Innovation Spaces: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Role of the Physical Environment in Innovation

Firms are paying increasing attention to the physical environments in which creative and innovative activities take place. These environments reflect the firm's strategic intentions towards innovation and provide a physical embodiment of their desired modes of working. To date, this new phenomenon has received little academic attention. Based on both literature and also the authors' combined experiences through observing firms in Europe, this paper proposes a simple framework to aid practitioners and academics to better understand the design, role and goals of such spaces.     

Evolutionary Optimisation of Mechanical Structures: Towards an Integrated Optimisation

This work results from the synthesis of author’s works on the applications of stochastic techniques (genetic algorithms with neural networks) for the optimisation of mechanical structures. The emphasis of this work is on the practical aspects and the feasibility of the aformentioned techniques. The research strategy consists in substituting, for finite element calculations in the optimisation process, an approximate response of a neural network. More precisely, the paper describes the use of backpropagation neural networks in creating function approximations for use in computationally intensive design optimisation based on genetic algorithms. An example of application for space frame optimisation of a helicopter tail boom is given in this paper, for which we can talk of integrated optimisation. This example (including displacement and frequency constraints) show the use of neural networks as a function approximation strategy to limit the computational costs associated with stochastic search methods.     

Towards an Integrated View on Architecture and its Evolution

Information about the evolution of a software architecture can be found in the source basis of a project and in the release history data such as modification and problem reports. Existing approaches deal with these two data sources separately and do not exploit the integration of their analyses. In this paper, we present an architecture analysis approach that provides an integration of both kinds of evolution data. The analysis applies fact extraction and generates specific directed attributed graphs; nodes represent source code entities and edges represent relationships such as accesses, includes, inherits, invokes, and coupling between certain architectural elements. The integration of data is then performed on a meta-model level to enable the generation of architectural views using binary relational algebra. These integrated architectural views show intended and unintended couplings between architectural elements, hence pointing software engineers to locations in the system that may be critical for on-going and future maintenance activities. We demonstrate our analysis approach using a large open source software system.     

Towards an Integrated Graph Based Semantics for UML

Recently, we proposed an integrated formal semantics based on graph transformation for central aspects of UML class, object and state diagrams. In this paper, we explain the basic ideas of that approach and show how two more UML diagram types, sequence and collaboration diagrams, can be captured. For UML models consisting of a class diagram and particular state diagrams, a graph transformation system can be defined. Its graphs are associated with system states and its rules with operations in the class diagram and transitions in the state diagrams. Sequence and collaboration diagrams then characterize sequences of operation applications and therefore sequences of transformation rule applications. Thus valid sequence and collaboration diagrams correspond to derivations induced by the graph transformation system. Proceeding this way, it can be checked for example whether such an operation application sequence may be applied in a specific system state.     

Managing the complex data center environment: an Integrated Energy-aware Framework

The problem of Information Technology energy consumption has gained much attention due to the always increasing use of IT both for business and for personal reasons. In particular, data centers are now playing a much more important role in the modern society, where the information is available all the time and everywhere. In this context, the aim of this paper is to study energy efficiency issues within data centers from the Information System perspective. The proposed approach integrates the application and infrastructure capabilities, in which the enactment of adaptation mechanisms is aligned with the business process. Based on both energy and quality dimensions of service-based applications, a model-based approach supports the formulation of new constrained optimization problem that takes into consideration over-constrained solutions where the goal is to obtain the better trade-off between energy and quality requirements. These ideas are combined within a framework where time-based analysis allow the identification of potential system threats and drive the selection of adaptation actions improving overall energy and quality requirements, represented by indicators satisfaction. In addition, the framework includes an evolution mechanism that is able to evaluate past decisions feedback in order to adjust the model according to the current underlying environment. Finally, the benefits of the approach are analyzed in an experimental setting.     

