Hasil untuk "Small and medium-sized businesses, artisans, handicrafts, trades"

Samta P. Pandya

This article reports on a survey of artistic entrepreneurs of Indian classical dance companies and studios (ICDC&S) in the diaspora and their clientele. Results suggested that diaspora ICDC&S are fairly sustainable businesses. Artistic entrepreneurs reported good self-efficacy in diaspora engagements, with variations due to gender, dance style, and entrepreneurial experience. The majority of ICDC&S clients reported high pro-cultural attitudes, a fair propensity to explore and commit to one’s ethnic group, and high ideal-type value orientations. Diaspora ICDC&S are emerging sustainable business models that connect the artistic worlds to market realities and deploy culture/values to strategically carve a space within complex globalized landscapes.

Iksuk Kim, Muhammad Mollah, Freddy Lee et al.

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the strategic priorities of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in the contexts of the United States, Korea and Bangladesh. Specifically, it examines how entrepreneurs can integrate these priorities into business operations to drive long-term success, including sustainable revenue growth and enhanced brand perception.Design/methodology/approachUsing a ranked-order approach, this study analyzed a sample of 512 responses from the United States (n = 107), Korea (n = 292) and Bangladesh (n = 113) to prioritize ESG factors for each country. We also conducted a one-way ANOVA to measure how individuals ranked ESG by level of importance in three countries.FindingsThe findings of this study reveal that ESG should be tailored to specific business contexts within each country rather than treated as a universal global standard. More specifically, in the United States, entrepreneurs place significant emphasis on all three ESG dimensions – environmental, social and governance. In contrast, entrepreneurs in Korea prioritize governance factors over social and environmental considerations. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, the focus is primarily on environmental factors.Originality/valueThis study serves as an eye-opener for entrepreneurs in the United States, Korea and Bangladesh, highlighting where they should focus their efforts when considering ESG factors. It is also the first comparative analysis of ESG priorities across developed and developing countries.

Estibalitz Ruiz Irusta, Juan M. Morales

Peer-to-peer energy trading platforms enable direct electricity exchanges between peers who belong to the same energy community. In a semi-decentralized system, a community manager adheres to grid restrictions while optimizing social welfare. However, with no further supervision, some peers can be discriminated against from participating in the electricity trades. To solve this issue, this paper proposes an optimization-based mechanism to enable distributionally fair peer-to-peer electricity trading. For the implementation of our mechanism, peers are grouped by energy poverty level. The proposed model aims to redistribute the electricity trades to minimize the maximum Wasserstein distance among the transaction distributions linked to the groups while limiting the sacrifice level with a predefined parameter. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal using the IEEE 33-bus distribution grid, simulating an energy community with 1600 peers. Results indicate that up to 70.1% of unfairness can be eliminated by using our proposed model, even achieving a full elimination when including a non-profit community photovoltaic plant.

M. Mavin De Silva, Callie Clark, Tadachika Nakayama et al.

Understanding the economic impacts of the placement of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) is crucial for planning infrastructure systems that benefit the broader community. Theoretical models have been used to predict human behavior during charging events, however, these models have often neglected the complexity of trip patterns, and have underestimated the real-world impacts of such infrastructure on the local economy. In this paper, we design a quasi-experiment using mobile phone GPS location and EVCS deployment history data to analyze the causal impact of EVCS placement on visitation patterns to businesses. More specifically, we leverage the staggered placement of EVCSs in New York City and California Bay Area to match treated and control businesses that share similar characteristics including the business sector, location, and pre-treatment visitation count. By comparing three alternative matching strategies, we show that staggered adoption avoids selecting controls from non-treated clusters, and yields greater spatial overlap in dense urban areas. We find that EVCS installations significantly increase customer traffic, with effects concentrated in recreational venues in New York City and routine destinations such as groceries, pharmacies, and cafes in California Bay Area. Our results suggest that the economic spillovers of EVCSs vary across urban contexts and highlight the effectiveness of leveraging the staggered nature of adoption timings for evaluating infrastructure impacts in heterogeneous urban environments.

