Big Companies Research Articles

FEATURES OF INNOVATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF SWITZERLAND

The features of Swiss innovative economy and main success factors in creation and implementation of innovations are analyzed in the article. Special attention is devoted to definition of the role of state and private sector in the formation of innovative structure of Switzerland, laws and acts regulating the development of innovations and basic institutions which are playing leading role in their management. The article considers the importance of cluster system creating around big companies a structural network of different actors complementing innovative ecosystem in the production process of new products. The author concludes that a small country status and economic decentralization arе not the obstacles for the development of innovative economy and corresponding infrastructure.

SecFL – Secure Federated Learning Framework for predicting defects in sheet metal forming under variability

With the ongoing digitization of the manufacturing industry and the ability to bring together data from specific manufacturing processes, there is enormous potential to use machine learning (ML) techniques to improve such processes. In this context, the competitive automotive industry can take advantage of the ML power by predicting defects before they occur, aiming to reduce the scrap rate and increase the robustness and reliability of the production processes. In a real world scenario, small and medium size companies do not have the amount of data the big companies have, which can prevent the usage of ML models in this vital niche for the industry. A collaboration in terms of data usage to develop powerful and general industry solutions is hindered by data privacy concerns despite similar problems. This paper addresses these concerns by providing a framework based on the Federated Learning (FL) method combined with Digital Envelopes (DE) to allow the ML models training while keeping the data of the partners and the models parameters private and protected against external cyber-attacks, which is one of the weaknesses of FL as of now. A case study was carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on handling data poisoning attacks to the training data and also the models’ weights.

CNN and Keras based Road Safety Traffic Signs Recognition System

Accident rates increased due to non-compliance with traffic signs and non-compliance with traffic rules. By using synthetic training data from images of train signs, we can overcome the problem of analysis of traffic data, which varies by country and region. This method is used to create files containing synthetic images to detect traffic signs from different perspectives. With this knowledge and a well-designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), we can create a data-driven train recognition and detection system that has accurate detection accuracy and still has action. This article presents the process of recognizing and classifying road signs and traffic signs to create their inventory to help great engineers replace and maintain them. It uses images captured by a camera from a moving car. The system is based on three main stages: color segmentation, recognition and classification. Many researchers in the world of artificial intelligence and technology and Tesla, Uber, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Ford, Audi etc. big companies like self-driving cars and self-driving cars. Therefore, in order for this technology to be used correctly, vehicles must be able to interpret traffic signs and make decisions accordingly. This reduces accidents and also helps drivers concentrate on driving rather than looking at every traffic card. The purpose of this document is to provide an effective way of discovering and recognizing traffic signs in India.

Ảnh hưởng của dịch COVID-19 đến hiệu quả hoạt động kinh doanh của các công ty thương mại và dịch vụ niêm yết trên thị trường chứng khoán Việt Nam

The objective of this study is to measure the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on performance of listed commercial and services companies on the Vietnam stock market. The data used in this study were collected from financial reports of 50 companies for the period from 2018 to 2021. Using the event study method, the results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has negative effects on the performance of commercial and services companies. However, the effects of COVID-19 on the performance of firms are different depending on the size of firms. Specifically, COVID-19 has only negative effects on performance of big companies. In addition, this study does not find a statistically significant difference in the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of firms with different operating leverage.

Support from the government for SMEs in South Africa

This study intended to investigate how the Lephalale Local Municipality's small and medium companies (SMEs) are hampered by a lack of government support. This study also aims to demonstrate how SMEs face difficulties in surviving as a result of problems in the business environment. Consequently, the government of South Africa has programs to assist SMEs. The growth of SMEs is important for advancing innovation, wealth distribution, and employment. The majority of SMEs launch and maintain their businesses with their own money. By using a qualitative research approach and semi-structured in-person, phone, and email interviews to collect data, the goals of this study were met. There were 318 registered SMEs in the area. Using purposive sampling methods, data from operational enterprises with a lifespan of 0 to 5 years were gathered. Atlas TI 8 was used to evaluate the data. The primary conclusions of this study show that (i) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) find it difficult to maintain their operations because they lack access to capital and business equipment. This fails if SMEs are not given the proper support. Because they lack the resources to compete with big companies, SMEs find it challenging. (ii) Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should think about enrolling in bookkeeping training and sending their staff to business training in order to network for the survival of the company. In order to assist SMEs in fulfilling the requirements for maintaining their enterprises, this study advises the government to examine present standards. With the right assistance, SMEs can create business plans and maintain operations, which will result in the creation of jobs, particularly for local communities. The government ought to think about mentoring and overseeing sponsored SMEs.

