Most R&D projects fail from a commercial point of view, and technological shifts may quickly turn even successful innovations into failure. It is, however, possible that projects which fail commercially produce knowledge with some social value. Such knowledge is likely to be embodied in workers or teams of workers, and in order to evaluate the social returns to research, it is desirable to trac...

With the development of electronic information technique, electronic ecommerce grows rapidly, including B2C electronic commerce company. The evaluation of customer value in B2C electronic commerce company is a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem with many quantitative and qualitative attributes. This paper proposes fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) approach to evaluate cust...

The objective of the Market Blended Insight (MBI) project is to develop web based techniques to improve the performance of UK Business to Business (B2B) marketing activities. The analysis of company value chains is a fundamental task within MBI because it is an important model for understanding the market place and the company interactions within it. The project has aggregated rich data profile...

Optimal dividend payment under a ruin constraint is a two objective control problem 1 which – in simple models – can be solved numerically by three essentially different methods. One 2 is based on a modified Bellman equation and the policy improvement method (see (2003)). In this 3 paper we use explicit formulas for running allowed ruin probabilities which avoid a complete search 4 and speed up...

How should the performance of a manufacturing company be assessed, relative to firms making similar products, at home and abroad? This paper shows how company-level productivity measures can be developed from public financial data to provide a more comprehensive gauge of firm performance than profit rates alone. As a specific example, we focus on the Korean steelmaker, POSCO. Founded four decad...

As Corporate Director of IBM Software Test and Development Excellence, Bill Woodworth has a three fold responsibility: 1) increase the IBM-wide focus on testing of all software products and solutions, 2) based upon the success achieved in #1 for testers, do the same for all IBM software developers, and 3) drive the continuing focus on improving the reliability/ availability of our integrated cu...