Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,452
result(s) for
"Modularity (Engineering)"
Sort by:
Thirty-fourth annual administrative law issue: Modular environmental regulation
This Article proposes a \"modular\" conception of environmental regulation and natural resource management as an alternative to traditional approaches. Under traditional approaches, agencies tend to operate independently, and often at cross-purposes, using relatively inflexible regulatory tools, without significant stakeholder input, and without institutional mechanisms capable of adapting to changing conditions over time. Modularity, by contrast, is characterized by a high degree of flexible coordination across government agencies as well as between public agencies and private actors; governance structures in which form follows function; a problem-solving orientation that requires flexibility; and reliance on a mix of formal and informal tools of implementation, including both traditional regulation and contract-like agreements. The Article frames the enterprise of environmental regulation and resource management as an exercise in designing governance institutions capable of managing multiple and seemingly incompatible demands over the long term. This approach departs from the traditional legal framing of such environmental conflicts as shorter-term and zero-sum questions of jurisdiction, authority, entitlement, and prohibition.
To illustrate modularity, the Article presents a detailed case study of the CalFed Bay-Delta Program, a multiagency effort to address competing demands on the water resources in the San Francisco Bay Delta. The story of CalFed illustrates many features of the modular ideal identified in the Article, and shows concretely how such an approach can achieve both procedural and substantive policy innovation while also producing measurable environmental improvements on the ground. The case study anchors the elaboration of the modular conception and its constituent elements presented in the latter part of the Article. Finally, the Article analyzes why the modular ideal is so hard to achieve in practice, yet it concludes that there is no alternative to moving toward modularity given the complex nature of the environmental and natural resource problems that we face.
Journal Article
Service Modularity and Architecture
Covers -- Editorial board -- Service modularity andarchitecture - an overview and research agenda -- Evolution of modularity literature: a 25-year bibliometric analysis -- What professionals consider when designing a modular service architecture? -- Exploring modularity in services: cases from tourism -- Modularizing specialized hospital services.
eBook
Design Rules, Volume 1
We live in a dynamic economic and commerical world, surrounded by objects of remarkable complexity and power.In many industries, changes in products and technologies have brought with them new kinds of firms and forms of organization.
eBook
Flexibility in Engineering Design
Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects--such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals--must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the \"flaw of averages,\" the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.
eBook
Innovation and competition in complex environments
The paper aims to shed light on the relation between technological research, competition and market dynamics, focussing on the role of product modularity. This relation is analysed via qualitative simulation modelling using a simple agent-based model. We define an economic system in which firms compete on the quality characteristics of a certain complex good, in a market where consumers have shown preferences for them. Firms are conceived as bounded rational agents that explore complex product technologies in order to improve their fitness in relation to the selection environment (i.e. the consumers' evaluation of the characteristics of the final good). The architecture of the good produced in the system is characterised by different degrees of modularity (i.e. the lower the correlations between the contributions of the different product components to the fnal product fitness, the simpler the good's technology and the higher the degree of modularity). On the other hand, the impact of product modularity on industrial dynamics is analysed using a set of quite homogeneous firms.
First, the model yields highly differentiated dynamics for firms that start from similar initial conditions, pointing to the importance of their research strategies. Second, the dynamic patterns obtained show that firms may easily end up in technological lock-in in spite of initial good performance, suggesting that path-dependence could be broken. Third, modularity impinges directly upon market results: a decrease in modularity, by increasing the difficulty in searching the complex technology, selects a limited number of firms, thus determining concentration in market shares. Finally, the industrial dynamics are influenced by the evolution of the quality of the fnal good.
Journal Article
Innovation policy in services: The development of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in Finland
This paper starts from the observation that policy-oriented discussion and policy-oriented studies in the sector of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) have been rare despite the central role that this sector has been argued to play in innovation. Finland is one country where activities for the development of KIBS have recently been initiated both at the national and the regional level. This paper describes and analyses these activities. National and regional KIBS studies form an important starting point in all of them. In the practical conclusions, a common feature is the emphasis on the simultaneous development of both the demand and supply sides. The need to link KIBS to innovation systems has been identified particularly at the regional level.
Journal Article