1,720,974 research outputs found
Distinguishing the innovation behaviour of micro, small and medium food enterprises
No full textThe European economy, and particularly the food sector, is characterised by SMEs. Networking represents for SMEs an opportunity to meet their needs in terms of know-how, and technological and financial resources with the main purpose of fostering innovation and facing global competition. Most scientific studies investigating networking for innovation focus on SMEs as a whole without exploring possible differences between SMEs. An important question to be posed is whether the firms within groups of SMEs behave the same in terms of innovation. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether different ‘innovation profiles’ of Italian food SMEs can be distinguished and to identify the structural factors associated with different profiles, with particular attention to size and networking. The methodology consists of a cluster analysis on data obtained by standardized on-line questionnaires compiled by Italian agri-food SMEs. Moreover, besides the identification of possible heterogeneity within the SME group with regard to innovation behaviour, the paper presents further value by providing useful information on surveyed Italian food SMEs in terms of firm structure and innovation
The Future of Agriculture within its Competition with Urban Sprawl
No full textThe paper analyzes the main landscape resources that characterize periurban land, the productive and social-economic processes involved, and the consequent territorial and landscape repercussions. This study therefore focuses on critical aspects of agricultural areas on the urban fringe. This kind of area is increasingly assigned the essential function of improving the quality of life of urban populations, given the various environmental and social roles that agriculture has always played and continues to do so, albeit in different ways depending on specific local conditions, in addition to its purely productive roles.
Moreover, many of the issues examined in the study for what concerns suburban areas are no longer a prerogative of periurban spaces and also extend to several rural situations with a low development density, where new dynamic and modestly-sized agricultural landscapes are arranged like tiles over the pre-existent rural - agricultural frame.
Some of the instruments needed to innovate and evolve the current approach to planning are not always applied systematically within an organised model for the planning of periurban spaces, and not always duly supported by economic programming tools. These considerations therefore highlight the strategic and fundamental role of integration between spatial and agricultural economic planning policies and instruments.
The paper also considers the analytical aspects useful for characterising some of the significant processes undergone in periurban areas. Data on land use, demography, the built-up system and town planning zoning of a study area is used. The processing performed demonstrated that the integrated analysis of developed land and population density variables offers a highly accurate description of development arrangements and their evolution, contributing to providing both qualitative and quantitative indications useful for measuring the level of efficiency of development arrangements and the degree of alteration of the landscape matrix
The Analysis of Rural Land Consumption through Areal Sampling Techniques
No full textThe present paper discusses the initial results of a broader research project, which is still in progress, aimed at developing a methodological approach for the analysis of land resources. The work has been inspired by the ever greater emphasis being placed, within land management and economic planning policy-making, on evaluating changes in the main landscape systems. The general aim of the research project is to work out a sampling methodology that can be applied to different territorial contexts and over various survey time intervals. This paper describes the principal steps in the development of an inferential statistical process, based on a stratified landscape sampling design of a 800 km2 study area located in the province of Bologna. The purpose is to assess the changes in land-use patterns and in the built environment that have occurred between the Second World War and today. The developed methodology, calibrated with reference to the built-up system, was used to extract and analyze a pilot sample of survey areas on the basis of specific statistical criteria. The general validity of the developed methodology means it can be applied to a variety of study areas and time intervals
Assessment of Energy Chains for Distributed Generation: Agricultural and Thermoeconomic Analyses within Emilia-Romagna Region
No full textThe process which includes production, collection, carriage and transformation of biomass into renewable fuels and then into energy (both electrical and thermal) involves a large number of decisions to select the most efficient chain. In this paper, the contribution margin of four different energy chains is evaluated both in terms of profits and energy gain per unit of cultivated surface. Four widely cultivated crops in Europe (corn, rapeseed, soybean and sunflower) are considered as feedstock. Four technologies are taken into consideration as conversion plants: (i) anaerobic digestion with internal combustion engines, (ii) direct combustion with Organic Rankine Cycle, (iii) gasification with internal combustion engines, and (iv) straight vegetable oil combustion within internal combustion engines
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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