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The purpose of this chapter is to further flesh out the small business strategy insight presented in the previous chapter through focus on the finer micro detail of what is actually done and by who in small business strategic management practice. The authors build forward their previous chapter response to deficiencies of understanding within the strategy and small business literatures, through provision of rich, thick description of best small business strategic management process and practice. And shine a brighter light into what has to date been a ‘black box’ of haze with regard to the fine detail and minutia of managerial, organisational and work activities that make up strategy process and content.

As in the previous chapter, the research approach is underpinned and informed by personal construct theory which gives emphasis to the highly complex nature of the task of small business strategic control and highlights the need for a creative and innovative research methodology to facilitate close and detailed investigation of the phenomenon.

This chapter is of significant practical relevance: offering guiding lenses and informing frameworks with regard to best small business strategic management process – and making explicit the micro-level actions, activities and behaviours which make up that process. These guiding frames are already being used to support growth-seeking owner managers in the UK and Africa. The knowledge base embraces original, valuing-adding work which addresses a major void in the current strategic management and small business literatures and is currently being utilised to help address unemployment and facilitate poverty reduction in Africa and underpin entrepreneurship development worldwide.

The purpose of the paper is to provide useful approximations for the computation of g‐renewal function, since no closed form solution of such a function is available

One of the methods uses a simple identity to obtain an approximation. The second method uses the Riemann sum to approximate the integrals to obtain a method of successive approximation.

The two methods provide satisfactory approximations with the relative errors in the computations are well within the acceptable limits. The accuracy of the successive approximation method could be improved with finer partition of the interval integration but at the cost of computational time.

The computational time increases for the evaluation of the renewal function for increasing values of t.

The paper provides easy to evaluate approximations for g‐renewal functions, which do not have closed form analytical solutions.

A FUNDAMENTAL method of determining the distribution of lift across the span of, e.g., a monoplane wing is that of Graphical Successive Approximation, proposed originally in 1923 by A. Fage and B. N. Jurieff independently.

New iteration methods for the calculation of steady magnetic fields in saturable media are presented. These methods converge for any choice of initial approximation, that is they possess global convergence. The convergence conditions and the estimates of convergence rate of these methods are expressed in terms of the physical properties of ferromagnetic media. Each of the proposed methods is deliberately adapted to specific but typical saturation conditions. All these methods together cover the broad area of diverse saturation conditions encountered in practice. The construction and justification of these iteration methods are based on the physical concept of secondary sources and on some mathematical ideas and results arising in the overlapping area of mathematical physics and functional analysis.

Gives introductory remarks about chapter 1 of this group of 31 papers, from ISEF 1999 Proceedings, in the methodologies for field analysis, in the electromagnetic community. Observes that computer package implementation theory contributes to clarification. Discusses the areas covered by some of the papers ‐ such as artificial intelligence using fuzzy logic. Includes applications such as permanent magnets and looks at eddy current problems. States the finite element method is currently the most popular method used for field computation. Closes by pointing out the amalgam of topics.

Current rapid prototyping processes are mainly based on layered manufacturing techniques using 2.5D slices. Defines manufacturing by means of 2.5D slices as a zero order approximation. A disadvantage of this approximation is the staircase effect, requiring thin layers to be used. If the outer surfaces of the slices can be inclined, speaks of a first order approximation. This approximation is achieved by linear interpolation between adjacent contours, resulting in ruled slices. Describes a method to approximate a given model geometry in a layered fashion not exceeding a user‐defined error δ using either a zero or a first order approximation and an adaptive layer thickness. Analyses the model geometry for curvature and inclination in order to determine the adaptive layer thickness. Provides a method for matching corresponding contours from adjacent slices. Several test objects have been processed using both zero and first order approximation. Shows that the first order approximation significantly reduces the number of required layers for a given δ when compared to the zero order approximation.

This paper evaluates a Successive Response Surface Method (SRSM) specifically developed for simulation‐based design optimization, e.g. that of explicit nonlinear dynamics in crashworthiness design. Linear response surfaces are constructed in a subregion of the design space using a design of experiments approach with a D‐optimal experimental design. To converge to an optimum, a domain reduction scheme is utilized. The scheme requires only one user‐defined parameter, namely the size of the initial subregion. During optimization, the size of this region is adapted using a move reversal criterion to counter oscillation and a move distance criterion to gauge accuracy. To test its robustness, the results using the method are compared to SQP results of a selection of the well‐known Hock and Schittkowski problems. Although convergence to a small tolerance is slow when compared to SQP, the SRSM method does remarkably well for these sometimes pathological analytical problems. The second test concerns three engineering problems sampled from the nonlinear structural dynamics field to investigate the method's handling of numerical noise and non‐linearity. It is shown that, despite its simplicity, the SRSM method converges stably and is relatively insensitive to its only user‐required input parameter.

Heat transfer from a stretching sheet to a micropolar fluid is analysed. The governing equations for momentum, angular momentum and energy are solved numerically using the method of successive approximation. Solutions for the flow field, temperature distribution and Nusselt numbers are obtained. Good agreement is found between the analytical predictions and the numerical simulation.