Olaf Kuhlke, Andrew Taylor

Georges Dupret, Konstantin Sozinov, Carmen Barcena Gonzalez et al.

Making ideal decisions as a product leader in a web-facing company is extremely difficult. In addition to navigating the ambiguity of customer satisfaction and achieving business goals, one must also pave a path forward for ones' products and services to remain relevant, desirable, and profitable. Data and experimentation to test product hypotheses are key to informing product decisions. Online controlled experiments by A/B testing may provide the best data to support such decisions with high confidence, but can be time-consuming and expensive, especially when one wants to understand impact to key business metrics such as retention or long-term value. Offline experimentation allows one to rapidly iterate and test, but often cannot provide the same level of confidence, and cannot easily shine a light on impact on business metrics. We introduce a novel, lightweight, and flexible approach to investigating hypotheses, called scenario analysis, that aims to support product leaders' decisions using data about users and estimates of business metrics. Its strengths are that it can provide guidance on trade-offs that are incurred by growing or shifting consumption, estimate trends in long-term outcomes like retention and other important business metrics, and can generate hypotheses about relationships between metrics at scale.

Chikelue Chris Akabuike

This study addresses the experiences of undergraduate entrepreneurs, including what motivates them, their challenges, and how they navigate both entrepreneurial activities and academic work. Using a snowball approach, a qualitative research design involving fifteen purposively selected respondents from among the sculpture students of the Nsukka Art School was used as a case study. Data collection and analysis were conducted using a semi-structured interview and a thematic analysis approach, respectively. Findings show that respondents are actively involved in entrepreneurial deeds within multiple non-sculpture related fields such as painting, graphic, communication design, T-shirt printing, portrait making, and utility wood sculptures. They are motivated by the quest to address personal financial constraints. Such entrepreneurial quests, however, expose them to specialization and operational, marketing, and managerial challenges. It is recommended that policymakers in academia, industry, and government work together toward repositioning student entrepreneurs by creating the enabling environment for economic growth. While a further study is needed to understand how undergraduates navigate their managerial challenges, the nuanced performance and difference in age and gender is noteworthy.

Sara Malou Strandvad

The term cultural entrepreneurship is increasingly used in academic research to address the intersection of business developments and creative work. However, the concept itself is disputed. Unpacking varying definitions of the term, this article revisits literature on the topic, searching for the figures of the cultural entrepreneur that scholars create. The article suggests that the literature is dominated by hero figures, who are based on retrospective analyses of successful individuals, and tragic hero figures, who summarize the situation for most self-employed creatives, establishing a bleak outlook. As an alternative, the article suggests seeing cultural entrepreneurs as catalyst figures.

Ian W. Gray, Jack Cable, Benjamin Brown et al.

Ransomware operations have evolved from relatively unsophisticated threat actors into highly coordinated cybercrime syndicates that regularly extort millions of dollars in a single attack. Despite dominating headlines and crippling businesses across the globe, there is relatively little in-depth research into the modern structure and economics of ransomware operations. In this paper, we leverage leaked chat messages to provide an in-depth empirical analysis of Conti, one of the largest ransomware groups. By analyzing these chat messages, we construct a picture of Conti's operations as a highly-profitable business, from profit structures to employee recruitment and roles. We present novel methodologies to trace ransom payments, identifying over $80 million in likely ransom payments to Conti and its predecessor -- over five times as much as in previous public datasets. As part of our work, we publish a dataset of 666 labeled Bitcoin addresses related to Conti and an additional 75 Bitcoin addresses of likely ransom payments. Future work can leverage this case study to more effectively trace -- and ultimately counteract -- ransomware activity.

Ben Johnsrude

We note that the subpolynomial factor for the $\ell^qL^p$ small cap decoupling constants for the truncated parabola $\mathbb{P}^1=\{(t,t^2):|t|\leq 1\}$ may be controlled by a suitable power of $\log R$. This is achieved by considering a suitable amplitude-dependent wave envelope estimate, as was introduced in a recent paper of Guth and Maldague to demonstrate a small cap decoupling for the $(2+1)$ cone; we demonstrate that the version for $\mathbb{P}^1$ may be taken with a loss controlled by a power of $\log R$ as well.

