New Business (new + business)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Advanced and intelligent technologies for reliable operation of power systems and electricity markets

IEEJ TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING, Issue 5 2008
Ryuichi Yokoyama Senior Member
Abstract Deregulation of power industries is still progressing in many countries, aiming at reduction of the electricity price, diversity of customer diverse choices, services and promotion of new business and keeping supply reliability. Many countries are testing this notion in anticipation of lower power prices through open competition. In such a competitive situation, it is necessary for suppliers to take on the responsibility of keeping supply reliability at the load end in order to prevent outages, for instance, independent power producers (IPP) placing distributed generations (DGs) close to the load or conventional utilities utilizing advanced and intelligent system operation/control technologies that are costly. Usually, customers pay one price for power that is good enough for ordinary use, therefore not necessarily highly consistent in quality of voltage, current, frequency or reliability. However, if customers desire better quality power, additional fees are added according to the particular characteristics desired, thus customers are supplied with this type of better power that they choose. Under such a worldwide new trend in power systems and markets, this article is edited for the purpose of introducing the most advanced technologies and the newest issues related to reliable and stable operations of power markets and systems in the competitive environment. © 2008 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source]


TRANSFORMING ENRON: THE VALUE OF ACTIVE MANAGEMENT

JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 4 2001
Vince Kaminski
Soon after Enron was formed as a regulated gas pipeline company in 1985, economic events forced a dramatic reorganization of the company. The result was the creation of an unregulated energy trading operation whose mission was to capitalize on opportunities arising from the deregulation of the natural gas market The initial form of the new business was that of a "gas bank" in which Enron became an intermediary between buyers and sellers of gas, locking in the spread as profit. Since there was no source of liquidity to the market, Enron had to develop its own risk management system. Furthermore, the need to respond quickly to rapidly changing market conditions required that Enron flatten its organizational structure and hire new people whose skills were better suited to the new decentralized organization. The focus of the new Enron accordingly became human and intellectual capital, not physical assets. Employees were encouraged to move about the firm to staff new business ventures. And in what may well be a unique feature in corporate America, Enron's top management today uses its human capital flows to guide its allocations of financial capital. Other aspects of the Enron model include attempts to capitalize on the option (as opposed to current DCF) value of assets, recognition of the value of networks in adding value to trading platforms, and the use of mark-to-market accounting for business transactions as a means of ensuring transparency and promoting timely decision-making. [source]


Using Interorganizational Information Systems to Support Environmental Management Efforts at ASG

JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 4 2001
Teresa M. Shaft
Summary We examine use of environmental information systems by ASG AB (hereafter ASG), an international logistics and transport firm headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, as a case study to illustrate the role of information systems in life-cycle-oriented environmental management. This case provides an example of how a firm can use interorganizational information systems (IOISs) to move toward environmentally sustainable business practices. Through the use of IOISs, ASG has been able to improve its environmental performance and that of its suppliers. Further, this improved environmental performance has been a competitive advantage for ASG and enabled it to attract new business. As such, ASG's experiences illustrate how aggressive practices move environmental management beyond compliance and cost control, at which many firms have been successful, to revenue generation. The case also shows how environmentally sustainable business practices can be integrated into a firm's strategy. In addition to illustrating how ASG has used IOISs to improve environmental performance, we compare their use of environmental ISs with the expected evolution of environmental ISs presented in the Shaft and colleagues (1997) framework. Although some of ASG's experiences verify the expected progression of these types of systems, some developments are not as expected. These differences have implications for the framework. [source]


The Use of Dynamic Financial Analysis to Determine Whether an Optimal Growth Rate Exists for a Property-Liability Insurer

JOURNAL OF RISK AND INSURANCE, Issue 4 2004
Stephen P. D'Arcy
Prior research on the aging phenomenon has demonstrated that new business for property-liability (P-L) insurers generates high loss ratios that gradually decline as a book of business goes through successive renewal cycles. Although the experience on new business is initially unprofitable, the renewal book of business eventually becomes profitable over time. Within this context, insurers need to manage their exposure growth in order to maximize long run profitability. Dynamic financial analysis (DFA), a relatively new tool for P-L insurers, utilizes Monte Carlo simulation to generate the overall financial results for an insurer under a large number of scenarios. This article uses a publicly available DFA model,along with the estimated market value of an insurer, based on 1990,2001 data for stock P-L insurers and underlying financial variables,to determine optimal growth rates of a P-L insurer based on mean,variance analysis, stochastic dominance, and constraints on leverage. [source]


Offering Incentives for New Development: The Role of City Social Status, Politics, and Local Growth Experiences

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2002
Paul G. Lewis
The propensity of municipal governments to offer incentives for new development is empirically examined, drawing upon both the literature on local economic development policy and studies of local residential restrictions. The data are from a 1998 mail survey of city managers in California in which officials assessed the likelihood that their local governments would offer financial assistance or zoning changes to various types of new business and residential land uses in their communities. Multivariate analysis indicates that local conditions resulting from past growth patterns,commuting times, job/population balance, and housing affordability,play an important role in shaping respondents' assessments as to whether their cities are likely to grant incentives. Such factors deserve an important role in explaining local government growth orientations, alongside measures of community status, political institutions, and the strength of progrowth coalitions. [source]