Open Innovation Emerging Challenges and Practices in Brazil

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices and challenges of innovation management in large companies in Brazil. Theoretical framework: This paper draws upon recent literature on open innovation, with particular attention to communication processes and challenges. The research adopts Chesbrough´s open innovation (OI) definition and develops its argument from Mortara and Minshall´s proposal of OI high-level trends (CHESBROUGH; VANHAVERBEKE; WEST, 2006; MORTARA; MINSHAL, 2017). Design/methodology/approach: The researchers conducted qualitative research of eleven interviews with innovation leaders of big multinational companies. The corpus was submitted to a framework analysis, which allowed for identifying 63 emerging themes, structured in a thematic framework that supported the interpretation procedure. Findings: Key findings include the development of five emerging categories of management types, innovation drivers, and communicational dimensions. Research, Practical & Social implications: The research draws attention to the impact of complexification in open innovation strategies, and the need for new models of governance, communicative functions, and innovation drivers. Originality/value: The results support the emerging, but yet scarce, literature on open innovation in Brazil, and identify key challenges and emerging practices among Brazilian managers in large companies.

BigTech credit risk assessment for SMEs

Lending by big technology companies (BigTechs) is an important new financial innovation in the digital era. This paper attempts to evaluate robustness and special features of BigTech's credit risk assessment. Using 1.8 million loan transactions for online merchants of a leading Chinese virtue bank, we carry out a horse race analysis between the BigTech approach (i.e., big data and machine learning models) and the bank approach (i.e., traditional financial data and scorecard models) in predicting loan defaults. We show that the BigTech approach better predicts loan defaults, reflecting information and modeling advantages. Though bank approach do well for the firms which have records in credit registry, BigTech's proprietary information can complement or, where necessary, substitute for credit history in predicting defaults, especially for the unbanked borrowers. We further discuss inclusiveness feature of the BigTech approach and the implications for financial inclusion, financial intermediaries' businesses and regulators' policy.

An Incentive-Compatible Mechanism for Decentralized Storage Network

The dominance of a few big companies in the storage market arising various concerns including single point of failure, privacy violation, and oligopoly. To eliminate the dependency on such a centralized storage architecture, several Decentralized Storage Network (DSN) schemes such as Filecoin, Sia, and Storj have been introduced. DSNs leverage blockchain technology to create a storage platform such that the micro storage providers can also participate in the storage market. To verify the accurate data storage by the storage providers during a storage contract, DSNs apply a Proof of Storage (PoS) scheme to continuously inspect the storage service. However, continuous verification of the storage provider imposes an extra cost to the network and therefore end-users. Moreover, DSN's PoS verification is vulnerable to a service denying attack in which the storage provider submits valid PoS to the network while denying the service to the client. Considering the benefits and existing challenges of DSNs, this paper introduces a novel incentive-compatible DSN scheme. In this scheme, the PoS is conducted only if the client submits a challenge request. We model the storage service as a repeated dynamic game and set the players' payoffs such that the storage provider's dominant strategy is to honestly follow the storage contract. Our proposed mechanism leverages the smart-contract and oracle network to govern the storage agreement between the client and storage provider efficiently. Furthermore, our scheme is independent of a specific blockchain platform but can be plugged into any blockchain platform with smart-contract execution capability. As a proof of concept, we have implemented our scheme using solidity language and chainlink oracle network. The performance analysis demonstrates the applicability of our scheme.

