Using technology and innovation to simulate daily life

“The Sims” is a synthetic doll's house embodied in a computer game. Besides topping sales charts and generating endless discussions among computer gamers, The Sims has received attention from various prestigious publications. Far more than a doll's house, The Sims evokes comparisons to a Greek myth in which you can play the deity, manipulating the lives of unaware humans. The trouble with this model-and what makes the game so intriguing - is that, just like mortals in Greek mythology, your “Sims” (simulated people) often frustrate your plans with their own autonomy. Moreover, the game demonstrates how game development can influence computer science. The Sims achieves its success through both advanced computing technology and an understanding of its users. It brings players into the game through a combination of great technology, a believable simulation environment, a superb user interface and a fun game design, which combine to make a computer game of everyday life that is more compelling than the reality it models     

仪器仪表行业产品开发过程中思维创新方法与应用

开源式创新思维是操作性极强的思维方法,可有效地帮助人们从传统思维中解放出来,高效广泛地获取、管理和使用研究对象内外部资源,并关注资源的积累、分析和应用,以较小的代价找到相对最优的解决方法,从而有效避免技术创新的盲目和无绪.另外,通过一系列典型案例,详细阐述开源式创新思维应用步骤与取得的成效,特别是提出结合国情,以机电一体化形式实施产品化推广应用理念.     

Exploring ideation and implementation openness in open innovation projects: IT-enabled absorptive capacity perspective

Advancements in information technology (IT) have made organizational boundaries so porous, thereby resulting in a trend toward leveraging external knowledge for innovation. However, firms experience significant obstacles in drawing external knowledge. This study aims to disentangle the role of IT-enabled absorptive capacity in new product development performance. The research model was tested with survey data of open innovation projects from 152 firms. Our findings indicate that IT-enabled absorptive capability improves open innovation project performance in terms of new product innovativeness and product speed to market, but we do not detect a significant direct influence of openness on performance. Our findings also show that the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and ideation openness significantly amplifies new product innovativeness while the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and implementation openness accelerates the product speed to market. This study theoretically contributes by building an IT-enabled absorptive capacity theory in the open innovation context and uncovering the effects of two dimensions of openness. In practice, it offers managers strategies to successfully conduct open innovation projects in deploying effective ITs and leveraging various types of openness during the two phases.     

Negotiability: a metafunction to tailor access to data in groupware

Functions which control access to data in groupware should be designed flexibly by offering different options to end users. However, conflicts might arise among different end users in the process of selecting one of these options. To support users in finding a consensual solution for these conflicts, we propose a metafunction called 'negotiability'. We propose to define and explore the concept of 'negotiability', and discuss its application to access control, concurrency control, and consistency control. We assume that negotiability can play an important role in tailoring these mechanisms and supporting a co-operative use of system's flexibility.     

Using process history to predict software quality

Many software quality models use only software product metrics to predict module reliability. For evolving systems, however, software process measures are also important. In this case study, the authors use module history data to predict module reliability in a subsystem of JStars, a real time military system     

A process-based framework of using social media to support innovation process

Although many organizations have deployed social media tools to support business activities such as marketing or customer relationship management in the past several years, academic research on using social media for supporting innovation process is very limited. Many organizations find it challenging to effectively integrate social media into organizational innovation practices because social media are primarily complex, informal and episodic. In this research, we would like to explore how various organizational factors can contribute to social media use for supporting innovation process. We conducted a case study of two particular cases, one with an e-learning service unit at a public university and another with a large hotel chain company. Based on the findings of this case study, we proposed a process-based framework that could help organizations use social media to support innovation process. This case study also identified situational factors that could affect the use of social media for closed innovation and open innovation respectively. In addition, some useful guidelines and proven practices are revealed from this case study.     

Using search theory to determine an applications selection strategy

The literature on software selection focuses mainly on identifying and ensuring the evaluation of those attributes of alternative commercial software products relevant to meeting the functional and non-functional requirements of the acquiring organisation. Once these attributes are determined, however, the firm acquiring the product must still decide on its selection strategy: which products should be evaluated, in what order, and at what point is it no longer beneficial to continue to evaluate additional products. We applied search theory to solve this problem of determining the selection strategy. This resulted in an optimal strategy but changes the way we view and manage software acquisition. In particular, the approach suggested that software acquisition may be better managed as an ongoing process instead of as a project with a distinct start and end. The approach formally incorporated the strategic importance of the application to the firm in determining the optimal strategy, a consideration that does not appear in the normal requirements-based approach to software selection.     

Using spreadsheet to teach on-line statistical process control

This paper gives the design considerations for on-line statistical process control (SPC) using spreadsheet software. The system combines a data acquisition system, data translation board, spreadsheet package, and a microcomputer. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate, by means of examples, how a microcomputer spreadsheet software and a data translation board can be used to teach on-line SPC as an alternative to the expensive commercial SPC software. Moreover, in the training and education environment, computer simulated data can be used for different case studies. Experience in using this approach to teach on-line SPC will be described.     

Using structured benchmarking to fast-track CMM process improvement

Sikorsky Aircraft designs and manufactures helicopters. In today's environment of glass cockpits, fly-by-wire control systems, and special missions, we are also in the integration business-which, from this article's perspective, translates into embedded software. We develop large systems in-house, such as the Comanche Mission Equipment Package, comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and we are deeply involved in enhancing large legacy systems for our Black Hawk and Seahawk platforms. Sikorsky Aircraft in pursuit of a Capability Maturity Model rating, determined that software benchmarking would help its process improvement and assessment effort. The article describes how Sikorsky prepared for benchmarking trips, structured its questionnaire, aggregated results and evaluated lessons learned     

Optimization strategy in the development process with application to cast components

At the development of commercial vehicles, it is necessary to develop cost-optimized components with respect to their entire lifetime. This requires a product development process that utilizes the possibility to simulate the product performance using modeling of different degrees of sophistication at any predefined level-of-detail (LOD). For example, the mechanical properties of a cast component depend strongly on the casting process, the simulation of which requires complex modeling at a high LOD. In this article, we propose an optimization strategy that is based on the LOD concept to develop cost-effective components. A sizing optimization of a cast model component is carried out with respect to both the mechanical and thermal response to exemplify the process. In particular, a (novel) global measure of the temperature in energy norm is introduced as an indicator of the “production fitness” to ensure high quality of the material properties. This measure is the thermal counterpart of the well-accepted mechanical strain energy.     

