Impact of funding and value added on Spanish venture capital-backed firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the effect of venture capital (VC) on the economic development of areas in which those specialized investors are active. The work focuses on the separate consideration of two effects that are supposed to explain the superior performance of a large sample of Spanish VC-backed firms, namely funding and value-added services provided by VC managers to their investee firms. The results show that funding is significant regardless of the stage of development of the investee firm. The value added, however, is only significant for the subsample of firms at the expansion stage.     

水下现浇模袋混凝土施工质量控制

在某预制场造船基地改造工程中,船舶下水滑道采用了水下现浇模袋混凝土的施工工艺。船舶下水方式为气囊滚动式下水。为保证船舶顺利下水,滑道的坡度及平整度是工程施工的控制重点。在以往的工程中,水下现浇模袋混凝土主要应用于护坡工程,对坡度及平整度的要求低于船舶下水滑道。针对水下现浇模袋混凝土和船舶下水滑道的特点,此工程在基床整平、模袋加工、模袋铺设和混凝土工程等方面进行了严格的施工质量控制,对施工细节进行了把握,取得了良好的效果。     

Speed in the Internationalization Process of the Firm

While firm internationalization processes have been understood as being dynamic, the dimension of speed has rarely been the main focus of research efforts, which, until a decade ago, focused principally on explaining sequences of entry modes and choices of markets. The emergence of the study of international entrepreneurship has enhanced the role of speed, although this has usually been measured in terms of the time lag between a firm's foundation and its initial international action, with little attempt at defining and explaining the speed of the process once it is under way. This study reviews the concept of speed from an internationalization perspective, describes the multidimensional nature of the concept and sets out the different aspects that link timescales with the types of changes – continuous and discontinuous – that take place during internationalizing processes. The paper concludes with a research agenda as a guide for future work on considering the role of speed in the internationalization process.     

Inter-firm collaborations and supply chain coordination: review of key elements and case study

Considering the effects of globalisation, the increase of production and energy costs, and the introduction of advanced technologies, companies need to change their way of doing business if they want to stay competitive. One way of doing this is to establish collaborations with suppliers, distributors and retailers, in order to exchange products efficiently and create value for customers. Nevertheless, the structure of the collaboration must be designed carefully and some coordination mechanisms must be implemented to support this way of doing business. In this article, we first analyse: why companies work together, how they should build their partnership, and which strategies they can implement to facilitate coordination of supply chain activities. We then report a case study of collaboration in the forest industry that shows the benefits of implementing coordination mechanisms as well as the necessity of using incentives to better share these benefits.     

Environmental and social supply chain management sustainability practices: construct development and measurement

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise and operationalise the concept of supply chain management sustainability practices. Based on a multi-stage procedure involving a literature review, expert Q-sort and pre-test process, pilot test and survey of 156 supply chain directors and managers in Ireland, we develop a multidimensional conceptualisation and measure of social and environmental supply chain management sustainability practices. The research findings show theoretically sound constructs based on four underlying sustainable supply chain management practices: monitoring, implementing systems, new product and process development and strategy redefinition. A two-factor model is then identified as the most reliable: comprising process-based and market-based practices.     

Using vulnerability performance indicators to attain food supply chain robustness

High effectiveness and leanness of modern supply chains (SCs) increase their vulnerability, i.e. susceptibility to disturbances reflected in non-robust SC performances. Both the SC management literature and SC professionals indicate the need for the development of SC vulnerability assessment tools. In this article, a new method for vulnerability assessment, the VULA method, is presented. The VULA method helps to identify how much a company would underperform on a specific Key Performance Indicator in the case of a disturbance, how often this would happen and how long it would last. It ultimately informs the decision about whether process redesign is appropriate and what kind of redesign strategies should be used in order to increase the SC's robustness. The applicability of the VULA method is demonstrated in the context of a meat SC using discrete-event simulation to conduct the performance analysis.     

Waste identification diagrams

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a very popular tool in lean environments to represent production flows, mapping value stream of a product or family of products, and helps to identify some types of waste. Although very popular, this tool has some limitations as already described in many publications, especially in terms of restrictions in showing most types of waste as well as in its inability to represent various production routes. The purpose of this study is to introduce the waste identification diagram (WID), a new tool to represent production units with its different forms of waste, which overcomes some VSM limitations. The originality of WID comes from the use of its symbols’ dimensions to convey, in a visual and immediate way, relevant information about a production unit. In this paper, WID is applied on a production unit of a lift manufacturer, for testing its performance and comparing it to VSM. The main findings are that WID is in general more effective than VSM in terms of representation of complex production units and in terms of identification of more forms of waste. WID must however overcome some of its limitations such as the lack of information-flow representation and the links to suppliers and clients.     

Essence taxonomy of Brazilian family businesses and conceptual implications for governance strategy

Journal of Management and Governance - This study advances the discussion on the governance of family businesses in emerging markets by exploring a taxonomy based on the F-PEC model in order to...     

基于日常生活的日常伦理规范分析

生活是"日常"前行的,"日常"是日复一日的时间延续,"日常"的生活在常态的稳定中不断前行,常态的、稳定的日常生活是生活的基础.在日常生活中,相较于个人的日常生活,族群的日常生活具有逻辑的先在性.日常伦理规范立足于族群的生活传统,相较于日常道德原则,具有客观性与客观差异性;相较于伦理学思想,具有常识性与经验性.日常伦理规范不是僵化的"死物",而是在不断演变当中.日常伦理规范演变的动力来自于日常生活;演变的过程具有持续性、和缓性特征;演变的程度具有领域性、结构性的差异;演变的结果具有多元化、多样化的特征;演变趋势从根本上受制于社会发展趋势.厘清日常伦理规范的概念与演变特点对我们正确认识当代中国伦理转型过程中的问题与演变趋势具有重要的理论指导意义.