In the past Portugal managed to grow at a significant rate, but the pace has getting slower and slower from decade to decade, until becoming practically stagnant in the first decade of the 21st century. This stumpy growth together with the current debt crisis has fed the rhetoric of structural...

In the spirit of “The Lisbon strategy”, public policies are redirecting support from investment-driven policies to knowledge building as the main driver for competitiveness and innovation. This re-orientation poses different challenges to regions and RIS concept may be the central element,...

The acknowledged importance of innovation and the increasingly decisive role played by the service sector make innovation an issue of major relevance to the economy. Using a sample of 6593 companies that answered the Community Innovation Survey 2008, we assessed the determinants of innovation of...

Existing illustrations of the learning phenomenon either stress the relationship between flows and stocks, neglecting the chronological time variable, or the speed of knowledge accumulation along time, neglecting the nature of the underlying learning process. In this paper we present a graphical...

We present a unified graphical framework accounting for the nature and impact of spillover effects. The dynamics of the learning process with a specific spillover transfer mechanism can be illustrated by recurring to this four-quadrant picture. In particular, a whole cycle of technological...

Within a debatable framework of ‘natural replication’ of well-succeeded cases such as the Silicon Valley, Route 128, OECD countries have been implementing policy measures directed to the stimulation of the development of regional clusters composed by Technology-Intensive Firms (TIF) around...

The importance of promoting innovation has been elevated up to a status of official standard since the Lisbon European Summit in 2000. Here research and development (R&D) was singled out as an essential element of the foundation on which innovation could be built. R&D has been a growing area of...

Using the Free Cash-Flow method in the valuation of small or medium enterprises is far different from the valuation of their larger counterparts: firstly, it's important to make some adjustments to the financial statements, in order to predict the future cash-flows; secondly, the calculation of...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been one of the fastest-growing areas of operations research during the last decades. The academic attention devoted to MCDA motivated the development of a great variety of approaches and methods within the field. These methods distinguish themselves...

As competition increases, Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing becomes an important issue in Portuguese industry. After a brief review of its history, elements, advantages and limitations, this paper presents the results of a postal questionnaire survey about JIT system sent to a sample of...