Teamwork and Organizational Innovation: The Moderating Role of the HRM Context

Evidence is accumulating on the role of teams in shaping a variety of business outcomes, but our knowledge on the effect of teamwork on organizational innovation is still evolving. This study examines whether the extent to which two staff groups are organized in teams (production staff and management/administrative staff) affects organizational innovation and whether human resource management (HRM) systems, which can be of facilitating or constraining nature, enhance the teamwork/innovation relationships. Hypotheses were tested with lagged and longitudinal data derived from 18 to 45 organizations from the UK manufacturing sector. Results suggest that the more widespread the use of teamwork in organizations, the higher the level of organizational innovation. Furthermore, this effect depends, particularly for production teams, on the overall quality of the HRM systems that exist in their organizations. Teamwork/innovation relationships are further moderated (for management and administrative teams) by an HRM practice that provides teams with time for thoughtful reflection. Thus, HRM systems can be of more or less facilitating or constraining nature for teams in organizations.     

Towards a Subject-Oriented Model-Driven Framework

Model-Driven Architecture is an approach which tackles such problems as: the high availability that a software product requires to be ready for use, the high degree of evolution that a software system has nowadays, etc. However, in the development of large complex systems, the benefits of that approach have been diminished due to the size and complexity of models that describe these kinds of systems. At this point Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) appears to improve the understanding, reusability and adaptation of the software artefacts. Its mechanism is based on modularization of crosscutting concerns in well-identified isolated entities called aspects. For this reason we propose to use together AOSD and MDA in the hope of reducing the shortcomings of the latter. Thus, aspects like security, replication, real-time constraints, etc., will be modelled by specialist modellers independently throughout the MDA framework. Our proposal exploits a tool for checking the consistency between different models (aspects) at the same level of abstraction; supporting the traceability of UML elements, requirements, and concerns; and controlling the impact of changes throughout the MDA framework.     

Towards Systematic Business Model Innovation: Lessons from Product Innovation Management

Although business model innovations are decisive for a company's long‐term success or failure, they are still poorly understood compared to product innovations. Thus, their execution is imperfectly supported, and their organizational accountability is insufficiently regulated. In this paper, we systematically investigate similarities and differences between product and business model innovation to assess the potential of transferring insights and best practices. Therefore, we condense key findings of product innovation management into a framework as a basis for the analysis of 11 current cases of business model innovation. This paper intends to contribute to a better understanding of the options that exist for business model innovation. We derive implications for an improved management of business model innovation based on the cases analysed. For the innovation process and its organizational anchoring, we disclose potential benefits of a more structured and holistic approach.     

插件式网络安全集成防护框架

随着Internet的普及,网络安全问题越来越成为令人关注的问题。单一的入侵检测或者是防火墙系统很难对系统进行有效的防护。如果能整合入侵检测和防火墙形成一种有机的新系统,将能较好地克服两者的缺陷。这里面临了两个问题：一方面需要一种框架能集成新的子系统,即集成入侵检测系统,融合不同的检测技术,同时集成管理不同类型的防火墙,形成结合边界防火墙的分布式防火墙;另一方面需要一种机制,能自动判定入侵检测系统的告警,生成相应的防火墙规则阻断攻击。为了集成不同类型的子系统,我们提出了一种插件式的框架,通过添加插件,它能够集成管理不同类型的防火墙和入侵检测系统,通过该框架的抽象,提供了一种告警自动响应的机制。     

基于软件层架构模式的构件集成组装研究

构件组装是基于构件的软件开发过程中的关键环节,组装机制又是构件组装中的核心问题。以软件架构为背景,提出通用层的架构模式,将层架构的概念引入到组装技术中,完成基于软件层架构模式的构件集成组装框架的设计。     

Towards an Integrated View of the Ambidextrous Organization: A Second‐Order Factor Model

Within the context of ambidexterity, this paper focuses on the tension between radical and incremental innovation and its main aim is to investigate whether an ambidextrous organization for innovation can be conceptualized in a more integrated way as a second‐order construct reflected by both contextual and structural approaches. Structural equation modelling is employed to analyse data from a survey of 185 firms in Austrian and Italian medium‐ and high‐tech industries. The primary contribution of the paper is that the ambidextrous organization can be meaningfully described by a higher‐order structure made up of structural and contextual solutions. This paper makes an important contribution to ambidexterity thanks to high‐order modelling of the construct of ‘ambidextrous organization’, thus unveiling interesting implications for both academics and managers.     

