Search results for " SME"
showing 10 items of 84 documents
IT Investment Decisions in Industry 4.0: Evidences from SMEs
2020
Organizational processes, production, business strategy, value creation and value delivery are undergoing significant change as a result of emerging new technologies in industry 4.0 context. This has drawn attention across many countries and not only organizations, but also stakeholders and policy makers as the fourth industrial revolution. While Industry 4.0 has been widely investigated in large enterprises, yet to date, little is known about how SMEs with limited financial resources make strategic decisions in particular about IT investment on diverse emerging technologies. To close this gap, this paper focused on the propensity of SMEs in IT investment in an industry 4.0 context. We anal…
Morphological and biometrical features of Trypanosoma evansi isolates from an outbreak in mainland Spain.
2011
According to several authors, Trypanosoma evansi is a monomorphic trypanosome found exclusively in slender intermediate forms, although additional studies have revealed that many strains present stumpy forms on rare occasions. In a recent T. evansi outbreak in mainland Spain, several atypical forms were observed in blood smear examinations. Molecular procedures were then necessary to confirm the causal agent. Morphological and biometric measures were taken to characterize the different forms of T. evansi. In contrast to published information, the results of this study would indicate that biometrically distinct T. evansi could also be found in the same farm and even in the same animal specie…
Relationships between societies and their environment in the Sahel in southwestern Niger over the past four thousand years : a geoarchaeological appr…
2013
The Sahel, a zone between the Sahara Desert and the Sudan forests, is currently experiencing major environmental changes. Since the droughts in 1970s and 1980s, and with the high population growth rate, vegetation cover has deteriorated considerably, contributing to increased runoff and soil erosion. Starting from this observation, we undertook the study of past societies in the Niamey region, to assess their impact on the environment. The lack of archaeological data meant that it was necessary to identify key indicators of occupation during the Neolithic and the Iron Age. In addition to providing new evidence to date the Neolithic site of Kirkissoy, a sedimentary study was conducted on a p…
Rebuilding a Cluster while protecting knowledge within Low-medium-tech supplier SMEs: A Spanish and French comparison
2021
International audience; Most of SMEs are engaged in open innovation practices, but they do not benefit from open innovation or from patenting in the same way as larger firms do. At the same time SMEs, as territorialized suppliers, play a crucial role within evolving regional specialization. In this context the purpose of our study is to examine how low and medium technology supplier SMEs learn and organize themselves at a territorial level to address the challenge of IP protection in an open innovation paradigm. We used a qualitative method with a longitudinal multi-case study involving 27 companies with a historical lance to compare the territorial dynamics of knowledge protection within c…
ScrumBut as an Indicator of Process Debt
2022
Technical debt analysis is used to detect problems in a codebase. Most technical debt indicators rely on measuring the quality of the code, as developers tend to induce recurring technical debt that emerges along with evolution cycles. This debt can emerge when project pressure leads to process deviations, for instance. In agile methods like Scrum, such deviations are commonly known as ScrumButs (like Scrum but …), which can be considered as a form of process debt. In this paper, we investigate two recurring signs of process debt (i.e. code smells and anti-patterns) caused by Scrumbuts. Our contribution investigates typical ScrumBut practices found in agile projects in one company and we re…
Viologen-based ionic liquid crystals: induction of a smectic A phase by dimerisation.
2014
The stability of thermotropic ionic liquid crystals is essentially due to micro-phase segregation between the ionic heads and the long alkyl chains. Here we show, using newly synthesized viologen dimers, that the structure of the central core is another key parameter to play with in order to tune the mesomorphic behaviour. © 2014 the Owner Societies.
ROMANIAN SMES VERSUS THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS-IMPEDIMENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
2012
This paper studies the way small and medium sized enterprises have reacted towards the global financial crisis. It also attempts to study the impact this crisis had on both the activity of these enterprises and on the business mentality in Romania. The article studies the reasons which determined the SMEs’ vulnerability during the crisis; these belong to a wide range, spreading from the tightening of the financing options or of the activity, up to the management’s nature. The impact of the economic crisis is studied starting with the statistics in the specialty literature, which highlight the SMEs’ situation starting with 2008. Having as support these numbers, the paper analyzes the effects…
Relational Tourism : challenges and capabilities
2009
preferences of the tourist consumer, in the last three decades, have brought to the birth of new ways of interpreting the tourism phenomenon, among these we highlight the Relational Tourism, phenomenon that can be perceived as human-scale tourism, clearly based on territorial, cultural and environmental constraints that include travel formats such as rural tourism, cultural tourism, farm tourism, environmental tourism, tourism, outdoor activity and many new ways, which have shown an important quantitative growth of Relational Tourism demands in Europe and internationally in the last decades, offering an alternative and increasingly more appreciated tourism to the traditional depersonalized …
Trypanosoma evansi infection in mainland Spain.
2009
An outbreak of Trypanosoma evansi infection that occurred in mainland Spain is described. The outbreak occurred on an equine and camel farm to which dromedary camels from an infected area of the Canary Islands had recently been introduced. One of these camels developed clinical signs and T. evansi was discovered in a blood smear examination. The herd was evaluated in order to determine the extent of the disease. The results showed that 76% of the camels, 35% of the donkeys and 2% of the horses were affected. The animals were isolated and treated using Cymelarsan((R)) (0.5mg/kg). After treatment, three blood analysis using parasitological methods revealed negative results. This is the first …
Social capital in relation to the foreign market entry and post-entry operation of family SMEs
2011
Scholars in the discipline of international entrepreneurship have mainly studied rapidly internationalizing firms. However, the majority of entrepreneurial firms are family-owned businesses (85% of all firms in the EU and the USA). Research on family business has focused on the importance of bonding social capital whereas, despite its importance, bridging social capital has not so far attracted much attention. It has been argued that bridging social capital plays an important role in firms’ internationalization processes. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of bridging social capital in the initial entry and post-entry operations of eight family SMEs with regard to the French…