This joint project aims to provide a comprehensive economic framework for the evaluation of hydropower and its use in order to assess hydropower operation, investments and its sustainability perspective at the regional level. The research will focus on the aspects of flexibility, uncertainty and the various perspectives of the involved stakeholders.
Swiss Hydropower (HP) is currently facing a wide range of challenges that have initiated a debate about future prospects and its role within the envisioned energy transition. Building on this debate, this paper provides an overview of the status and prospects of Swiss HP by identifying and evaluating the different drivers and uncertainties that Swiss HP faces. Based on a review and the perceptions held by some of the main Swiss HP stakeholders the two main topics that need to be addressed are the market driven impacts and the political, legal and social aspects. While the market dynamics cannot directly be influenced by Swiss companies or authorities, the regulatory framework can and needs to be adjusted. However, this requires a comprehensive stakeholder process and is at least a medium-term process.
Based on an exhaustive literature review, this paper presents an overview of the evolution of different methods useful for defining competitive intelligence needs, where the information helps the firm to justify its strategic decisions, the analysis of the early warning topics and the elements of the competitors' environment and the actors influencing the organization or its value system, and their categorization. These findings are part of a doctoral study aiming at identifying the usefulness of data coming from open intelligence. The researcher presents, on one hand, a categorization of competitive intelligence needs, and on the other hand, a synthesis model that assists managers in defining competitive intelligence needs. It also aims to show how to foster innovation.
Both scholars and practitioners agree that constructing a shared organizational identity is necessary for successful outcomes in mergers and acquisitions. Yet the process of constructing shared identity is not an easy path. We report findings of a longitudinal in-depth case study of merging Mexican subsidiaries- part of two European Multinational Corporations. The study took advantage of a rare opportunity that includes prior knowledge of the merger and permission to follow-up until post-merger integration concluded. Particularly, in the studied case, status differences between pre-merger organizations were removed, external boundaries were reinforced and new outgroups emerged, namely the Head Offices and Latin American divisions. Our study contributes to the M&A literature, to the stakeholder approach to organizational identity and to identity construction in nested organizations. We shed light on how intergroup dynamics change over time during interactions between internal and external stakeholders, and whose status changes in the post-merger organization. Based on these findings, we argue that considering both intragroup and intergroup dynamics can refine the concept of shared organizational identity. Intragroup dynamics refers to employees of the post-merger organization, and intergroup dynamics refers to outgroup - outside the post-merger organization. We coin a concept of an optimal shared identity, defined as the members’ shared belonging to the post-merger organization and to the Multinational Corporation (on the global or regional level) in the face of salient outgroups.
Patients suffering from diabetes often develop several comorbidities such as hypertension and dyslipidemia. The presence of the comorbidities leads to more complex patient profiles associated with specific patient treatments. In this paper we present a novel algorithm to help physicians, given a new case, in retrieving similar past patient cases. This novel algorithm is based on the bag-of-words (BoW) model to encode as features, the occurrence of each pre-computed cluster, for each patient, according to the approach of document classification. We then evaluate the algorithm on a real de-identified dataset of 3201 diabetic patients, demonstrating the advantage of our approach.
Au cours des 20 dernières années, la fonction commerciale des villes a considérablement évolué. Les consommateurs de produits ont développé leur consommation de services et plus récemment la consommation des espaces publics des centres-villes. Il s’agit donc de mieux comprendre cette évolution, ainsi que la transformation des facteurs de l’attractivité commerciale des centres-villes.
Purpose. The aim of this paper is to analyze growing importance of the state in the implementation of strategic solutions to stimulate holistic development in the tourism sector in Switzerland. Method. The research method is a qualitative analysis of source documents and data coming from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) as well as from the Swiss Tourist Federation, the Ministry of Sport and Tourism in the Republic of Poland, and the Polish Tourism Organization. Moreover, the comparative analysis of the websites from 49 Swiss and 16 regional and 50 local Polish tourism organizations was conducted. Findings. The paper presents the actual study of tourism policy implemented in Switzerland within the last 19 years. Moreover comparative analyses of strategic solutions implemented in Swiss and Polish tourism reveal important differences regarding the role of public-private partnership in tourism management and as well in the commercialization of tourism products. Research and conclusions limitations. Qualitative analyses refer exclusively to the comparison between Swiss and Polish tourism policy and the role of Swiss and Polish tourism organizations in the destination management. Practical implications. Swiss strategic solutions presented in the paper may constitute a solid benchmark for decision makers and governmental authorities dealing with support for the tourism development in Poland. Originality. The innovative solutions implemented in Swiss tourism are usually neglected in various analyses and comparative reports published in Poland.