Towards a Framework for Visual Model Development

A number of decision support systems (DSS) based on a visual interactive simulation (VIS) model have been implemented in recent years. A key component of a VIS model is the visual model. Existing VIS model development methodologies suggest methods (such as the paper prototype method) for developing a visual model. However, these methods are quite general and do not contain a framework to guide development. This paper describes a framework which combines the paper prototype method with systems concepts to develop the visual model. The proposed framework consists of eight stages. A project proof of principle example is described in which a VIS-based DSS provides support to the owner of a company selling telephone systems.     

Integrated Computer-Aided Innovation: The PROSIT approach

The paper presents a methodology aimed at the improvement of the product development cycle through the integration of Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) with Optimization and PLM systems. The interoperability of these tools is obtained through the adoption of Optimization systems as a bridging element between CAI and PLM systems. This methodology was developed within the PROSIT project (http://www.kaemart.it/prosit).The paper describes the main issues related to the integration of these complementary instruments and the solutions proposed by the authors. More specifically, the main idea of the PROSIT project to link CAI and Optimization systems is the adoption of the latter tools not just to generate optimized solutions, but also as a design analysis tool, capable to outline critical aspects of a mechanical component in terms of conflicting design requirements or parameters. CAI systems are then applied to overcome the contradictory requirements. The second step, i.e. the integration between Optimization and PLM systems, has been obtained through the development of Knowledge-Based (KB) tools to support designer's activities. More in details, they provide means to analyze and extrapolate useful geometrical information from the results provided by the optimizer, as well as semi-automatic modelling features for some specific geometries. A detailed example related to the design of a plastic wheel for light moto-scooters clarifies the whole procedure. The paper integrates, extends and updates topics presented in Cugini et al., Barbieri et al. and Cascini et al. [U. Cugini, G. Cascini, M. Ugolotti, Enhancing interoperability in the design process—the PROSIT approach, in: Proceedings of the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer-Aided Innovation, Brighton (MI), USA, October 8–9, 2007, published on Trends in Computer-Aided Innovation, Springer, ISBN 978-0-387-75455-0, pp. 189–200; L. Barbieri, F. Bruno, M. Muzzupappa, U. Cugini, Design automation tools as a support for knowledge management in topology optimization, in: Proceedings of the ASME 2008 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2008), Brooklyn, New York, USA, August 3–6, 2008; L. Barbieri, F. Bruno, M. Muzzupappa, U. Cugini, Guidelines for an efficient integration of topological optimization tools in the product development process, in: Third International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, Atlanta, USA, June 23–25, 2008; G. Cascini, P. Rissone, F. Rotini, From design optimization systems to geometrical contradictions, in: Proceedings of the 7th ETRIA TRIZ Future Conference, Frankfurt, Germany, November 6–8, 2007].     

How to Improve Text Summarization and Classification by Mutual Cooperation on an Integrated Framework

Text summarization and classification are core techniques to analyze a huge amount of text data in the big data environment. Moreover, as the need to read texts on smart phones, tablets and television as well as personal computers continues to grow, text summarization and classification techniques become more important and both of them do essential processes for text analysis in many applications.Traditional text summarization and classification techniques have individually been considered as different research fields in this literature. However, we find out that they can help each other as text summarization makes use of category information from text classification and text classification does summary information from text summarization. Therefore, we propose an effective integrated learning framework using both of summary and category information in this paper. In this framework, the feature-weighting method for text summarization utilizes a language model to combine feature distributions in each category and text, and one for text classification does the sentence importance scores estimated from the text summarization.In the experiments, the performances of the integrated framework are better than ones of individual text summarization and classification. In addition, the framework has some advantages of easy implementation and language independence because it is based on only simple statistical approaches and POS tagger.     

