esew research has had problems in selecting the basic structural and functional unit for the analysis of work. For convenient location of the computer support, some meaningful intermediate whole should be defined between the individual and the organization. The concepts of 'team' and 'group' are intuitively understandable, but somewhat weak for serious analysis. This paper suggests that the con...

To support the activities of the Federal Research Internet Coordinating e r Committee (FRICC) in creating an interconnected set of networks to serve th esearch community, two workshops were held to address the technical support of s o policy issues that arise when interconnecting such networks. Held under the auspice f the Internet Activities Board at the request of the FRICC, and sponsored by ...

There is a tightening race for developing new innovative businesses between global corporations in the world’s high tech industries. Technology-oriented global corporations have therefore to react as fast as possible in order to be able to create new customer value in due time with innovative offers and to survive in increasingly hypercompetitive global markets. In many cases they try to match ...

Technology acceptance is a widely acknowledged key player in explaining technology adoption. However, there is a notable knowledge gap concerning the impact of cultural factors on technology acceptance, especially in the medical sector. It is evident though that countries differ greatly regarding their technical proneness, development and usage habits what should have considerable impact on acc...

Acknowledgment I thank Selex ES and SESM for supporting my PhD's scholarship. Also, I express my gratitude to Dr. Alfonso Farina for his technical support during my research activities, the continuous assistance, encouragement and kindness demonstrated during these three years.

Using firm-level data from Changzhou, one of the representative prefectural cities in the Yangzi River Delta in China, we investigate the performances of both internal and external R&D in high-tech firms. We find that, on average, high-tech firms with more internal R&D expenditure apply for more patents in terms of both the total number of patents and the number of invention patents. Internal R...

In this paper we present an architecture for enabling complex workflow execution in Cloud-like environments. We focus mainly on modeling concepts and techniques to enhance accessibility to Cloud services by different kind of users. Complex workflow tasks need in some cases to be mapped to distributed resources and involves the cooperation between several partners. Workflow management is critica...

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in four high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to ‘innovativeness’. However, given that firms are heterogeneous and that growth rates distributions are heavy-tailed, it may be misleading to use regression techniques that focus on the ‘averag...

Date Approved _________________ iii To my beloved wife Túria, with my endless gratitude, love and admiration. iv Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank Dr. John Barry for his guidance during my stay at Georgia Tech. His very clear and objective view of technical matters, as well as his deep insights, have influenced a lot my view of research in telecommunications, and hopefully made this ...

Most companies generate little drama as they manage the daily tension of their uncertain futures. And they rather like it that way, since forecasting errors can generate bad publicity. After the fact, it is usually easy to understand why a calculated gamble failed due to a bit of bad luck. It is more difficult to identify a mistake for which management is responsible. In this column, I’ll focus...