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This chapter summarizes existing empirical literature on German gazelles and draws on a large new sample of high-growth firms for a description of the regional and sectoral distribution of gazelles in Germany. In addition, the regional distribution of gazelles is juxtaposed with the occurrence of regional cluster initiatives. In sum, our results are in line with major former findings. We find gazelles in all sectors and many regions with some specificities for young and urban gazelles. We do not find significantly more gazelles in regions, though, which pursue a targeted cluster policy. Finally and consequently, we call for more granular studies on types and characteristics of gazelles in the future.

This study aims to explore the importance and impact of supply and manufacturing risk management upon business performance within the context of Chinese manufacturing supply chains.

A two-phased multi-method approach was adopted, which included a survey questionnaire to practitioners in Chinese manufacturing supply chains followed by semi-structured interviews. The findings included 103 valid survey responses complemented by six semi-structured interviews.

The results indicate that in Chinese manufacturing context supply risk and manufacturing risk management are both vital for business performance. A high correlation between business and manufacturing risk management performance exists; however, no significant impact of supplier dependency, systematic purchasing, maturity of production and supply chain and human resources was found despite previously these elements being regarded as key influencers for supply and manufacturing risk management performance. The Chinese manufacturing supply chain indicated that elements such as the supplier and customer orientation, flexibility, manufacturing and supply risk highly connotes with business performance.

In the current unpredictable and volatile business environment, the competitiveness of manufacturing supply chains to a large extent depend on their ability to identify, assess and manage the manufacturing and supply risks. The findings of this study will assist supply chain managers in taking decision on manufacturing and supply risk management and reducing the uncertainty upon their business performance.

The supply chain risk has been widely explored within the context of individual case studies, or standalone models focusing on either supply or manufacturing risk in supply chains; however, to what extent this has been applicable to a wider context and its impact upon business process has not been explored. Hence, this study simultaneously has analysed manufacturing risk and supply risk and its impact upon Chinese manufacturing supply chains business performance. Moreover, this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, which is often limited in this area. Finally, the institutional theory lens offers novel insights in better understanding the factors that can affect the impact of supply and manufacturing risk management upon business performance in those contexts, such as China, where the institutional aspect presents specific features.

Interconnection, packaging and mounting of electronic devices tend to be too often neglected in development of the increasingly sophisticated devices of today. Whilst the electronics sector is probably the most innovative of all manufacturing industries and has an excellent record in the production of miniature devices of increasing complexity and capability, development of reliable, efficient joining techniques, essential for manufacture of marketable systems, is too often considered to be a secondary activity. Recommendations for interconnection and packaging techniques are frequently demanded towards the end of a costly development programme, at a stage when device design has been decided and when it is too late to make modifications which would facilitate these joining operations.

Although additive manufacturing (AM; 3D printing/3DP) is presently in its infancy, once it becomes economically viable for mass production, it would revolutionize the operation and supply chain network of traditional businesses and manufacturing industries. To this end, approaches for ensuring a smooth transition of the economy, businesses, manufacturing centers and related services are being investigated. This review paper assesses the existing literature on the impact of AM on the maritime transportation sector.

This paper provides a systematic literature review through three methodological phases: (1) a comprehensive review of the number of English language literature studies published on the topics of AM or 3DP (1970–2021); (2) a bibliometric analysis of selected keyword combinations and (3) a detailed review on the impact of AM on different sectors.

The key findings are that existing studies do not attempt to forecast shipping volume and ton-miles that can be affected by the mainstreaming of the technology. Additionally, existing literature that focuses on the impact of the technology on different shipping categories is limited to studies on container ships.

The review identifies some potential areas of research that since maritime transportation will be affected by mainstreaming AM, it will have economic, social and environmental impacts on global trade that require future assessment.

Learning from demonstration (LfD) provides an intuitive way for non-expert persons to teach robots new skills. However, the learned motion is typically fixed for a given scenario, which brings serious adaptiveness problem for robots operating in the unstructured environment, such as avoiding an obstacle which is not presented during original demonstrations. Therefore, the robot should be able to learn and execute new behaviors to accommodate the changing environment. To achieve this goal, this paper aims to propose an improved LfD method which is enhanced by an adaptive motion planning technique.

