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The purpose of this paper is to report the first practical applications of FCAUP (Framework for Conformity Assessment inspired by the Uncertainty Principle) carried out using a pilot implementation in a boat trailer manufacturer company in Maryville, Tennessee, USA and a practical application in a metrology company in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil.

Field studies have been conducted in two different companies: a pilot implementation during the preparation activities of the acceptance inspection of finished products and a practical application during the internal audit related to the quality management system.

(1) partial double inspection is advantageous in conformity assessment; (2) a structured procedure tends to reduce the risks arising from the use of partial double inspection; (3) the recommended amount of double inspections is directly proportional to the uncertainty involved in the process and it is inversely proportional to the degree of trust in a presumed conformity status.

This novel framework is for practitioners in manufacturing industries and test laboratories.

The results of these practical applications suggest that FCAUP is a consistent approach to be used in several categories of conformity assessment in manufacturing industries and test laboratories due to the balance between result and time (cost).

This new framework, named FCAUP, for planning and executing conformity assessment activities has been introduced in a theoretical study published by Moraes and Silva (2018) and it is based on an analogy with the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics.

Research on cultural entrepreneurship has explored the role of language in making and giving sense to novel ventures and market categories and in legitimating them. We analyze how an emerging de novo market category, quantum computing, is constructed through the use of analogies and metaphors. Through a multimodal analysis of interview and newspaper data, we find that in addition to using analogies and metaphors to highlight familiarity, actors also use such tropes to expound the weirdness of the new category, thus marking it as profoundly different and novel. Such tropes have a dual function; they draw the boundaries between science and laypeople but also arouse awe and curiosity among the audiences. Our study thus casts light on the cultural work during de novo category emergence.

This essay explores evolutionary and competence‐based theories of the firm. Evolutionary theories can be regarded as a subset of a wider class of theories, variously described as “capabilities”, “resource‐based”, or “competence‐based” theories of the firm. These contrast with a different set of contractarian theories, emanating largely from the work of Coase. It is argued that the contractarian theories of the firm misleadingly assume given individuals thus neglecting processes of individual learning and transformation. Similarly underestimated is importance of technology and the persistence of variety in firm structure and performance. The genesis of the alternative, competence‐based approach is outlined, including the important subset of “evolutionary” approaches of the Nelson‐Winter type. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the competence‐based approach to strategic management.

Strategic option generation is a fundamental step in strategy formulation. Several lenses have been proposed to explain its foundations, including the microeconomics positioning school, and the resource and capabilities based view of the firm. These approaches are largely based on inductive and deductive logics, which are not the logics that provide strategic options that are potentially novel, profitable, and largely differentiated from competitive offerings. In this chapter, we propose a unifying framework of the cognitive foundations of strategic option generation. Building on five fundamental cognitive acts – imitation, framing, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and mental simulation, this proposed model both synthesizes the extant literature and provides guidance about promising avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.

There is a growing support for the view that the private sector is at least as efficient as the public sector in managing investment risks of large projects. Governments forget that it is the taxpayer who bears all the risks in a public finance scenario of investments. So, it seems unfounded that governments should neglect the cost of investment risk in obtaining finance as the taxpayer might be seen as a shareholder in (public) investments, which by definition are risky. It is this taxpayer-is-shareholder perspective that will be criticized in this paper. This taxpayer approach neglects the variety of funding and financing positions that might be taken by the various actors in investment projects. The paper concludes that some prudence is recommended in supporting private finance initiatives

Information Technology (IT) has ushered in not only large societal opportunities but also large uncertain ‐ ties and risks. Future developments, like ubiquitous networked embedded systems, are technologies society may face. Such technologies offer larger opportunities and uncertainties because of their ability to widely distribute power through their small, inexpensive, and ubiquitous characteristics. Many interpretations of how these technologies may develop have been postulated, ranging from the conservative Precautionary Principle, to uncontrolled development leading to “singularity.” With so much uncertainty and so many predictions about the benefits and consequences of these technologies, it is important to raise ethical questions, determine potential scenarios, and try to identify appropriate decision points and stakeholders. Rather than going along an unknown path, perhaps lessons could be learned from recently deployed technologies, such as nuclear technology, that were controversial but offered similarly large potential benefits and risks. The experience of nuclear technology development, with its various successes and failures, is recalled and compared with potential scenarios in the development of networked embedded systems

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyse part of the relevant legal instruments currently available for regulating environmentally harmful space activities.

This paper opted for a functional research method combined with a comparative methodology. To make the argument, this paper relies on the contextual analysis of primary and secondary sources of law, instrument of soft law and the relevant background material (e.g. journal articles, textbooks, law reform and policy papers).

The central section will focus on the principles of international environmental law to outline their utility in the contemporary context. Finally, the conclusive part will point out the several ways in which the use of analogies can shape the outer space regime, especially concerning how those principles that are developed to safeguard the Earth, can also be extended for the protection of the space ecosystem.

Environmental hazards are rapidly increasing and the current international law and policy on planetary protection are inadequate to meet the challenges of the near future. There is no possibility of an environment-friendly and sustainable future if not strictly connecting it with a comprehensive and transparent acknowledgement of the human mistakes made on Earth. There are valuable lessons to be learned from our past, and it is under this perspective that the trend of polluting the outer space can be reverted. This paper fulfils an identified need to study the correlation between principles of international environmental law, space law and the current situation in the outer space.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

The principle of prudence plays a critical role in the design of national and international public sector accounting. Whereas in private sector accounting there is a substantial body of literature with regard to conservatism, the academic debate on the prudence principle in public sector accounting has only started recently. The aim of this chapter is to analyse whether the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) address asymmetric prudence with respect to measurement. This chapter shows that the existence of requirements leading to asymmetric prudence with regard to the measurement of assets is widespread throughout the suite of IPSASs.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework on how the representativeness heuristic operates in the decision-making process. Specifically, the authors unbundle representativeness into its building blocks: search rule, stopping rule and decision rule. Furthermore, the focus is placed on how individual-level cognitive and behavioral factors, namely experience, intuition and overconfidence, affect the functioning of this heuristic.

From a theoretical standpoint, the authors build on dual-process theories and on the adaptive toolbox view from the “fast and frugal heuristics” perspective to develop an integrative conceptual framework that uncovers the mechanisms underlying the representativeness heuristic.

The authors’ conceptualization suggests that the search rule used in representativeness is based on analogical mapping from previous experience, the stopping rule is the representational stability of the analogs and the decision rule is the choice of the alternative upon which there is a convergence of representations and that exceeds the decision maker's aspiration level. In this framework, intuition may help the decision maker to cross-map potentially competing analogies, while overconfidence affects the search time and costs and alters both the stopping and the decision rule.

The authors develop a conceptual framework on representativeness, as one of the most common, though still poorly investigated, heuristics. The model offers a nuanced perspective that explores the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that shape the use of representativeness in decision-making. The authors also discuss the theoretical implications of their model and outline future research avenues that may further contribute to enriching their understanding of decision-making processes.