Tendo como justificativa a relevância econômica dos arranjos produtivos regionais no capitalismo informacional, a pesquisa se propôs a analisar os modelos de desenvolvimento de quatro pólos regionais de tecnologia da informação, dois internacionais e dois nacionais, sob a perspectiva do conceito de desenvolvimento sistêmico. Os pólos abordados foram do Vale do Silício (Califórnia), Bangalore (Índia), Campinas e São Carlos (Brasil). Foi utilizada a metodologia de análise qualitativa cross-case de múltiplos casos. Os resultados foram comparados com o modelo ideal de desenvolvimento sistêmico. Como conclusão, foi possível verificar que os clusters nacionais funcionam sob poucos valores voltados para o empreendedorismo, o que culminou no estabelecimento de modelos mononucleados de relações entre agentes, diferente dos modelos multinucleados observados nos clusters internacionais, mais próximos das premissas do desenvolvimento sistêmico. / This research is justified by the economic relevance of the regional productive arrangements for the informational capital, and analyses the developments model of four regional information technology poles, Silicon Valley (California), Bangalore (India), São Carlos and Campinas (Brazil). The research was developed using the qualitative multiple cross-case analysis methodology and the results were compared with the ideal model of systemic development. The conclusion signalizes the low incidence of entrepreneurship elements in the Brazilian organizational culture, which corroborates to the formation of mono-nucleated models of relations among the national clusters agents, contrasting to the international clusters, which have multi-nucleated models of relations among their agents, closer to the systemic development premises.

The overarching objective of this research is to recognize the learning styles of engineering and technology students and to propose pedagogical methods for the comprehension of technological concepts in electricity. The topic of electrical resistor-capacitor (RC) circuits has been chosen because it is fundamental to engineering and technology courses. There is substantial evidence to suggest that students find such a concept difficult to grasp. The focus of the research lies in explicating undergraduate students cognitive structures about RC circuits, and proposing a method related to students learning styles of how these cognitive structures may be enhanced. The main thesis argument claims that the transfer of knowledge from familiar RC circuit configurations to unfamiliar RC circuit configurations does not occur easily even if the problem-space is kept identical. The methodology used in this research is a mixed-method approach employing qualitative and quantitative data-gathering and analysis processes. This research concludes that the reasons for lack of transfer of knowledge stem from conceptual and perceptual constraints. Constraints involve: (a) which analogical models are employed in relation to the RC circuit, (b) how the circuit schematic diagram is drawn, and (c) relations between analogy, circuit schematic diagram, voltage-time graphs and verbal jargon used to describe circuit behaviour. The research presents a variety of novel, custom-designed learning aids which are employed within the research methodology to rectify the lack of transfer of knowledge for the RC circuits considered in the study. The design of these learning aids is based on the concept of embodied cognition and mainly makes use of visual and kinaesthetic means to appeal to students who may have different learning styles. The use of such learning aids is proposed as a complementary teaching strategy. The approach taken in this research and its outcomes are significant because they continue to inform the research and educational communities about how human development may be fostered through engineering and technology education (Barak and Hacker, 2011).

The aim of this research is to examine the factors influencing the adoption and success of HRIS in Saudi Arabian public sector organisations.

