The impact of intrapreneurship strategy on business performances of Italian companies

Intrapreneurship is a decentralized management strategy applied in large and medium-sized companies. The strategy enables employees to use their entrepreneurial skills for the benefit of both the company and the employee. Talented employees get the opportunity to create ideas, undertake innovative ventures, to experiment, to gain access to financial resources and other resources in order to encourage innovative change and results. The creator of the idea was the Pinchot couple in 1978, but to this day the concept has undergone several evolutionary waves (Antoncic, 2020). The intrapreneurship strategy positively affects the agility in the company, raises efficiency, has a positive effect on team spirit, increases productivity, reduces costs and raises profitability. The main goal of the paper is to analyze the level of intrapreneurship presence in large and medium-sized companies in the Italian region of Campania. The influence of intrapreneurship parameters on companies' business indicators is also measured. An instrument for measuring intrapreneurship was created for the needs of paper. The instrument measures the presence of autonomous teams in the company, the possibility of taking business initiative, speed of access to resources for testing purposes and realization of new business ideas, encouraging risk with the aim of realizing business ideas, mobility of resources within the company, the degree of management tolerance in order to realize new business ideas of employees, the presence of rewards, the level of management support at all levels, the number of hierarchical levels in the company and the role of crowdsourcing in the development of internal entrepreneurship. After factor and regression analysis, Factor 1 has a dominant impact on all three business indicators, while Factor 2 has a smaller but statistically significant impact on the company's volume of business and investments

Assessing the Implementation of Decentralized Management System: Babre Tabor Municipality Administration in Focus

This study addressed the efforts exerted on the implementation of decentralization management system employed a few years ago in a governmental institution. More specifically, this study attempted to assess the perceptions employees hold about the decentralization package, their decision-making practices and correlations among participants’ perception, decision-making practices and provision of resources. To this end, of one hundred and fifty employees, fifty of Debre Tabore Municipality administrative, in Amhara regional state, were selected in a mix of systematic and stratified sampling technique. Likert scale and frequency count itemized questionnaire administered and forty-eight sheets of questionnaire were returned filled in. The major findings showed that participants had a reasonable level of awareness on the positive roles of decentralization, considerable level of decision-making practices and some degree of perceived provisions of resources or support. Besides, there seemed to have positive relationships among the participants’ perceptions about municipality decentralization, input provision and practice of decision making. small but positive correlations among perceptions. A mere degree of variations of responses to the perceptions and practices of decentralization were also seen due to background differences in gender, position and work experiences. In light of the results, the decentralization could be implemented with a more focus of employees’ concern on resource provisions and shared commitment.

Smart Grid Nontechnical Loss Detection Based on Power Gateway Consortium Blockchain

The rapid development of the smart grid brings convenience to human beings. It enables users to know the real-time power supply capacity, the power quality, and the electricity price fluctuation of the grid. However, there are still some threats in the smart grid, which increase all kinds of expenses in the grid and cause great trouble to energy distribution. Among them, the man-made nontechnical loss (NTL) problem is particularly prominent. Recently, there are also some NTL detection programs. However, most of the schemes need huge amounts of supporting data and high labor costs. As a result, the NTL problem has not been well solved. In order to better avoid these risks, problems such as tampering of smart meter energy data, bypassing the smart meter directly connected to the grid, and imbalance between revenue and expenditure of the smart grid are tackled, and the threat scene of NTL is constructed. A hierarchical grid gateway blockchain is proposed and designed, and a new decentralized management MDMS system is constructed. The intelligent contract combined with the elliptic curve encryption technology is used to detect the storage and the acquisition of power data, and the detection of NTL problems is realized. At the same time, it has a certain ability to resist attacks such as replay, monitoring, and tampering. We tested the time consumption and throughput of this method on Hyperledger Fabric. At the same time, eight indexes of other methods proposed in the literature are compared. This method has a good effect.

