The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and involved 43 federal laboratories, 51 industrial companies, and 428 scientists and engineers in these laboratories. In addition, the study also surveyed the technology transfer officers in the sample of federal laboratories.
The main findings from this study show that the successful laboratories are those in which senior management actively support cooperation with industry, with strong positive attitudes and actual incentives, and in which the scientific personnel exhibit entrepreneurial attributes and have positive attitudes towards commercialization. Also, successful laboratories are those in which the cooperating company supports commercialization and where the company's technical people perceive their counterparts in the federal laboratories as willing to take risks and able to deal with ambiguity.
The study also established that the incentives most likely to work in the effort to improve commercialization in the federal laboratory are those that create a supportive environment for entrepreneurs in the laboratories (as opposed to just offering financial incentives). Further, the study has found that technical capabilities of the laboratories and their attractiveness to industry are poor predictors of successful commercialization. Rather, it is not so much what the laboratory has to offer, but how the cooperation is carried out and managed that better explains the success of commercialization.
Finally, the study also found that the main reasons why industry and federal laboratories engage in cooperation (for example, access to unique technical resources) are different from the behavioral and organizational factors that impinge on successful commercialization.
For more information about this study, contact Professor Elie Geisler, Department of Management, College of Business, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, WI 53190; Phone: (414) 472-3971; Fax (414) 472-4863; E-mail: geislere@uwwvax.uww.edu
The managers reported that industrial mathematicians are highly valued as problem-solvers and systems thinkers. Recent mathematics graduates working in industry thought that U.S. universities successfully taught many of the technical skills necessary for an industrial environment. However, both graduates and managers called for improvements in education in such areas as computation, modeling, interdisciplinary work and communication skills.
"We set out to explore the roles of mathematics outside academia, to understand the qualities valued in nonacademic mathematicians, and to examine how nonacademic mathematicians and their managers view graduate education. Documenting the benefits of mathematics to business and industry was a welcome result of the MII survey," says Margaret Wright, SIAM president and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
"What we have learned about the work place for non-academic mathematicians can help enhance education and industry-university connections," says James M. Crowley, SIAM executive director. "The Society will now work with universities and industry to implement the report's suggestions."
The database shows that about 52 percent of the students were "traditional" students. That is, they were granted degrees from the school where they matriculated as freshmen and had spent uninterrupted years of full-time study. The remaining students did some or all of the following: transferred among institutions, attended part-time, or were intermittent (i.e., they spent at least one term away from their home campus). The attendance patterns of the students varied by area of study. Among the sciences, the percentage of traditional students was the highest in life and physical sciences, with 66 percent. This percentage was the lowest for mathematics and computer science, at 48 percent. The mathematics and computer science domain also had the largest share of part-time students: 24 percent.
With the data provided by this database, researchers can probe such questions as:
Researchers and investigators can mine this new database for the wealth of information it contains about the class of '91 and to consider what that information implies about college students today.
1) Technology/Methods: The greatest operations opportunity today is in either the use of technology or continuous improvement to improve methods. Opportunities for the use of technology include computerized maintenance management systems, manufacturing execution systems, bar coding, warehouse management systems, etc. Opportunities for continuous improvement include preventive/ predictive maintenance, planning and scheduling maintenance operations, simplified work flow, crossdocking, improved inventory management, paper flow simplification, outsource, ergonomics and more.
2) Facilities/Space Utilization: The capacity of facilities and the flow through these facilities, be they production operations, maintenance storeroom, raw material storage, work-in-process storage, finished goods storage or distribution, are all viewed as offering tremendous opportunities for improvement. Facility consolidation, contraction and expansion are all mentioned as having significant potential depending upon the circumstances.
3) Strategic Issues: The strategic topics of vision, mission, organizational alignment, capacity, breadth of product offerings, flexibility, modularity, measurement and reporting systems, internal benchmarking and the overall process for creating and sustaining peak performance are ranked very high as offering major opportunities for improvement.
4) Response Time: The topic of speed and reaction time throughout an organization is seen as a tremendous opportunity for improvement. Production lead times, purchasing lead times, set-up times, new product-to-market lead times, customer response times, order fill response times and in-transit times are all viewed as critical in today's fast-paced environment.
5) People/Team Development: No matter which portion of an operation is visited, people/team development issues are hot. In maintenance, the topics are craft skill development, operator-based maintenance and teams for continuous improvement. Throughout production and distribution, the topics of employee involvement, empowerment, leadership, communications, rewards and recognition and the teaming process are tabled as having the greatest opportunity in harnessing the energy of change that is occurring through our operations.
6) Customer Service: Similar to all the other issues, there is nowhere in the organization that customer service is not viewed as critical. Both internal customer service and external customer service are viewed as a tremendous opportunity for improvement. Be it a maintenance manager talking about equipment uptime, a production manager discussing meeting customer needs, or a distribution manager discussing order fill rates, all agree that customer service is a key topic for operational success.
7) Quality: Product quality and information quality are viewed as equally critical success factors across all operational sectors. The need for ISO 9000/QS 9000 certification and the follow through to exceed customer expectations is a mandate that has been accepted as a given.