This research addresses two puzzles: Why do similar regions within countries pursue different commitment strategies towards growing their bioscience industries? Why do some change in response to a global financial shock and others do not? I argue that the presence and strength of a knowledge-oriented strategy team (KOST) helps to explain different levels of and changes in bioscience commitment strategies. The study weaves in additional explanations including natural resources, rival industries, national institutions and path dependence. The most significant finding of this research is that those Canadian provinces that established a strong KOST prior to the 2008 global financial crisis "puzzled and powered through" to maintain high level commitments to their bioscience industries afterwards. Their KOSTs engaged in disruptive social learning and coordinative bargaining processes.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The telecommunications industry generates vast amounts of data on a daily basis. The exponential growth in this industry has, therefore, increased the amounts of nodes that generates data on a near real-time basis, and the required processing power to process all this information has increased as well. Organisations in different industries have experienced the same growth in information processing, and, in recent years, professionals in the Information Systems (IS) industry have started referring to these challenges as the concept of Big Data (BD). This theoretical research investigated the definition of big data as defined by several leading players in the industry. The theoretical research further focussed on several key areas relating to the big data era: i) Common attributes of big data. ii) How do organisations respond to big data? iii) What are the opportunities that big data provide to organisations? A selecting of case studies are presented to determine what other players in the IS industry does to exploit big data opportunities. The study signified that the concept of big data has emerged due to IT infrastructure struggling to cope with the increased volumes, variety and velocity of data being generated and that organisations are finding it difficult to incorporate the results from new and advanced mining and analytical techniques into their operations in order to extract the maximum value from their data. The study further found that big data impacts each component of the modern day computer based information system and the exploration of several practical cases further highlighted how different organisations have addressed this big data phenomenon in their IS environment. Using all this information, the study investigated the 4C Group business model and identified some key opportunities for this IT vendor in the big data era. As the 4C Group has positioned themselves across the ICT value chain, big data presents several good opportunities to explore in all components of the IS. While training and consulting can establish the 4C Group as a big data knowledgeable vendor, some enhancements to their application software functionalities can provide additional big data opportunities. And as true big data value only originates from the utilization of the data in the daily decision making processes, by offering IaaS the 4C Group can enable their clients to achieve the illusive goal of becoming a data driven organisation.

We live in an age of rapid change. The advance of science and technology, throughout history, has culminated in periods of transition when social values have had to adapt to a changed environment. Such times have proved fertile ground for the expansion of the imagination. Utopian literature offers a vast archive of information concerning the relationship between scientific and technological progress and social change. Alterations in the most basic machinery of society inspired utopian authors to write of distant and future worlds which had achieved a state of harmony and plenty. The dilemmas which writers faced were particular to their era, but there also emerged certain universal themes and questions: What is the best organisation of society? What tools would be adequate to the task? What does it mean to be human? The dividing line on these issues revolves around two opposed beliefs. Some perceived the power inherent in technology to effect the greatest improvement in the human condition. Others were convinced that the organisation of the social order must come first so as to create an environment sympathetic to perceived human needs. There are, necessarily, contradictions in such a division. They can be seen plainly in More's Utopia itself. More wanted to see new science and technique developed. But he also condemned the social consequences which inevitably flowed from the process of discovery. These consequences led More to create a utopia based on social reorganisation. In the main, the utopias of Francis Bacon, Edward Bellamy and the later H. G. Wells accepted science, while the work of William Morris, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut rejected science in preference for a different social order. More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis were written at a time when feudal, agriciTfural society wasbeeing transformed by new discoveries and techniques. In a later age, Bellamy's Looking Backward and Morris's News From Nowhere offer contrary responses to society at the height of the Industrial evolution. These four authors serve as a prelude to the main area of the thesis which centres on the twentieth century. Wells, though his first novel appeared in 1895, produced the vast bulk of his work in the current century. Huxley acts as an appropriate balance to Wells and also exemplifies the shift from utopia to dystopia. The last section of the thesis deals with the work of Kurt Vonnegut and includes an interview with that author. The twentieth century has seen the proliferation of dystopias, portraits of the disastrous consequences of the headlong pursuit of science and technology, unallied to human values. Huxley and Vonnegut crystallised the fears of a modern generation: that we create a soulless, mechanised, urban nightmare. The contemporary fascination with science in literature is merely an extension of a process with a long tradition and underlying theme. The advance of science and technology created the physical and intellectual environment for utopian authors which determined the form and content of their visions.

