How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system’s bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is solved, the solution in combination with organizational boundaries and property rights can be used to capture a stream of rents. Th...

It has been a long-standing goal in systems biology to find relations between the topological properties and functional features of protein networks. However, most of the focus in network studies has been on highly connected proteins ("hubs"). As a complementary notion, it is possible to define bottlenecks as proteins with a high betweenness centrality (i.e., network nodes that have many "short...

The paper describes some basic approaches to detection of bottlenecks in composite (modular) systems. The following basic system bottlenecks detection problems are examined: (1) traditional quality management approaches (Pareto chart based method, multicriteria analysis as selection of Pareto-efficient points, and/or multicriteria ranking), (2) selection of critical system elements (critical co...

product mix problem (pmp) is one of the most important and complicated problems in production systems. different approaches have been applied to solve this problem, among them, theory of constraints (toc) has been widely considered since 1990s. this paper develops a distinguished algorithm to solve product mix prob-lems that is efficient both in single and multi-bottleneck problems. at first, t...

To enable ubiquitous wireless multimedia communication, the bottlenecks to communicating multimedia data over wireless channels must be addressed. Two significant bottlenecks which need to be overcome are the bandwidth and energy consumption requirements for mobile multimedia communication. In this paper, we address the bandwidth and energy dissipation bottlenecks by adapting image compression ...

Host-parasite interactions are often characterized by large fluctuations in host population size, and we investigated how such host bottlenecks affected coevolution between a bacterium and a virus. Previous theory suggests that host bottlenecks should provide parasites with an evolutionary advantage, but instead we found that phages were rapidly driven to extinction when coevolving with hosts e...