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| Innovation |  Previous | Page 1 of 1 | Next 
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| Funding Models for High Tech Start-ups: How Do We Fund a Fantastic Future? | | .jpg)
William Bains | |
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| Despite excellent science and a demand for the products, the European biotechnology industry has had limited success, and in the UK has collapsed almost entirely. A major reason for this is the behaviour of the investors in the industry, from actions ranging from systematic under-investment through manipulation of business processes to inappropriate public flotation. As a result, creating and funding of VC-backed biotechnology companies is falling rapidly. I suggest that there are several mechanisms to restart the biotechnology industry in Europe, based on innovative funding from business angels, new investment vehicles, and potentially the mutualisation of development of new products.
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| Business Process Outsourcing and India | | final.jpg)
Sumitro Mukherjee | |
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| This article explores the recent boom in business process outsourcing, spurred on by the rapid development of information technology. India is a major destination for BPO and provides a case study of strengths and weaknesses for its future in this field.
Business Process Outsourcing is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization’s critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. Outsourcing, Offshore-Outsourcing and Offshoring are used interchangeably despite important technical differences. Outsourcing involves the transfer of organizational function to a third party; when the third party is located in another country it is called Offshore-Outsourcing; whereas offshoring represents the transfer of an organizational function to another country, regardless of whether the work stays in the corporation or not. Outsourcing and offshoring are not new concepts to the global economy. Earlier, offshoring was mostly restricted to manufacturing through technology-transfer during the maturity and decline phases of product life cycle. Major advantages of outsourcing are cost-reduction, comparative advantage by division of labour and economies of scale, lower turn-around time, and data-backup for disaster management. Areas of concern are service quality, data-theft, attrition rate, privacy laws and personal-information misuse and credit-card frauds. There are other issues also like job-losses in the outsourcing country, cultural differences and information security. The Indian outsourcing industry, a fast growing and major investment area, should benefit from an impetus in coming years due to its increased focus on information security and a comprehensive IT Act.
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| Maximising Success from the Use of Patents in Global Business | | final.jpg)
Deli Yang | |
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| Maximising success from the use of patents in global business is much more than merely preventing foreign competitors from illegal imitation, the author explains that patent owners need to fully understand patent fundamentals, the patent environment, patent management and patent strategies to realise patent potential in foreign business. These recommendations are also in line with the general purpose of patent protection – striking a balance of interest between private patent owners and public interests. |
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| Against the Tyranny of PowerPoint: Making the Technology Work for Us | | final.JPG)
Yiannis Gabriel | |
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| PowerPoint is a powerful piece of communication technology that has had profound consequences on presentations (business and educational), classroom communication and, possibly, on the nature of learning itself. An analysis of the ways in which PowerPoint is used offers considerable insights into, first, the nature of educational technologies and their organizational implementations, second, the effect of these technologies on the construction and dissemination of organizational knowledge, and, third, on the qualities and skills of a society of spectacle, where a great deal of organizational knowledge assumes the form of visual representations. Potential short-comings of PowerPoint include the parcelling of knowledge into bullet-points, reliance on visual aids to support weak analysis and the forced linearity of argumentation that limits improvisation, digression and inventivesness. The author, however, argues that PowerPoint can be used more creatively, to build on our culture’s emphasis on spectacle and image and related multi-tasking skills that lecturers and students develop. In this manner, PowerPoint can redefine the nature of a lecture, from the authoritative presentation of a text into a multi-media performance that elicits a critical, creative and active response from its audience. |
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| SME Survival Clusters in Developing Countries (With Case Studies) | | .jpg)
Mario Davide Parrilli | |
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| This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘survival clusters’ or groups of small- and medium-sized firms in developing countries, formed to stimulate growth. Adopting a ‘system’ approach in addition to a ‘stages’ approach, the author analyses data from two SME clusters in Central America as Case Studies. Policy recommendations are made.
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6 January 2009 |
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