This thesis covers a broad range of topics in the general area of economic growth theory and economics of technological change. It is primarily about the ultimate sources of growth and its ultimate limitations. We scrutinize the implications of several specifications of long-run growth "engines" which can be found across the theoretical literature and put forward their generalizations and extensions. At the highest level of generality, we provide a formal proof that balanced (i.e. exponential) growth requires knife-edge assumptions which cannot be satisfied by typical values of model parameters. This result implies that at least one such knife-edge assumption must be made if a given model is supposed to deliver balanced growth over the long run. Next, we deal with the issue of resource-based limits to long-run growth. We propose to promote technological progress which would improve the substitutability between non-renewable and renewable resources: if the elasticity of substitution between the two kinds of resources exceeds unity, production will not fall down to zero even after the non-renewable resources will have been completely depleted. Factor-augmenting technological progress can also be helpful, but its effects are much less pronounced and it must go on forever in order to assure sustainable production. Another question asked is whether it is plausible that R&D-based growth, fueled by steady increases in the world’s population, can be extended into indefinite time. We answer this question by introducing endogenous fertility choice, with population entering the utility functional multiplicatively, into an R&D-based semi-endogenous growth model. The next issue addressed here are the idea-based microfoundations of aggregate production functions. We discuss the correspondence between the shape of production functions, the direction of technical change, and the possibility of sustained endogenous growth. A broad class of production functions, nesting both the Cobb-Douglas and the CES function, is derived. Finally, we discuss the impact of the heterogeneity of innovations on long-run economic dynamics: we extend the semi-endogenous growth model with a distinction between radical and incremental innovations. Total R&D output is assumed to depend on technological opportunity which is depleted by incremental innovations but renewed by radical innovations. The dynamic interplay of the arrivals of the two types of innovations is shown to give rise to oscillations along the transition to the economy’s balanced growth path.

This study employs duality theory to model the dairy industry. Supply and demands for milk, cull cows, feed, labor and veterinary services were simultaneously estimated using Weighted Least Squares. Elasticities and partial adjustments were obtained for the Nation and the following regions, Appalachia, Cornbelt, Northeast, Pacific, Southern Plains and Upper-Midwest. Predictions for the change in quantity of goods demanded and supplied were made assuming a parallel shift in the supply of milk and demand for feed. In conclusion, predictions on the impact of bovine Somatotropin are made assuming all results are correct.

In the service economy of the 21st century, companies face intense competition in providing customer-centric products and services. In an environment where emerging technologies constantly stimulate innovative methods of service delivery, customer and technological knowledge remain the primary types of information applied by a company in providing customers with quality products and services. Managing knowledge interactions for synergetic business operations is critical in building a service-oriented infrastructure for continuous innovation. This study explores the pattern of knowledge interaction between R&D and marketing departments. Knowledge possessed by R&D department is defined as technological knowledge, while knowledge possessed by marketing department is defined as customer knowledge. First, the concepts, theories, and relevant research regarding the relationship between customer and technological knowledge is reviewed. Based on boundary-spanning theory, this study conducts an exploratory case study to examine the interaction between customer and technological knowledge. The case study focuses on the interaction between sales personnel and R&D employees across three levels of interaction, the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. This study found that different types of knowledge and activities between R&D and marketing departments generate different results. This study also found that most business knowledge for innovation is generated at the knowledge interaction between semantic and pragmatic level. Another finding is that Field Application Engineers play the important roles of boundary spanner because they possess both technological knowledge and customer knowledge for their specialized field. Boundary spanners serve as both filters and facilitators in information transmittal between internal units, and play an important role in the transfer of ideas within organizations. To develop critical innovations, businesses should interact according to what type of knowledge accessed.

With the unprecedented growth of the communication industry that the world is experiencing, the demand from rural inhabitants for high quality communications at an economically affordable cost is growing. However, rural areas are rather restricted from deploying communication services due to the rough natural environment, and the shortage of rudimentary communication facilities and technical personnel. Appropriate models for building rural wireless networks and a concomitant simulation environment are, therefore, expected to enable the construction of technologically-optimal and economically-efficient networks in specified rural areas.<br /> <br /> The research has set up two independent models, one for the economic need and the other for the technical need of building networks in rural areas. One model was the Impact of Telecommunications Model, which disclosed the importance of building a wireless network in specified rural areas by choosing an economic parameter to forecast the profitability of the network. The other was the Service Model, which collected primitive data from given rural areas and abstracted these data by flowing them through four technical layers to form the predicted technical wireless network. Both of the models had been applied to real-world cases to demonstrate how to use them.<br /> <br /> A simulation environment was finally designed and implemented to realize the above two models for the sake of instantiation. This environment could simulate the specified rural network by constructing a wireless network on the invented areas and evaluating its quality and economic efficiency. It was written in Scilab simulation language, which was an open source.