A novel approach for assessment of candidate technologies with respect to their innovation potentials: Quick innovation intelligence process

Technological innovation process starts with technical discovery of new things or new ways of doing things, i.e., invention. With the commercialization of invention, the term, innovation, takes place instead of invention. The process ends with (duplicative and/or creative) imitation by competitors. It is expected that maximum profits can be achieved in the time interval from commercialization of invention to its imitation because of monopoly power. Therefore, assessing the emergence of invention in accordance with ability for commercialization and resistance for imitation can generate winning innovation intelligence. Besides, for achieving sustainability, disruptive technologies should also be taken into account through evaluation of trendiness of candidate technologies. This study presents a novel assessment process that aims to evaluate and prioritize candidate technologies according to their innovation potentials by considering commercialization, imitation and trendiness factors all together. According to authors’ best knowledge, the technology assessment process presented in this study is the first attempt in the literature that is dedicated to winning innovation intelligence and takes above mentioned factors together into account. Main input resources of the process are patents, scientific publications and market research reports. While trendiness of technologies is evaluated with the help of a fuzzy inference system that combines patent data and publication data, commercial and imitation potentials are evaluated with the help of some marketing indicators and determinants in the proposed assessment process.     

Using a hybrid method to evaluate service innovation in the hotel industry

This study develops a hybrid method to improve selection decision making in service innovation. Because criteria for customer perceptions tend to be vague and conflicting, the process of evaluating perceptions (qualitative scale) and operational data (quantitative scale) should be combined. This study proposes the concomitant evaluation of qualitative and quantitative scales using a hybrid approach that combines fuzzy set theory, a discrete multi-criteria method based on prospect theory (known as TODIM in Portuguese) and the non-addictive Choquet integral. The study assumes that the criteria possess interdependent relationships. The advantages of the proposed hybrid approach, which exhibits a hierarchical structure, have been demonstrated throughout the hot spring hotel industry. The proposed method demonstrates that it can be extremely useful for recommending operational alternatives because it clearly identifies the main criteria of the expressed alternatives. The results indicate that the approach easily and effectively accommodates criteria with gain and loss functions and can help practitioners improve their performance and reduce overall service innovation risks.     

使用Matlab 7.0处理树脂吸附实验报告

使用Matlab 7．0对树脂吸附实验数据进行了处理,采用一维三次样条插值方法绘制了实验曲线。使用曲线拟合函数polyfit,采用G．E．Boyd液膜扩散方程、Langmuir吸附等温式和Freundlich吸附等温式等对实验数据进行了线性拟合,拟合结果和使用Origin7．0拟合结果相同,且线性相关系数均接近于1。     

Technology management and strategy composition: innovation of IC foundry

The goals of this research are two-tiered: The first goal is to analyze the evaluation criteria used by integrated circuit (IC) designers when selecting foundry service providers. The second goal is to use an in-depth case study on the global IC foundry leader, TSMC, to explore the strategic compositions of IC foundry’s process development, since the process technology has been found, through our survey at the prior stage, to be the most significant evaluation criterion in view of competitiveness in the customer market. As a result, for the foundry industry, technology no longer counts for everything, although it is a priority; coordinated strategies, in contrast, should assure more business merits for all concerned. This study has drawn the strategy matrix with eight categories of IC foundry process strategies.     

网络新闻编辑人才的发展与创新策略

随着互联网的飞速发展,在人们的生活中网络变得愈加重要,因此,在这样的发展要求下,新闻网络编辑这一新的职业便随之而生.这一职业在短时间内发展迅速,一跃成为了国家型的职业大典,出现将近六百多万人的新闻编辑工作者.这些工作者与网站建设、网络新闻传播联系紧密.版面编辑、业务知识和创新策划能力,改良新闻的板块设计与信息采集方式,增加与网络民众的深度互动,凸显原创特质,把握社会主动话语权是新时代对网络新闻编辑的要求.     

A robust strategy for real-time process monitoring

An operator support system (OSS) is proposed to reliably retain salient information in a high dimensional and correlated database, to uncover linear and nonlinear correlations among variables, to reconstruct failed/unavailable sensors, and to assess process-operating performance in the presence of noise and outliers. The proposed strategy carries out the task in three steps. In the first step, a robust tandem filter is used to suppress noise and reject any outlying observations. Next, an orthogonal nonlinear principal component analysis network is utilized to optimally retain a parsimonious representation of the system. In the final step, the process status is checked against the normal operating region defined by kernel density estimation, and failed/unavailable sensors are reconstructed via constrained optimization and the trained network. The strategy is demonstrated in real-time using a pilot-scale distillation column.     

用VB和MatrixVB混合编程处理固-液吸附实验数据

用MatrixVB插件引入VB的方法,实现了VB与Matlab混合编程。利用VB 6.0设计用户界面,操作方便,界面简洁、友好。利用MatrixVB强大的数学功能,实现计算机处理固-液吸附数据和绘图,并根据Boyd液膜扩散方程、Langmuir等温吸附方程等吸附理论,线性拟合实验数据,得出拟合方程,提高数据处理效率。