Although service innovation has long been considered crucial for economic development, systematic and comparable empirical evidence elaborating the activities and effects of service innovation, particularly from a smalland medium-sized enterprise (SME) perspective, is limited. To fill this research gap, this study focused on the innovative behaviors of SMEs in service industries to clarify the ...

This paper highlights some of the issues facing owner/operators when attempting to align personnel, procedures, and equipment to achieve cost effective and safe operating performance. Each issue is presentedusing simple andpractical thoughts toward life, collected from fortune cookies consumedduring the technical editing of CCPS’s Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems...

John Timmons is Clinical and Education Manager, Negative Pressure Wound Therapy, Smith and Nephew and Tissue Viability Nurse Hon. Grampian NHS Trust, Aberdeen; Richard Shorney is Director, Real Healthcare Solutions Improving patient experience can be achieved in a number of ways. Many improvements do not have to be complex, but can involve small changes in practice which may have an impact on p...

Real-world social networks are dynamic in nature. Companies continue to collaborate, align strategically, acquire, and merge over time, and receive positive/negative impact from other companies. Consequently, their performance changes with time. If one can understand what types of network changes affect a company’s value, he/she can predict the future value of the company, grasp industry innova...

Autogrill Belgium, part of the world’s largest provider of catering services to travellers, drifted into an extremely worrisome position in 2006. They had just gone through a merger, were experiencing cut-throat financial difficulties and appeared unable to adequately respond to a changing market context. The case follows COO Mario Orinx and CSOO Stan Monheim over a period of 8 years as they le...

In understanding strategic organisational transformation, in an effort to secure long-term competitive advantage, this paper explains the necessity of ! the role of learning, in ensuring an organisation’s ability to successfully transform itself into a learning organisation; focussing on ! the importance of an effective leadership style, enabling business to strategically align with the ability...

The collection of electronic data as evidence of crime is an important responsibility given to law enforcement. The technical constraints of this task are arguably far less significant than usability and economic ones, since police officers are non-specialists and police departments face significant budgetary limitations. In this position paper, we consider the economics of digital evidence rec...

We describe an efficient learning algorithm for aligning a symbolic representation of a musical piece with its acoustic counterpart. Our method employs a supervised learning approach by using a training set of aligned symbolic and acoustic representations. The alignment function we devise is based on mapping the input acousticsymbolic representation along with the target alignment into an abstr...

Unsupervised joint alignment of images has been demonstrated to improve performance on recognition tasks such as face verification. Such alignment reduces undesired variability due to factors such as pose, while only requiring weak supervision in the form of poorly aligned examples. However, prior work on unsupervised alignment of complex, real-world images has required the careful selection of...