This study aims at a better understanding of how firms arrange and profit from their technological competencies. In particular, it presents a contribution to the diversification-performance literature by dealing with a still poorly researched aspect of diversification, namely technological...

Attention to processes has increased, as thousands of organizations have adopted processfocused practices, including TQM and ISO 9000. Proponents of such programs stress the promise of improved efficiency and profitability. But research has not consistently borne out these prospects. Moreover,...

Many US firms are improving their individual competitiveness by offshoring manufacturing operations, services and, increasingly, knowledge work. Although research to date has maintained that these practices are beneficial to the offshoring firm and national economies, by reducing costs and...

This paper describes how firms’ propensity to carry out component (or architectural) innovation is influenced by the degree of task uncertainty during inter-firm product development. Using successfully applied patents in automobile emission control technologies from 1970 to 1998; this research...

The primary objective of this study is to propose an estimator of the parameters of the generalized Gaussian noise model with desirable asymptotic properties, namely, asymptotic consistency and asymptotic efficiency. Three estimators are proposed and analyzed. The relative merits and demerits of...

This work introduces the Method of Exergy Multipliers. Having asserted the utility of the exergy concept, this method aims to streamline the calculation procedures used in exergy analysis and its study. The method defines the exergy multipliers of a given process in terms of ratios of the work,...

This thesis introduces a new family of classifiers called dyadic decision trees (DDTs) and develops their theoretical properties within the framework of statistical learning theory.First, we show that DDTs achieve optimal rates of convergence for a broad range of classification problems and are...

The Department of the Premier: Orgnisational Development is mandated to coordinate provincial intervention that will assist the provincial departments of the Western Cape to improve the efficiency of their service delivery. Increasing customer demand for quality services have virtually forced...

Optimal daily operation of electric power generating plants is very essential for any power utility organization to reduce input costs and possibly the prices of electricity in general. For a fossil fuel – fired power plant for example, the benefits of power generation optimalization (i.e....