Trade credit and customer relationships

MANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 6-7 2003
Barbara Summers
Trade credit is an important economic phenomenon, and a variety of theories have been put forward to explain the decisions firms make on credit extension. The ways in which credit can be used as a strategic tool to support corporate objectives has not, however, been fully discussed. The results presented here provide some support for the extant theory on trade credit extension and for recent empirical papers in this area (e.g. Ng et al., 1999; Petersen and Rajan, 1994). However, our results suggest that trade credit granting has a set of subtle and complex motivations over and above those predicted by standard theory. In particular trade credit extension can be used as a many-faceted marketing/relationship management tool and/or as a means of signalling information to the market or to specific buyers about the firm, its products and its future prospects/commitment. Much of credit extension can be seen as customer focused; for example, encouraging frequent purchasers which offer the potential for relationship development or accommodating customers' demand for credit to help finance their production period. The requirements/bargaining power of large customers can influence a firm to extend more credit. Firms will vary terms in anticipation of capturing new business, to attract specific customers and in order to achieve specific marketing aims. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Minding the business of business: Tools and models to design and measure wealth creation

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2009
Mariano L. Bernardez
What is the business of business? How can planners and investors anticipate the true chances of failure and success of a business idea? This article describes a rationale for developing successful new business on the basis of a simple, sensible idea: the business of any business is to make its clients successful enough to continue purchasing and recommending its products and services and continue adding value to all stakeholders. Using a double-bottom line, a triple top-line business case, and a wealth creation flowchart, the author shows how to demonstrate measurable benefit as the core of a business proposition and engineer creation and delivery of value from a carefully designed client experience. This new technology, illustrated with examples of multiple businesses incubated at the Sonora Institute of Technology (ITSON), combines two models,Roger Kaufman's Organizational Elements Model (OEM) with Dale Brethower and Geary Rummler's Anatomy of Performance (AOP),in a simple, straightforward process supported by an extensive research bibliography. [source]


Megapixels, Millimetres and Microsieverts: Packaging Digital Photogrammetry for Emerging Industrial Markets

THE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC RECORD, Issue 95 2000
D. P. Chapman
As the performance of megapixel digital imaging systems continues to improve, the rapid growth of high-end consumer markets drives prices ever lower. When such cameras are married with emerging, desktop "photogrammetric" software packages, the close range photogrammetric community is faced with many new challenges and opportunities. The dramatic changes in the technological arena are matched by a rapidly changing business environment in which concepts such as "Partnering" and "Supply chain management" have become key themes. As organizations of all sizes seek to thrive within this new business landscape, there appears to be a willingness to think more flexibly about the client-supplier relationship and the sharing of risks and rewards. This, in turn, has encouraged the development of highly customized measurement solutions across a wide range of market sectors. In each of these solutions the emphasis is not on a generic photogrammetric product, but on a highly tailored system tightly coupled to existing workflows, and focused on the specific needs of the client. Such systems pose particular challenges to their designers, since they are frequently operated by users with relatively little photogrammetric background and yet must always meet the challenging requirement of producing an output which is "fit for purpose". Thus this paper hopes to show how novel megapixel imaging systems can be configured to deliver flexible measurement systems capable of millimetric level accuracy within the challenging engineering environments typical of the nuclear and process industries (hence the microsievert component of the title). [source]


Converged service continuity: A challenge for the merchant and the architect

BELL LABS TECHNICAL JOURNAL, Issue 2 2008
Linas Maknavicius
Offering service continuity is about providing customers with ubiquitous, uninterrupted, and transparent access to personalized content and services, both when they move between various access networks and when it is desirable to continue a session on another terminal at any time. The novelty does not only lie in new functional implementation, but in new business and distribution models as well. To make this vision a reality, the merchant and the architect must work jointly. Service continuity thus strives to eliminate barriers created by access conditions and user terminals, in response to generalization of the user-centric paradigm. The variety of existing technical environments, however, involves constraints that raise new operational challenges for the realization of communication and media service continuity. Moreover, bringing service continuity to the market depends on forward-looking business models based on interplay among actors in the market. © 2008 Alcatel-Lucent. [source]


Greening from the front to the back door?

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 3 2010
A typology of chemical, resource management services
Abstract Though services and product,service systems have been promoted as a promising way towards more eco-efficient and sustainable societies, they have not turned into reality as expected. Chemical and resource management services are among the few operational examples. They aim to align the service provider's and customer's actions to reduce chemical usage and waste, improve supply chain management and increase resource efficiency. Arguably, they also create new business and higher profit margins compared with merely selling chemicals or handling industrial waste. Thus far they have been viewed as a single business model. In contrast, this study shows through the construction of five ideal types that the actual services and their focus vary. They range from the management of the chemical supply to operations, waste reduction, combined logistics services, process management, IT and other technologies. Consequently this affects the value creation, organization and environmental efficiencies of these services. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]