Search results

When Theodore Levitt discussed how firms respond to the question “what business are we in?”, he highlighted the myopic perceptions of some because they viewed their business as “running a railroad” or “making films” — rather than being “in the transport or entertainment market”.

This paper develops a new algorithmic approach to equilibrium road traffic assignment which, by directly estimating differences, can more accurately estimate the impact of (relatively) small traffic schemes or changes in the demand pattern. Comparing the outputs of two independent traffic assignments to “with” and “without” scheme networks very often masks the effect of the scheme due to the “noise” in the resulting solutions. By contrast an incremental approach attempts to directly estimate the changes in link flows - and hence costs - resulting from (relatively) small perturbations to the network and/or trip matrix. The algorithms are based firstly on “route flows” as opposed to “link flows“, and secondly, they use a variant of the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm known as “Social Pressure” which gives a greater weight to those O-D path flows whose costs are well above the minimum costs as opposed to those which are already at or near minimum. Tests on a set of five “real” networks demonstrate that the Social Pressure Algorithm is marginally better than Frank-Wolfe for single assignments but is very much faster and more accurate in predicting the impact of small network changes.

Three Jotun Paints coating systems — “Barrier/Navitar”, “Marathon” and “Baltoflake” — have been tested for abrasion resistance by BAW (Bundesanstalt für Wasserbau), the official German approvals authority for sub‐merged steel structures in harbours, canals and sluices. As a result, all three systems have been approved by BAW.

The purpose of this paper is to inform businesses about the best practice in getting the most out of the government‐funded Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – a method of transferring university expertise to the benefit of business.

The paper describes how these Knowledge Transfer Partnerships work, the kind of projects that get funded, and the benefits that surveyed companies have experienced. It then gives three case studies of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships to illustrate how they work.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships significantly improve productivity and profitability in most businesses where the projects take place. They also cover a broad range of projects than simply technology transfer.

The paper is valuable to businesses, especially SMEs, who might be looking to undertake projects that involve some innovative or research element as it explains how to obtain significant government funding.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

At the turn of the decade the tendency of retrenchment in organisations appeared as a byproduct of an ongoing recession threatening with heavy consequences for the future. In the big organisations, like the Fortune 500 Companies, the number of people employed full time shrunk from 19% of the workforce two decades ago to less than 10% (Castro, 1993). Initially justified by marketing difficulties due to foreign competition, retrenchment has become fashionable and a kind of panacea, although actually only about a third of the companies which performed major lay‐offs reported increases in productivity and profits, while a plummeting morale surfaced in 80% of the cases. Therefore, more and more such organisations are getting, as it were, “lean and lame” (Henkoff, 1994).

Over the years organization development professionals have evolved a number of techniques and methods for gathering and using information. In the Leadership and Organization Development Journal we shall outline the key issues on a number of these approaches. We have adopted a practical question and answer approach, but for those wishing to pursue the ideas further we have provided a brief list of references at the end.