Intermodal Terminal Planning under Decentralized Management: Optimization Model for Rail-Road Terminals and Application to Portugal

Terminals are key components of intermodal transport networks, as they are the facilities where freight is transferred between transport modes. The efficiency of such facilities crucially depends on their locations (and sizes), which are typically chosen considering two levels of analysis: local/urban and regional/country. Our focus in this presentation is the regional/country level. At this level, the problems involved in the locational (and sizing) decisions at stake are a particular variety of hub locations problems—a class of problems that has been widely studied through optimization approaches. However, they typically assume that decisions are made in a centralized management context: decision-makers not only choose the locations of intermodal terminals (or hubs), but also fully control their utilization (i.e., which terminal each user will patronize). This signifies that such approaches are not applicable when users–potentially, any companies that move freight–behave according to their own individual interests; that is, they are not applicable in a decentralized management context. In this presentation, we describe an ongoing study where (regional) intermodal terminal location problems are dealt with in this type of context considering terminals of different types and respective capacity and operation ranges. In particular, we present the complex optimization model we have developed to handle such problems, and the (sometimes counterintuitive) results it led to when applied to a case study inspired by the Portuguese reality.

The place of local government bodies in the system of public governance of tourist activity in the conditions of financial decentralization

The paper states the gradual revival of tourism, both in Ukraine and in the world. That is why we believe that tourism, especially in the western and southern regions of our country can become a significant driver of economic development of local communities. For the rapid and successful development of the tourism industry in Ukraine, it is necessary to find internal reserves to increase demand for domestic tourism products, increase ways to meet consumer demands for content, diversity and quality of tourism and recreation services. It is determined that the system of management of the tourism industry in the context of decentralization in Ukraine is disorganized, built on lobbying principles, consists of different in number and quality of officials, has insufficient funding and misuse of allocated funds. The importance of creating a decentralized management mechanism in the conditions of decentralization, which will be effective even with minimal funding of the tourism industry, different number of employees in this field and will ensure a high level of their professionalism. It is proposed to create tourist departments at the regional and local levels; training and retraining of specialists-managers, who in connection with the position will perform the assigned powers in the field of tourism. A separate area is the improvement or change of the law on tourism adopted in 1995, which does not fully meet modern realities and requires comprehensive changes that would meet the interests and modern needs of society. We believe that it is very important that tourism should be planned on a comprehensive basis, taking into account all aspects of legislation relating to other sectors that have a direct or indirect impact on it.

Synergy of Edge Intelligence and Blockchain: A Comprehensive Survey

Edge intelligence (EI), as an emerging technology, has been attracting significant attention. It pushes the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) from the cloud to the network edge, aiming to embrace and support the next-generation communications while unleashing AI services. However, it faces challenges in its decentralized management and security, which limit its capabilities to support services with numerous requirements. On the other side, blockchain (BC), as a promising decentralized technology, is beneficial to tackle the above issues. However, there exist some technical challenges for BC, such as transaction capacity, scalability, and fault tolerance. Motivated by significant current interest around EI and BC, this survey examines whether the synergy of EI and BC can make a powerful network with combined functionalities of both cutting-edge technologies. Accordingly, we develop EI-chain and Chain-intelligence to realize reliable computing-power management, data administration, and model optimization at the edges, while improving the functions of BC by leveraging complementary characteristics of EI and BC, further making up for their own limitations. In this survey, a wide spectrum of literature is carefully reviewed to enable the EI-chain and Chain-intelligence. Moreover, we cover the technological aspects of EI-chain and Chain-intelligence: overview, motivations, and frameworks. Finally, some challenges and future directions are explored. We believe this survey will provide developers and researchers a comprehensive view on the synergy of EI and BC, while accelerating the design of a powerful integrated network.

Synergy of Edge Intelligence and Blockchain: A Comprehensive Survey

Edge intelligence (EI), as an emerging technology, has been attracting significant attention. It pushes the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) from the cloud to the network edge, aiming to embrace and support the next-generation communications while unleashing AI services. However, it faces challenges in its decentralized management and security, which limit its capabilities to support services with numerous requirements. On the other side, blockchain (BC), as a promising decentralized technology, is beneficial to tackle the above issues. However, there exist some technical challenges for BC, such as transaction capacity, scalability, and fault tolerance. Motivated by significant current interest around EI and BC, this survey examines whether the synergy of EI and BC can make a powerful network with combined functionalities of both cutting-edge technologies. Accordingly, we develop EI-chain and Chain-intelligence to realize reliable computing-power management, data administration, and model optimization at the edges, while improving the functions of BC by leveraging complementary characteristics of EI and BC, further making up for their own limitations. In this survey, a wide spectrum of literature is carefully reviewed to enable the EI-chain and Chain-intelligence. Moreover, we cover the technological aspects of EI-chain and Chain-intelligence: overview, motivations, and frameworks. Finally, some challenges and future directions are explored. We believe this survey will provide developers and researchers a comprehensive view on the synergy of EI and BC, while accelerating the design of a powerful integrated network.