Competitive funding has emerged in the late 1990s as an important component of World Bank support to agricultural research systems. This paper outlines the role of competitive funding against a back ground of changing strategies for financing agricultural research. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a synthesis of lessons learned, and ongoing challenges in successful use of competitive funding...

The competitive pressure in business environment has increased tremendously especially in the knowledge based economy. As a result, companies from various industries around the world have invested millions in embarking the Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) and Competitive Intelligence (CI) activities to manage information and knowledge resources in their organizations to be competitive. This p...

Concern regarding extensive damage to tropical forests resulting from logging increased dramatically after World War II when mechanized logging systems developed in industrialized countries were deployed in the tropics. As a consequence, tropical foresters began developing logging procedures that were more environmentally benign, and by the 1990s, these practices began to be described as “reduc...

This paper focuses on Coalition Formation paradigm as a market mechanism. Concretely, Coalition Formation occurs as part of a wider open world and may occur many times during the lifetime of a population of agents. This fact can in some circumstances be exploited by agents to re-use partial existing coalition and social relationships over time to improve Coalition Formation efficiency. The aim ...

This paper provides a case study of a real-world organization and its management of technology and innovation (MTI). The study examines the structure, environment, and resources of the organization as they pertain to the MTI. Specifically, the organization is examined for the alignment of the MTI to the strategy and the competitive advantages. Subjective assessment of the state of MTI is made b...

In a competitive world, is very important that to have tools that offer an adequate support to the project manager with information about the development process. However at the moment, there is no a complete environment offering the adequate resources to develop distributed software, integrating both technical aspects related to software development and the management aspects. So it is very in...

Decision support in software engineering is an emerging field. The need to select the best method, technique or tool in a given business context is becoming more and more important in an increasingly competitive world where time-to-market, budget constraints, and the achievement of functionality and quality goals are becoming crucial for achieving a company’s business goals. In today’s software...

in today’s competitive world, customers are at the main focus of organizations and the customer loyalty is the main reason of acquiring competitive advantage of organizations. the aim of present research is to investigate the relationship between customer loyalty and one of its key variables, service quality. trust and satisfaction have been investigated here as intermediate variables. this res...

An organization has to make the right decisions in time depending on demand information to enhance the commercial competitive advantage in a constantly fluctuating business environment. Therefore, estimating the demand quantity for the next period most likely appears to be crucial. This work presents a comparative forecasting methodology regarding to uncertain customer demands in a multi-level ...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the introduction of online courses to replace the current classroom-based staff training. The current training is practical, and must be completed before access to the financial computer system is authorized. The long term objective is to measure the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of the training, and to establish whether a transfer of knowledge ...