The Impact Of Brand Image and Promotion on Customer Loyalty

Grab indeed is a big company that provide service of ride and food delivery. The question is whether the brand image of Grab with its product Grabfood gain customer loyalty or their promotion reach the customer loyalty or even both variables are influence customer loyalty. Some researches discussed that both variables are influences customer loyalty. On the other hand, there are researches that stated that brand image has no effect on customer loyalty as well as promotion has no impact on customer loyalty. It is important to investigate whether the brand image of Grab and its promotion able to influence the customer loyalty directly without customer satisfaction. Moreover, this study is conducted at Ponorogo regency which few of similar platform compete each other. This study aims to investigate the impact of brand image and promotion on customer loyalty. The method employed in this study is a qualitative method. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyzed the data through SPSS 20 aplication. The data was obtained using servey questionnaire. The population of this study is 12.422. Therefore, using Slovin technique the sample size of this 99 respondents. The result of this study indicates that promotion partially impacting customer loyalty while brand image partially has no effect on customer loyalty. Meanwhile, simultanousely promotion and brand image influence customer loyalty. The level of impact of promotion and brand image are about 53.3% while the rest of it about 46.7% are impacted by other factor excluded from this study. The result of this study is quite strong, therefore, it is important for Grab to take an account on their brand image, since Grab already have an enormous promotion in several platform of media social. Brand image probably could be erupted by the Grab partner (driver) therefore it is important to maintain the relationship with the partner.

APPLICATION OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY PROGRAMS AND ISSUES OF DATA PROTECTION

The business owners, administrators and managers are strongly depended on the internet, to develop their business. This fact is more obvious in cases when applying the loyalty programs and contacts with the customers. Marketers sometimes get lost in their business management and tend to be less focused on the legal issues, keeping their mind in the business growth. In this point, one of the key elements is being on compliance with the national and international legal norms of data protection of the customers. The relevant changes in the domestic law makes it more difficult for the business owners to operate their online marketing business. Nevertheless, it seems that such legal provisions with regard to privacy and data protection are not fully respected and the state institutions should do more about this. This article discusses the application of customer loyalty programs and the issues related to data protection, especially in Albania. It was found out that more efforts are needed to adhere to the EU standards in protecting personal data and certainly a stricter control by the government institutions is required on the way and methods the big companies collect, store and share the personal information of the customers.

Assembling Publics: Microsoft, Cybersecurity and Public‐Private Relations

In this article, we advance the literature on publics in international politics by exploring the nexus between publicness and big tech companies. This nexus finds a significant expression in the increasing impact of big tech companies to mediate disputes over societal problems, deliver social goods and rearticulate public-private relationships. We develop an analytical framework by combining recent scholarship on assemblage theory and publics, allowing us to understand publicness as enacted in practices which revolve around issues and rearticulate relations of authority and legitimacy. To demonstrate the value of the framework, we show how Microsoft is involved in assembling publicness around cybersecurity. Microsoft does so by problematising and countering state-led cybersecurity activities, questioning the state as a protector of its citizens and proposing governance measures to establish the tech sector as authoritative, and legitimate “first responders.” With this rearticulating of public-private relations, we see the emergence of a political subject for whom security is not solely the right of a citizen secured by the state but also a customer service provided as per a service agreement. The study hence offers important insights into the connection between publicness and cybersecurity, state and big tech relations, and the formation of authority and legitimacy in international politics.

MULTI-INTERNAL ACTORS DIAGNOSIS OF CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN AN INDUSTRIAL SME

AbstractIn big companies, Circular Economy (CE) is being explored, nevertheless, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) struggle to follow because of particular barriers and a lack of practical guide. Here, we use Style & Design, a French industrial SME, as a case study to explore how SMEs can perform a successful CE integration. This article aims at proposing a multi-internal actor circularity diagnosis method. It focuses on building an inclusive and co-constructed therefore well-accepted and persistent integration of CE for SMEs, which is lacking today in the existing literature. This work relies on a mixed qualitative and quantitative data analysis applied on a corpus of 42 one-hour-long semi-structured interviews, with 37 different professions. We capture the view of the current and desired situation and identify CE barriers unique to each interviewed worker. We also connect with each worker and open the dialog for the rest of the CE deployment. The final goal is to assemble this worker-oriented diagnosis with quantitative diagnosis, like Life Cycle Analysis of the products and Material Flow Analysis of the factory, to diagnose a complete picture of an industrial SME circularity.

A Lesson for the Future: Will You Let Me Violate Your Privacy to Save Your Life?

