Innovation and new product development (NPD) are critical to firm success and are often cited as means to a sustained competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the question of which innovation programs to pursue and how they should be funded is not trivial. This thesis examines the resource allocation and NPD portfolio problem. Special emphasis is placed on the organizational and behavioral factors that influence this problem. In doing so, we adopt a hierarchical perspective and posit that the resource allocation and NPD portfolio problem acquires a unique structure depending on the level at which the problem is considered. Beginning at the firm level, each study attempts to break open a black box to understand the drivers of effective resource allocation and NPD portfolio decisions at successively more detailed levels of analysis. We begin with an analysis of the firm's total R&D investment and we show how R&D intensity (the percentage of revenue that is reinvested in R&D) depends on a combination of NPD portfolio metrics and operational variables. We then extend the analysis to reveal how a simple evolutionary process explains the often cited consistency in R&D intensity at the industry level. Next, we analyze how the R&D investment is partitioned into "strategic buckets" consisting of NPD programs that are characterized by type of innovative activity (incremental or radical). We show how time commitment, technological/market complexity, and potential disruptions to the technology/market environment influence the balance between incremental and radical programs in the NPD portfolio. Finally, we analyze how individual NPD programs are funded and how they evolve over time in an organization setting that is defined by more or less autonomy. We find that how best to allocate resources depends on two types of autonomy bestowed upon managers: autonomy with respect to NPD funding and autonomy regarding how the NPD budget is monitored and controlled. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of our work.

As the world¡¦s high degree of urbanization, greenhouse gas emission by vehicles, home appliances and industrial production is increasing year by year and according to the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) report urban carbon-dioxide emissions accounted for 80% of total global emissions. In order to encourage the alternative energy development, Taiwan government actively promotes the subsidy for alternative energy implementation, thus making the solar energy industry booming in recent years. Based on the government procurement competition mechanism, the procurement competition needs to be transparent and fair. Faced with competition in the industry, companies must reduce costs and improve quality while also required to enhance the customer satisfaction. Therefore, a good engineering project control becomes the most important factor to enhance a company's competitive ability. Particularly, when professional management is getting more and more important nowadays, solar energy system¡¦s building construction is not only limited to technology and equipment level, but also the enterprise configuration of internal human resources and outsourcing. Moreover, how to minimize cost and how to use efficient way to make the project work on schedule are the important issues for policy makers. This study is based on a domestic solar systems engineering project, and focuses on the distribution and configuration of the limited internal and external resources of multiple projects in progress. It uses the Critical Chain Project Management in the Theory of Constraints to break through limitations. VBA programming is used to find the minimum cost of human resource conflict in the project scheduling, furthermore Arena simulation system is utilized to establish the best configuration of human resources deployment to provide decision-making mechanism. The simulation result is verified that it can really help to provide a decision-making reference to project managers to obtain the ideal scheduling and resource allocation.

In this dissertation we study the problem of allocating computational resources and managing applications in a data center to serve incoming requests in such a way that the energy usage, reliability and quality of service considerations are balanced. The problem is motivated by the growing energy consumption by data centers in the world and their overall inefficiency. This work is focused on designing flexible and robust strategies to manage the resources in such a way that the system is able to meet the service agreements even when the load conditions change. As a first step, we study the control of a Markovian queueing system with controllable number of servers and service rates (M=Mt=kt ) to minimize effort and holding costs. We present structural properties of the optimal policy and suggest an algorithm to find good performance policies even for large cases. Then we present a reactive/proactive approach, and a tailor-made wavelet-based forecasting procedure to determine the resource allocation in a single application setting; the method is tested by simulation with real web traces. The main feature of this method is its robustness and flexibility to meet QoS goals even when the traffic behavior changes. The system was tested by simulating a system with a time service factor QoS agreement. Finally, we consider the multi-application setting and develop a novel load consolidation strategy (of combining applications that are traditionally hosted on different servers) to reduce the server-load variability and the number of booting cycles in order to obtain a better capacity allocation.

<p>Due to the scarcity of wireless resources, efficient resource allocation is essential to the success of cellular systems. With the proliferation of bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications with diverse traffic characteristics and quality of service requirements, the resource management is becoming particularly challenging. In this thesis, we address some of the key link-layer resource allocation mechanisms that affect the performance of video streaming in cellular systems: bit-rate allocation, opportunistic scheduling, and statistical multiplexing. The bit-rate allocation problem involves the distortion-optimal assignment of source, channel, and pilot data rates under link capacity constraints. We derive an analytical model that captures the video distortion as a function of these data rates and, based on it, we study various bit-rate allocation strategies. The opportunistic scheduling problem addresses the throughput-optimal assignment of time-slots among users with diverse channel conditions under certain fairness constraints. We focus on two aspects of the opportunistic scheduling: the performance of delay-constrained streaming applications and possible extensions of the opportunistic concepts to multicast scenarios. Finally, the statistical multiplexing is a resource-efficient method for smoothing out the extreme burstiness of video streams. We study possible statistical multiplexing gains of H.264 video streams in the context of E-MBMS architecture.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-223). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. xv-130).

Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): William Gates, Julie Carpenter. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-84). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-223). Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Space Link Extension (SLE) is a set of recommended standards for mission cross support developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). The SLE recommendations define protocols for extending the space link from ground terminals to other facilities deeper within a ground network, allowing distributed access to space link telecommand and telemetry services. The SLE protocols are widely used to provide cross support between sites, programs, and agencies. In traditional SLE deployments, individual service instances have been manually provisioned well in advance of the commencement of cross support for a particular mission, and hardware and software resources have been allocated to those service instances at the time of provisioning. While valid, this approach requires that dedicated resources be provided for each mission and service instance, and limits an SLE provider's ability to reallocate resources in real time based on system availability or other factors. This paper discusses an alternative approach to SLE service provisioning, in which individual service instances are assigned resources from a common resource pool at the time that each service instance is initialized. The paper addresses the key design elements and technical tradeoffs involved in this approach, and discusses the potential benefits with regard to load balancing, equipment reuse, and resiliency against system failure.