This paper empirically examines some environmental scanning practices of high, medium and low growth Australian manufacturing SMEs. Building on McMahon’s (2001) work, the study applies scanning related variables from Australia’s Business Longitudinal Survey to the three growth paths identified. The study finds significant differences between the scanning practices of SMEs from each of the growth paths, although not always in the direction predicted. However, upon closer examination, the findings appear to provide empirical support for much of the literature on the evolution of scanning practices in SMEs. Beyond supporting existing material, an important finding is that the evolution of scanning practices appear to be related to the level of managerial development the firm has achieved rather than simply the external environment as portrayed in much of the literature. Finally, implications for small business owners and areas for further research are provided. 2

The emerging multiple media portals accessed by a variety of terminals require semi- and fully automatic procedures for managing the material. The IMU trial system, developed in this work, automatizes parts of the news content acquirement and processing work of the portal web master. The IMU active proxy server extracts the metadata from news web sites and from the television news broadcasts through video analysis making an automatic classification and linking of related articles and TV clips possible. The deeply integrated material is partioned into news composites called channels, which can be personalised by the user. The automatically computed event and media calendar allows for a new type of integration of news and up-coming events. The news content is refined by setting up filters for monitoring of the business environment. Through our interfaces for PC, TV, WAP and MP3 terminals, the user accesses the same news content at work, at home in the living room and on the move. To balance the automatic procedures with journalistic judgement, we created web tools for human editors to control and override the automatic operations and for creating new content. The community feature enables groups to share news and to discuss topics internally. The trial including closely 400 users with PC, TV and WAP terminals showed a stable interest in the service. The typical user retrieved a few fresh articles including a TV clip at prime time in the evening. The television set user retrieved two times more material than the PC user, but proportionally less news. The most popular channels for the TV-user were TV programme schedules and TV clips. The community channels attracted the TV set users. Personalization was used scarcely and searches even more seldom. The interviews showed tha...

Abstract. R&D portfolio management is a critical task with which the majority of the large companies are confronted. Despite its wide implementation in companies there are no widely accepted and used methods to perform this task. Each company uses its own mix of various qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve its goal. The objective of this thesis is to explore the adequacy and the design issues to use a prediction market for supporting the R&D portfolio management process. We chose prediction markets to perform this task since their aggregation mechanisms and information discovery process seems to solve most of the current issues of the R&D portfolio management process.

R&D portfolio management is a critical task with which the majority of the large companies are confronted. Despite its wide implementation in companies, there are no widely accepted and used methods to perform this task. Each company uses its own mix of various qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve its goal. The objective of this thesis is to explore the adequacy to use a prediction market for supporting the R&D portfolio management process. We chose prediction markets to perform this task since their aggregation mechanisms and information discovery process seems to solve most of the current issues of the R&D portfolio management process. PREDICTION MARKETS AS AN INNOVATIVE WAY TO MANAGE R&D PORTFOLIOS 1

Globalization, the internationalization of markets, the knowledge economy, and e-business are among the interrelated phenomena whose emergence poses new challenges for the survival and adaptation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For the various public and private organizations such as government agencies, universities and consulting firms that constitute the development infrastructure for these enterprises, the issue that thus arises is the elaboration of policies, programs, and services that respond to the new competitive exigencies of SMEs in the changing business environment. Hence, it is essential to detect trends and understand strategic issues that stem from a global knowledge economy, that is, through business intelligence activities by which the economic, technological, and social environments of SMEs are scanned. This article proposes a conceptual and operational framework to this end. For analytical and operational purposes, these trends are grouped under four business intelligence themes as follows: a) the transformed management of the value chain and new organizational forms, b) information technologies, information systems, and e-business as sources of added value and vectors of competitiveness, c) the opportunity to develop new markets in a context of internationalization, and d) the

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Research Article Firms evolving in increasingly turbulent environments need to respond to market threats and opportunities with speed. At the same time, firms implement numerous information technologies (IT) in the hope of streamlining processes and providing managers with unfettered access to information from both within and outside the firm. While research shows how agility and IT contribute to firm performance, the relationship between these two constructs remains relatively unexplored. Using an electronic integration perspective, we develop a framework that addresses this issue. The framework suggests that IT applications affect the two components of agility (sensing and responding) through two types of integration (internal and external). The framework also explains the mediating roles of knowledge exploration, knowledge exploitation, and process coupling. Four propositions are developed and illustrated with different examples. Avenues for future research are developed.