreditation of RHs”, “promotion of REs” and “social event” services help REs and RHs to establish guanxi. Further, guanxi, working along with the “mentoring and training” service, helps REs to reduce contracting, monitoring and enforcement costs.

This study is among the first to explore the matching mechanisms between science parks’ services and entrepreneurs' cost reduction. This helps reconcile the inconsistent findings on science parks' effect by explaining why some NSPs are able to provide strong support to REs while others are less successful. In addition, the findings are useful for NSPs to develop the right mix of tailored services for REs. Finally, REs will find this study useful to evaluate which NSP is a more suitable location for their new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine publication characteristics and dynamic evolution of the Industrial Management & Data Systems (IMDS) over the past 25 years from volume 94, issue 1, in 1994 through volume 118, issue 9, in 2018, using a bibliometric analysis, and identify the leading trends that have affected the journal during this time frame.

A bibliometric approach was used to provide a basic overview of the IMDS, including distribution of publication and citations, articles citing the IMDS, top-cited papers and publication patterns. Then, a complex network analysis was employed to present the most productive, influential and active authors, institutes and countries/regions. In addition, cluster analysis and alluvial diagram were used to analyze author keywords.

This study presents the basic bibliometric results for the IMDS and focuses on exploring its performance over the last 25 years. And it reveals the most productive, influential and active authors, institutes and countries/regions in IMDS. Moreover, this study detects the existence of at least five different keywords clusters and discovers how themes have evolved through the intricate citation relationships in IMDS.

The main contribution of this paper is the use of multiple analysis techniques from a complex network paradigm to emphasize the time evolving nature of the co-occurrence networks and to explore the variation of the collaboration networks in the IMDS. For the first time, the evolution of research themes is revealed with a purely data-driven approach.

This paper aims to contribute towards understanding how safety knowledge can be elicited from railway experts for the purposes of supporting effective decision-making.

A consortium of safety experts from across the British railway industry is formed. Collaborative modelling of the knowledge domain is used as an approach to the elicitation of safety knowledge from experts. From this, a series of knowledge models is derived to inform decision-making. This is achieved by using Bayesian networks as a knowledge modelling scheme, underpinning a Safety Prognosis tool to serve meaningful prognostics information and visualise such information to predict safety violations.

Collaborative modelling of safety-critical knowledge is a valid approach to knowledge elicitation and its sharing across the railway industry. This approach overcomes some of the key limitations of existing approaches to knowledge elicitation. Such models become an effective tool for prediction of safety cases by using railway data. This is demonstrated using passenger–train interaction safety data.

This study contributes to practice in two main directions: by documenting an effective approach to knowledge elicitation and knowledge sharing, while also helping the transport industry to understand safety.

By supporting the railway industry in their efforts to understand safety, this research has the potential to benefit railway passengers, staff and communities in general, which is a priority for the transport sector.

This research applies a knowledge elicitation approach to understanding safety based on collaborative modelling, which is a novel approach in the context of transport.

THE article which we publish from the pen of Mr. L. Stanley Jast is the first of many which we hope will come from his pen, now that he has release from regular library duties. Anything that Mr. Jast has to say is said with originality even if the subject is not original; his quality has always been to give an independent and novel twist to almost everything he touches. We think our readers will find this to be so when he touches the important question of “The Library and Leisure.”

High levels of turnover in financial markets are consistent with the notion that trading, like gambling, yields direct utility to some agents. The purpose of this paper is to show that the presence of these agents attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future returns. Since psychological literature indicates that the desirability of a gamble arises from the ex ante volatility of the outcome, the authors propose that agents derive greater utility from trading more volatile stocks. These stocks earn lower average returns in equilibrium, although the risk premium on the market portfolio is positive. The authors then consider a dynamic setting where agents’ utility from trading increases when they make positive profits in earlier rounds (e.g. due to an endowment effect). This leads to “bubbles,” i.e. disproportionate jumps in asset returns as a function of past prices, higher volume in up markets relative to down markets, as well as a leverage effect, wherein down markets are followed by higher volatility than up markets.

Analytical.

The presence of gamblers attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future returns. If gamblers prefer more volatile stocks, these stocks earn lower average returns in equilibrium. If agents’ utility from trading increases when they make positive profits in earlier rounds (e.g. to an endowment effect), this leads to higher volume and lower volatility in up markets relative to down markets.

No paper has previously modeled agents who derive direct utility from trading.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the economic requirements of power system loading dispatch and reduce the fuel cost of generation units. In order to optimize the scheduling of power load, an improved chicken swarm optimization (ICSO) is proposed to be adopted, for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problem.

