While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

In public services, the political component of the marketing environment has a major importance, as all decisions adopted within central administration influence both the objectives and measures implemented by units of local government and other public service providers. Any discontinuity in the...

The importance-performance grid is a marketing instrument used to make decisions regarding the growth of the consumersâ€(tm) satisfaction, by optimizing the attributes of products. This grid is a useful instrument, as it is shown in the paper, to the extent to which the importance and...

For developing economies the development of enterprises should be a strategic goal, this way of thinking may become viable only as a result of a combination of judicious analysis based on specific local economic aspects and a set of actions to correct any slippage or amplify existing development...

This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When a hurricane shuts down production at a Unilever plant? When Dell and Apple chip manufacturers in Taiwan take weeks to recover from an earthquake? When the U.S....

Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book,...

From the foreword by Howard W. Johnson: "Philip Sporn's long and distinguished career has been at the interface of economics, engineering, and management. His accomplishments as an engineer, an engineering manager, and finally as an executive, have been marked by an innovative approach to...

Contained herein is an array of exciting and knowledgeable papers that discuss, from assorted disciplinary angles, the "present and future impact of computers on management organization and the nature of managerial work." No two papers cover the same ground or reach identical conclusions, for...

The past two decades have seen a gradual but noticeable change in the economic organization of innovative activity. Most firms used to integrate research and development with activities such as production, marketing, and distribution. Today, firms are forming joint ventures, research and...