COVID-19 was an unprecedented pandemic that changed the lives of everyone. To handle the virus’s rapid spread, governments and big tech companies, such as Google and Apple, implemented Contact Tracing Applications (CTAs). However, the response by the public was different in each country. While some countries mandated downloading the application for their citizens, others made it optional, revealing contrasting patterns to the spread of COVID-19. In this study, in addition to investigating the privacy and security of the Canadian CTA, COVID Alert, we aim to disclose the public’s perception of these varying patterns. Additionally, if known of the results of other nations, would Canadians sacrifice their freedoms to prevent the spread of a future pandemic? Hence, a survey was conducted, gathering responses from 154 participants across Canada. Next, we questioned the participants regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and their knowledge and opinion of CTAs before presenting our findings regarding other countries. After showing our results, we then asked the participants their views of CTAs again. The arrangement of the preceding questions, the findings, and succeeding questions to identify whether Canadians’ opinions on CTAs would change, after presenting the proper evidence, were performed. Among all of our findings, there is a clear difference between before and after the findings regarding whether CTAs should be mandatory, with 34% of participants agreeing before and 56% agreeing afterward. This hints that all the public needed was information to decide whether or not to participate. In addition, this exposes the value of transparency and communication when persuading the public to collaborate. Finally, we offer three recommendations on how governments and health authorities can respond effectively in a future pandemic and increase the adoption rate for CTAs to save more lives.

Conflict of interests among shareholders – does it refer to dividend decisions?

Abstract Research background Agency theory refers to the conflict of interests between different groups involved in the business. One aspect of the agency theory is conflict among shareholders. One of the areas of potential conflict is dividend payment. Purpose The goal of our paper was to identify the impact of voting behaviour of shareholders during Annual General Meetings on dividend decisions. We make a comparison between big and small companies. Research methodology We included the 20 biggest and the 20 smallest companies from the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) in our sample over the 2010–2022 period. We collected 413 observations (shareholders’ presence, voting results from annual general meetings, and financial data). We use statistical tests, a correlation analysis, and a regression analysis. Results: We found that in small companies there is conflict among large shareholders on dividend payout decisions, while in big companies small shareholders show their disappointment by voting against or abstaining from voting for financial statement acceptance (but not dividend payout decisions). Additionally, we found that the higher presence of large shareholders at the AGM the lower the dividend payout is. Novelty: The originality of the paper is that instead of ownership structure we took into account shareholders’ presence at AGM’s. We deal with a unique set of hand-collected data on voting results. We present new evidence on interests of conflict among shareholders (not only on dividend decisions). Although the problem of the conflict between minority and majority shareholders was identified, there is a scarcity of research on its background and implication.

The Creative Employment in the Context of Structural Transformations

The article is devoted to the study of creative employment in the context of digital technology development. The study aims to identify the problems of creative employment and develop the prospects for stimulating the growth of creative employment in the context of digitization. The study conducted a critical literary analysis of the concept of creative employment and its components to achieve this purpose. The research concluded that creative employment includes work in the cultural sector and the whole range of innovative activities. The application of statistical analysis methods made it possible to estimate global creative employment, dynamics, and structure today. IT and media are nowadays the core sectors in the formation of creative employment, and they form the many job vacancies of the big companies. At the same time, creative employment can be realized independently. The analysis results showed that the digital sphere of creativity is the most promising today and in the future. Virtual reality, piece intelligence, and Blockchain are recognized as the future technologies as essential components of the IT sector. The combination of e-commerce together with traditional ones allows bringing the whole cultural creative potential to a new level, providing an increase in employment. At the same time, an essential aspect of getting a job is the creative potential of an individual and digital competencies. With this purpose, the suggestions on increasing employment levels by stimulating small businesses and entrepreneurship in the creative industry are developed.