The ICSO increased the self-foraging factor to the chicks whose activities were the highest. And the evolutionary operations of chicks capturing the rooster food were increased. Therefore, these helped the ICSO to jump out of the local extreme traps and obtain the global optimal solution. In this study, the generation capacity of the generation unit is regarded as a variable, and the fuel cost is regarded as the objective function. The particle swarm optimization (PSO), chicken swarm optimization (CSO), and ICSO were used to optimize the fuel cost of three different test systems.

The result showed that the convergence speed, global search ability, and total fuel cost of the ICSO were better than those of PSO and CSO under different test systems. The non-linearity of the input and output of the generating unit satisfied the equality constraints; the average ratio of the optimal solution obtained by PSO, CSO, and ICSO was 1:0.999994:0.999988. The result also presented the equality and inequality constraints; the average ratio of the optimal solution was 1:0.997200:0.996033. The third test system took the non-linearity of the input and output of the generating unit that satisfied both equality and inequality constraints; the average ratio was 1:0.995968:0.993564.

This study realizes the whole fuel cost minimization in which various types of intelligent algorithms have been applied to the field of load economic scheduling. With the continuous evolution of intelligent algorithms, they save a lot of fuel cost for the ELD problem.

The ICSO is applied to solve the ELD problem. The quality of the optimal solution and the convergence speed of ICSO are better than that of CSO and PSO. Compared with PSO and CSO, ICSO can dispatch the generator more reasonably, thus saving the fuel cost. This will help the power sector to achieve greater economic benefits. Hence, the ICSO has good performance and significant effectiveness in solving the ELD problem.

The purpose of this paper is to present the challenges identified during a lean implementation in a health visiting service within a large primary care trust in NHS UK.

Following a series of lean workshops a triangulated approach to data collection was adopted in order to determine the root cause of the challenges that were faced during this lean implementation. The three methods that were selected for qualitative analysis included semi‐structured interviews, document analysis and researcher participant observation.

Six key challenges were identified from the data analysis. These were: high process variability; a lack of understanding of lean; poor communication and leadership; target focused; problems defining waste; and difficulty in determining who is the customer and what do they value?

Although this particular lean implantation had limited success, the research has highlighted a number of challenges which would have to be addressed prior to future lean exercises. This will assist other clinical and managerial staff to prepare for the challenges that may be faced during a lean implementation, and adapt their approach to future quality improvement.

The barriers to lean implementation could be overcome with upfront planning, transformational leadership, excellent communication, identification and sharing of best practice and, above all, a shared vision. There is no quick and easy solution to productivity improvement, community services, as in this paper, cannot expect to select lean tools and techniques and emulate the success seen elsewhere. If they wish to deliver world‐class healthcare in the face of constrained resources and greater demand, they need to adopt a long‐term vision.

This paper aims to present a review carried out under DEFRA‐funded project WRT208, describing: the composition of WEEE, current treatment technologies, emerging technologies and research.

This paper summarises the output from the first part of the project. It provides information on the composition of WEEE and an extensive survey of technologies relevant to materials recycling from WEEE. A series of further papers will be published from this research project.

WEEE has been identified as one of the fastest growing sources of waste in the EU, and is estimated to be increasing by 16‐28 per cent every five years. Within each sector a complex set of heterogeneous secondary wastes is created. Although treatment requirements are complicated, the sources from any one sector possess many common characteristics. However, there exist huge variations in the nature of electronic wastes between sectors, and treatment regimes appropriate for one cannot be readily transferred to another.

A very large number of treatment technologies are available, both established and emerging, that singly and in combination could address the specific needs of each sector. However, no single set of treatment methods can be applied universally.

This paper is the first part of work leading to the development of technical strategies and methodologies for reprocessing WEEE into primary and secondary products, and where possible the recovery of higher added‐value components and materials.

The purpose of this paper is to present the authors’ views of university–multi academy trusts’ (MATs) opportunities for future interconnectivity that could support successful partnerships.

The authors developed a matrix of university–MATs partnerships that could help identifying potential scenarios of collaboration between universities and MATs.

Four potential scenarios of collaborations are proposed (board membership, academic supervision, recruitment support and academic support).

Scholars in the field can further investigate the four proposed scenarios in the matrix in future studies.

The matrix will be useful for universities and MATs management for potential cooperation in the future.

The study proposes four scenarios of cooperation between MATs and universities.