Delivering the Whole Product

2010 ◽  
pp. 978-992
Author(s):  
Joseph Feller ◽  
Patrick Finnegan ◽  
Jeremy Hayes

It has been argued that competitive necessities will increasingly require OSS companies to participate in cooperative business networks in order to offer the complete product/service (whole product) demanded by customers. It is envisaged that these business networks will enhance the business models of participant firms by supplementing their value-adding activities and increasing responsiveness to customers. However, while such propositions have intuitive appeal, there is a lack of empirical research on such networks. This article examines Zea Partners, a network of small open source companies cooperating to deliver the ‘whole product’ in the area of content management systems (CMSs). It investigates how participation in the network augments the business models of participant companies and identifies the business agility challenges faced by the network. The article concludes that reconciling the coordination needs of OSS networks with the operational practices of participant firms is a critical issue if such networks are to achieve adaptive efficiency to deliver whole products in a ‘bazaar-friendly’ manner.

Author(s):  
Joseph Feller ◽  
Patrick Finnegan ◽  
Jeremy Hayes

It has been argued that competitive necessities will increasingly require OSS companies to participate in cooperative business networks in order to offer the complete product/service (whole product) demanded by customers. It is envisaged that these business networks will enhance the business models of participant firms by supplementing their value-adding activities and increasing responsiveness to customers. However, while such propositions have intuitive appeal, there is a lack of empirical research on such networks. This article examines Zea Partners, a network of small open source companies cooperating to deliver the ‘whole product’ in the area of content management systems (CMSs). It investigates how participation in the network augments the business models of participant companies and identifies the business agility challenges faced by the network. The article concludes that reconciling the coordination needs of OSS networks with the operational practices of participant firms is a critical issue if such networks are to achieve adaptive efficiency to deliver whole products in a ‘bazaar-friendly’ manner.


Author(s):  
Joseph Feller ◽  
Patrick Finnegan ◽  
Jeremy Hayes

Researchers have argued that competitive necessities will require open source software companies to participate in cooperative business networks in order to offer the complete product / service (whole product) demanded by customers. It is envisaged that these business networks will enhance the business models of participant firms by supplementing their value adding activities and increasing responsiveness to customers. However, while such propositions have intuitive appeal, there is a paucity of empirical research on such networks. This study examines Zea Partners, a network of small open source companies cooperating to deliver the ‘whole product’ in the area of Content Management Systems (CMS). It investigates how network participation augments the business models of the participant companies, and identifies the agility challenges faced by the business network. The chapter concludes that reconciling the coordination needs of OSS networks with the operational practices of participant firms is of crucial importance if such networks are to achieve adaptive efficiency to deliver whole products in a ‘bazaarfriendly’ manner.


Author(s):  
A. Ferrerón Labari ◽  
D. Suárez Gracia ◽  
V. Viñals Yúfera

In the last years, embedded systems have evolved so that they offer capabilities we could only find before in high performance systems. Portable devices already have multiprocessors on-chip (such as PowerPC 476FP or ARM Cortex A9 MP), usually multi-threaded, and a powerful multi-level cache memory hierarchy on-chip. As most of these systems are battery-powered, the power consumption becomes a critical issue. Achieving high performance and low power consumption is a high complexity challenge where some proposals have been already made. Suarez et al. proposed a new cache hierarchy on-chip, the LP-NUCA (Low Power NUCA), which is able to reduce the access latency taking advantage of NUCA (Non-Uniform Cache Architectures) properties. The key points are decoupling the functionality, and utilizing three specialized networks on-chip. This structure has been proved to be efficient for data hierarchies, achieving a good performance and reducing the energy consumption. On the other hand, instruction caches have different requirements and characteristics than data caches, contradicting the low-power embedded systems requirements, especially in SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) environments. We want to study the benefits of utilizing small tiled caches for the instruction hierarchy, so we propose a new design, ID-LP-NUCAs. Thus, we need to re-evaluate completely our previous design in terms of structure design, interconnection networks (including topologies, flow control and routing), content management (with special interest in hardware/software content allocation policies), and structure sharing. In CMP environments (chip multiprocessors) with parallel workloads, coherence plays an important role, and must be taken into consideration.


Author(s):  
Marta Matulčíková ◽  
Daniela Breveníková

Constraints on our personal and professional life imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic have radically influenced our approach to forms of education, including those used in further professional training of employees. This shift means the focus on distance education as a managed educational form, which is suitable for further professional training. The aim of the paper is to present the implementation of distance education in further professional training in enterprises and based on the empirical research propose ways of improving options of education. Distance education is characterised in terms of its principles and developmental stages. Its first generation was correspondence education. The Learning Management System (LMS) and Learning Content Management System (LCMS) are described as the systems applied in further professional training. The research was conducted by means of the questionnaire method, combined with the pre-research survey. Results of empirical research are presented in tables. Separate parts of the paper deal with ICT application in corporate education (correspondence education, Computer-based training (CBT), Web-based training (WBT), Technology Based Training (TBT) and with the utilisation of Learning Management Systems (LMS). Analysis of respondent opinions shows that respondents tend to prefer the face-to-face form of corporate education. The length of the pandemic is going to affect the spread of e-learning in corporate education and its role in education. The learners’ interest may be expected to be shifted to LCM and LCMS utilisation. The paper is a partial result of the research scheme VEGA No. 1/0309/18 “Social networks in human resource management” supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Research and Sports, Slovakia


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2118
Author(s):  
Emma Johnson ◽  
Andrius Plepys

Business models like product-service systems (PSSs) often recognise different sustainability goals and are seen as solutions for the impacts of consumption and fast fashion, but there is a lack of evidence supporting the environmental claims of such business models for clothing. The research aimed to understand if rental clothing business models such as PSSs have the environmental benefits often purported by quantifying the environmental impacts of rental formal dresses in a life-cycle assessment (LCA) in a case study in Stockholm, Sweden. The effects of varying consumer behaviour on the potential impact of a PSS vs. linear business model are explored through three functional units and 14 consumption scenarios. How users decide to engage with clothing PSSs dictates the environmental savings potential that a PSS can have, as shown in how many times consumers wear garments, how they use rental to substitute their purchasing or use needs, as well as how consumers travel to rental store locations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2241
Author(s):  
Moritz Ehrtmann ◽  
Lars Holstenkamp ◽  
Timon Becker

Community energy actors play an important role in the energy transition, fostering the diffusion of sustainable innovation in the renewable energy market. Because market conditions for business models in the renewable energy sector are changing and feed-in-tariff (FiT) schemes expiring, community energy companies are in the process of innovating their business models. In recent years, several community energy companies in Germany have entered the electricity retail market selling locally generated electricity from their renewable energy installations to customers in their region. We explore the evolving regional electricity business models for community energy companies in Germany, related governance structures, and the role they play for a sustainable energy transition. In order to implement these complex business models, community energy companies cooperate with professional marketing partners (intermediaries), which are capable of taking over the tasks and obligations of electricity suppliers. Through a series of expert interviews and desk research, we identify three distinctive regional electricity business models and examine opportunities and challenges to their implementation. Results show that there are different forms of cooperation, leading to specific governance structures and creating a set of new value propositions. Through these forms of cooperation, business networks emerge, which can function as incubators for sustainable innovation and learning for the post-FiT era.


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