8) Cost Reduction: With a keen sense of reality and the strong awareness of people involvement, all operational elements are working on doing more with less. The simplification, streamlining and focusing of resources to get the job done at a minimal cost are seen by most not as something that has been done, but something that needs to be done.
9) Inventory Reduction: Although much progress has been made, there exists very little acceptance of current inventory levels. Operations management believes that major opportunities still exist to reduce inventories while still achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.
10) Productivity: Surprisingly, most operations management still believes we have a lot of potential remaining in improving productivity. Both direct labor and indirect labor productivity are highlighted. The focus of these productivity enhancements are viewed as coming from unleashing the power of the people and allowing people a greater opportunity in designing their work procedures, as opposed to the more traditional top-down productivity enhancements.
Detailed monographs are available at no charge from Tompkins Associates, Inc. in each of the practice areas. To receive these free monographs, contact: Information Services, Tompkins Associates, Inc., 2809 Millbrook Road, Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27604, Phone: (919)876-3667, Fax: (919) 872-9666.
Click here to view a bar chart of the "top ten operations opportunities."
General Magic Inc. is following the same philosophy as Sun in anticipating greater use of the Internet with PCs by publishing specifications for adding interactive graphics to the WWW. Plans are also in the works for General Magic to load its software on hand-held phones, pocket-sized communicators and PCs.
In 1994 alone, the use of GIDEP's database saved the government and industry a combined $120 million.
But complaints have risen that suggest gathering information by way of GIDEP is a difficult process. Users have noted that GIDEP lacks a data-analysis means of fusing and integrating information/data from the various categories it maintains so that, from study and statistical summaries, more knowledge and understanding about near and long-term government and industry equipment and service requirements can be ascertained and better understood.
This leaves GIDEP standing poised for a follow-up phase - a multi-integration era - with information production pointing in new directions that could lead to a more interdisciplinary government/industry two-way street environment. But it's up to the government and GIDEP's users to make this happen.
Asia's New High-Tech Competitors, published by the Division of Science Resources Studies (SRS), makes these predictions and identifies South Korea and Taiwan as the countries that may become the next "Japans" in terms of high technology industrialization.
Nine Asian nations are examined in the report and separated into three economic tiers:
South Korea and Taiwan are predicted to become even stronger contenders in the high-tech marketplace, where the United States has long been the leader. Also, Malaysia had strong performances in parts of its economy and is therefore believed to be a contender as the next Asian NIE.
According to the report, a growing Asian economy will also bring new business and research opportunities for U.S. high-tech industries and the science and technology community. These opportunities will come in the form of larger markets for goods and services and new collaborators in scientific and technological research.
According to the survey, 30 percent of controllers report that their companies' hardware/software implementation projects were over budget by an average of 23 percent.
Keeping MIS projects on time was another challenge for controllers. Forty percent of survey respondents say that projects were completed behind schedule by an average of six months and only 1 percent of controllers surveyed said projects were completed early.
What areas of MIS can look forward to being outsourced over the next two years? Controllers ranked maintenance first, applications second, communications networks third, and mainframes fourth. In addition, nearly three quarters (74 percent) of the controllers say they are satisfied with the outsourced MIS services.
As usual, about 80 percent of all fire deaths occurred in the home. The 1994 home fire death toll of 3,425 represented a 7.9 percent decline from the year before and was also the lowest level ever recorded by NFPA, down 41.6 percent since 1977. Residential properties other than homes (e.g., hotels and motels, dormitories, rooming or boarding homes) saw their fire death toll drop by 61.9 percent in 1994 to a total of 40, the lowest total ever recorded in that category.
Non-residential structures (e.g., stores, offices, industry, commercial properties, schools, health care facilities) collectively accounted for 125 civilian fire deaths in 1994, a decline of 19.4 percent from the year before and the lowest total ever recorded in that category. Deaths in vehicle fires represented a notable counter-trend, increasing 5.9 percent in 1994 to a total of 630, with most of those involving automobiles.
INFORMS member John R. Hall Jr., NFPA assistant vice president for fire analysis and research, says the large 1994 drop in fire deaths is an encouraging sign. "Every year we learn more about how and why fatal fires occur, and every year more people take those lessons and apply them successfully to their own lives."
Overall, U.S. fire departments responded to 2,054,500 fires in 1994, an increase of 5.2 percent from the previous year. Reported property damage totaled $8,151,000,000, a 4.6 percent decrease from 1993 even before accounting for inflation. Since the late 1980s, U.S. property damage due to fire has been strongly influenced by the presence or absence of very large fires.
Fire safety initiatives must be targeted where the need is greatest, and that continues to be the home, says Hall. NFPA advocates greatly expanded public fire safety education efforts to reach all U.S. homes with essential fire prevention and protection messages.
Plan 9 is not designed to compete with Unix or Windows; rather it is a small, powerful system designed to work in today's distributed, networked computing world. The operating system is expected to be especially useful in a small segment of the industry where many proprietary systems exist today.
The Plan 9 operating system is a distributed system. In its most general configuration it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and other servers that provide faster central processing units, user authentication and network gateways.