The LfD is based on GMM/GMR method, which can transform original off-line demonstrations into a compressed probabilistic model and recover robot motion based on the distributions. The central idea of this paper is to reshape the probabilistic model according to on-line observation, which is realized by the process of re-sampling, data partition, data reorganization and motion re-planning. The re-planned motions are not unique. A criterion is proposed to evaluate the fitness of each motion and optimize among the candidates.

The proposed method is implemented in a robotic rope disentangling task. The results show that the robot is able to complete its task while avoiding randomly distributed obstacles and thereby verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The main contributions of the proposed method are avoiding unforeseen obstacles in the unstructured environment and maintaining crucial aspects of the motion which guarantee to accomplish a skill/task successfully.

Traditional methods are intrinsically based on motion planning technique and treat the off-line training data as a priori probability. The paper proposes a novel data-driven solution to achieve motion planning for LfD. When the environment changes, the off-line training data are revised according to external constraints and reorganized to generate new motion. Compared to traditional methods, the novel data-driven solution is concise and efficient.

Real estate and stocks are two major asset types in an investor’s portfolio. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between these two markets to provide a valuable insight into the process of portfolio optimization and security selection.

This study examines the long-run relationship between residential real estate prices and stock market index in the case of Germany for the period of 2005-2017 by applying time series econometrics techniques. To this aim, this study uses Hedonic House Price Index as a proxy for real estate prices and DAX30 as a proxy for stock prices. Moreover, three additional variables, namely, consumer confidence, credit availability and supply of mortgage loans, are incorporated as control variables to assess the robustness of the results.

Obtained empirical results indicate a long-run relationship between stock prices and real estate prices which suggests that in long-run, there is no diversification benefit from allocating stock and real estate assets in a portfolio. This finding is especially important for long-term investors such as pension funds.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first study that empirically investigates the relationship between the real estate market and stock prices using the Hedonic Price Index for the case of Germany.

Inspired by the dynamic changes in our daily lives enabled via quantified-self technologies and the urgent need for more studies on the human-computer interaction design mechanisms adopted by these applications, this study explores the value of user affective experience mirroring and examines the empowerment effect of meaningful gamification in a psychological self-help system (PSS) that aids people in work stress relief.

Based on an analysis of the existing systems and theories in relevant fields, we conducted mixed-method research, involving semi-structured interviews, experience sampling experiments and user bio data triangulations, to identify the benefits of user affective experience mirroring and examine the impact of visual impact metaphor–based (VIM) meaningful gamification on PSS users.

For a gamified PSS, users generally perceive VIM as arousing more feelings of enjoyment, empathy, trust and usefulness, empowering them to gain more mastery and control over their emotional well-beings, especially with relieving their occupational stress and upbringing their level of perceived happiness. Overtime, VIM-based meaningful gamification further boosts such value of a PSS.

Weaving together meaningful gamification and psychological empowerment theories, the results emphasized that successful empowerment of user through gamification in PSSs relies heavily on whether a deeper and meaningful affective connection can be established with the users, in short, “meaningful gamification for psychological empowerment”. Such an understanding, as demonstrated in our research framework, also sheds light on the design theories for persuasive technology and human influence tactics during human computer interactions.

The results of the study demonstrate to practitioners how to make the best use of gamification strategies to deeply relate to and resonate with users. Even without complicated game-play design, meaningful gamification mechanisms, such as VIM facilitate the empowerment of users while gaining their appreciation, establishing a deeper connection with them and eventually generating persuasive effects on intended future behavioural outcomes.

The effective management of work-related stress with handy tools such as a VIM-based PSS can be beneficial for many organizations and, to a large extent, the society.

This study proposed and empirically demonstrated the empowerment effect of meaningful gamification for PSS users. In this cross-disciplinary study, theories from different research domains were synthesized to develop a more thorough and multi-faceted understanding of the optimal design strategies for emerging information systems like this VIM-based PSS.