Render2MPEG: A Perception-based Framework Towards Integrating Rendering and Video Compression

Currently 3D animation rendering and video compression are completely independent processes even if rendered frames are streamed on‐the‐fly within a client‐server platform. In such scenario, which may involve time‐varying transmission bandwidths and different display characteristics at the client side, dynamic adjustment of the rendering quality to such requirements can lead to a better use of server resources. In this work, we present a framework where the renderer and MPEG codec are coupled through a straightforward interface that provides precise motion vectors from the rendering side to the codec and perceptual error thresholds for each pixel in the opposite direction. The perceptual error thresholds take into account bandwidth‐dependent quantization errors resulting from the lossy com‐pression as well as image content‐dependent luminance and spatial contrast masking. The availability of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients at the codec side enables to use advanced models of the human visual system (HVS) in the perceptual error threshold derivation without incurring any significant cost. Those error thresholds are then used to control the rendering quality and make it well aligned with the compressed stream quality. In our prototype system we use the lightcuts technique developed by Walter et al., which we enhance to handle dynamic image sequences, and an MPEG‐2 implementation. Our results clearly demonstrate many advantages of coupling the rendering with video compression in terms of faster rendering. Furthermore, temporally coherent rendering leads to a reduction of temporal artifacts.     

Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine: Towards a Systemic Model

The contribution of this study is an increased understanding of personal creativity and the innovation process in haute cuisine, a validation of the socio‐cultural systems view of creativity and a model that accounts for the socio‐cultural dimensions of haute cuisine. In this paper we discuss existing views that conceptualize creativity and innovation in this sector as a sequential developmental process following the principles of operations management. However, based on in‐depth interviews with world‐renowned chefs, we argue for a systemic rather than sequential developmental process view. The reason for this is that the chefs interviewed understand the ‘creativity part’ of the innovation process as an embodied experience often guided by intuition and the ‘innovation part’ as a process of social evaluation greatly dependent on the perception, knowledge and value judgement of the testers from the leading restaurant guides. The main implications of the findings go beyond the haute cuisine sector and open areas for future research on creativity and intuition more generally.     

融合PKI基础设施的信息安全保障技术框架研究

传统的基于网络安全防护的安全技术已不能满足信息安全保障(IA)时代的安全需求,与此同时网络安防系统自身也存在各种安全风险和面临各种安全攻击,同样需要强化身份、认证、保密、完整、抗抵赖等安全保障。本文将通过强化密码基础设施的核心和基础安全支持服务功能,融合密码基础设施与网络安防技术,为信息系统及网络安全防护系统提供更加强壮的身份、认证、保密性、完整性及抗抵赖等安全服务。     

An Integrated Framework for Empirical Discovery

In this article we present a framework that integrates three aspects of empirical discovery—the formation of taxonomies, the generation of qualitative laws, and the detection of numeric relations. We specify a control structure that integrates these component processes, embedding qualitative discovery within taxonomy formation, and embedding numeric discovery within both of these activities. We also describe the framework's basic representation and organization of knowledge, which combines elements from recent work in machine discovery and qualitative physics. In addition, we describe IDS, a running system that instantiates this framework, and report its behavior on problems from the history of science. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the system as revealed by experimental studies, and propose some directions for future research.     

一个集成式的软件构件描述框架

该文提出了一个可扩展、可裁减的集成式软件构件描述框架。该框架采用了相宜的方法对构件的接口、语义、问题空间等方面进行描述，并且通过XML提供了可扩展的机制。实践证明，在该框架基础上实现的构件库管理系统体现了较好的构件描述与检索能力。     

电子系统EDA集成开发环境框架结构

E D A 集成开发环境是电子系统开发必备的工具与手段。本文根据目前的 E D A 工具软件及其套件结构和电子系统的开发需要,提出三种不同类型的典型 E D A 集成开发环境框架结构——板级、芯片级和综合型电子系统 E D A 集成开发环境框架结构,并以图示的方式进行描述。