‘Ghost Networks’ Put Patients at Risk of Becoming More Ill

‘Ghost Networks’ Put Patients at Risk of Becoming More Ill

Technological diversity of quantum computing providers: a comparative study and a proposal for API Gateway integration

After decades of advances, mainly theoretical, in recent years quantum computing has begun to show its first practical applications. This new and revolutionary technology aims to enhance essential areas such as cybersecurity, financial services, or medicine. The growth of this technology has encouraged different research centers and big companies such as IBM, Amazon, and Google to dedicate considerable efforts to developing new technologies that bring quantum computing to the market. However, these technologies are not yet mature and create a significant vendor lock-in problem. Therefore, new tools are needed that facilitate access to this technology and that allow developers to increase the abstraction level at which they work. Given that the integration of quantum software should not be very different from that of classical services, we can take advantage of the knowledge acquired and use current techniques of service-oriented computing. In this work, we have carried out a technical comparison between different quantum computing service providers using a case study, by performing empirical tests based on the Travelling Salesman Problem. This study highlights the differences between the main providers. To address these differences and reduce the vendor lock-in effect, we propose an extension of the Quantum API Gateway to support the different providers and the casuistry that each one presents. This would allow programmers to deploy quantum code without vendor-specific knowledge of the major providers, which would facilitate access and simplify the development of quantum applications.

Process simulation and techno-economic analysis of olive oil mill wastewater steam reforming

Olive oil production contributes to environmental deterioration, mainly due to the land spreading of the pollutant effluents. One solution to treat these liquid effluents (olive mill wastewater - OMWW) is the steam reforming (OMWWSR) reaction.In this work, the effects of the main parameters that affect the OMWWSR process were studied: composition of the effluent, total pressure, and temperature of the reformer; furthermore, several reactor configurations were simulated: traditional reactor (TR), autothermal reactor (ATR), sorption-enhanced reactor (SER), and sorption-enhanced autothermal reactor (SEATR). All reactor configurations treated an effluent flow rate of approximately 12 tons/h, which equals the quantity of OMWW produced by a big Portuguese olive oil producer company. In addition, energy integration and techno-economic analyses were elaborated to reveal which reactor configuration(s) presented the most attractive results. It was verified that the ATR and SER presented higher performances in terms of H2 production per kmol of OMWW fed and energy consumption per kmol of H2 produced. Finally, it was observed that the ATR achieved a net present value (NPV) that ranged from 7.2 to 9.2 M€ and payback times (PB) which ranged from 3 to 2 years. Regarding the SER configuration, the NPV and PB ranged from 4.7 to 12.2 M€ and 5-2 years, respectively.

Requirements practices and gaps when engineering human-centered Artificial Intelligence systems

Context:Engineering Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is a relatively new area with many challenges, unknowns, and limited proven best practices. Big companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple have provided a suite of recent guidelines to assist engineering teams in building human-centered AI systems. Objective:The practices currently adopted by practitioners for developing such systems, especially during Requirements Engineering (RE), are little studied and reported to date. Method:This paper presents the results of a survey conducted to understand current industry practices in RE for AI (RE4AI) and to determine which key human-centered AI guidelines should be followed. Our survey is based on mapping existing industrial guidelines, best practices, and efforts in the literature. Results:We surveyed 29 professionals and found most participants agreed that all the human-centered aspects we mapped should be addressed in RE. Further, we found that most participants were using UML or Microsoft Office to present requirements. Conclusion:We identify that most of the tools currently used are not equipped to manage AI-based software, and the use of UML and Office may pose issues with the quality of requirements captured for AI. Also, all human-centered practices mapped from the guidelines should be included in RE.

False Advertising

Have you ever come across the advertisement campaigns that these big companies nowadays run? Well, I think you might have. It’s easy to spot such advertisements once in a while nowadays. But what do you think about them? Are they genuinely doing it just to support themselves or to earn a huge amount of profit? Well, the answer to this could be two folds. These big firms might run these ad campaigns to spread awareness about their brand amongst the people or just to earn profit by increasing their presence in the people’s lives out there. Every business that focuses on maximizing its business or the scalability or the profit of the business is successful nowadays. And to reach that success, these big firms can go to any limits and my paper deals with one such scenario where the people have been harmed and have suffered a lot due to these ad campaigns. In my paper, we will discuss the famous advertisement campaign Pepsi ran in the year 1995 to win the Cola war with its opponent coca cola. The campaign was called “Drink Pepsi, get stuff.” This campaign was a huge example of false advertising as well as which raised the question of whether advertisements were an offer to the public or not.