Muhammad Arslan, Christophe Cruz

In this study, we compared the performance of four different methods for multi label text classification using a specific imbalanced business dataset. The four methods we evaluated were fine tuned BERT, Binary Relevance, Classifier Chains, and Label Powerset. The results show that fine tuned BERT outperforms the other three methods by a significant margin, achieving high values of accuracy, F1 Score, Precision, and Recall. Binary Relevance also performs well on this dataset, while Classifier Chains and Label Powerset demonstrate relatively poor performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of fine tuned BERT for multi label text classification tasks, and suggest that it may be a useful tool for businesses seeking to analyze complex and multifaceted texts.

José dos Santos, Rodney Duffett

Social media has facilitated interaction between businesses and consumers, and consequently, has seen rapid growth as a communication channel by a number of smaller retailers in South Africa. Hence, the primary research objective of this study is to explore social media usage as a marketing communication strategy by independent food retailer small to medium enterprises (SMEs). The study used a qualitative data collection strategy and in-depth interviews were conducted among eleven independent food retailer SMEs in South Africa. The study revealed that the level of social media activity by the respondent retailers was influenced by enabling factors such as cost effectiveness, accessibility, reach and relationship building, whereas perceived risk and resources such as time, knowledge and human resources were inhibiting factors. The research contributes to the available literature exploring social media usage as customer contact points for promotional purposes, as well as provides insight for further studies on the use of social media conduits by independent food retailer SMEs or similar businesses in a developing country.

Sarah Archino, Marta Lanier, Ross McClain

The dominance of New Venture Creation and Skills for Transitioning models has produced scholarship focusing on the impact of entrepreneurial pedagogy on graduates who pursue careers within the arts. This paper shares a liberal arts approach, positioning arts as a central component in the creation of an entrepreneurial mindset with benefits for students throughout campus. Shifting our department to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset through arts-based experiential education, we have created an alternate approach that can serve those who wish to become professional artists, but also provides value for the majority of our students who will not remain in the arts.

Marco A. S. Netto, Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Eduardo R. Rodrigues et al.

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.

Jack Spielberg

Categories of paths are a generalization of several kinds of oriented discrete data that have been used to construct $C^*$-algebras. The techniques introduced to study these constructions apply almost verbatim to the more general situation of left cancellative small categories. We develop this theory and derive the structure of the $C^*$-algebras in the most general situation. We analyze the regular representation, and the Wiener-Hopf algebra in the case of a subcategory of a groupoid.

Patrick Kelsey

Book review of Arts Management, an Entrepreneurial Approach, by Carla Walter

D. Tiziani, M. Garczarczyk, L. Oakes et al.

An important aspect of the calibration of the Cherenkov Telescope Array is the pointing, which enables an exact alignment of each telescope and therefore allows to transform a position in the sky to a point in the plane of the Cherenkov camera and vice versa. The favoured approach for the pointing calibration of the medium size telescopes (MST) is the installation of an optical CCD-camera in the dish of the telescope that captures the position of the Cherenkov camera and of the stars in the night sky simultaneously during data taking. The adaption of this approach is presented in this proceeding.

A. Belenky, L. Egorova

The paper presents two new approaches to modeling the interaction of small and medium pricetaking traders with a stock exchange. In the framework of these approaches, the traders can form and manage their portfolios of financial instruments traded on a stock exchange with the use of linear, integer, and mixed programming techniques. Unlike previous authors publications on the subject, besides standard securities, the present publication considers derivative financial instruments such as futures and options contracts.

Saiqa Aleem, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Recently, information systems like ERP, CRM and WFM record different business events or activities in a log named as event log. Process mining aims at extracting information from event logs to capture business process as it is being executed. Process mining is an important learning task based on captured processes. In order to be competent organizations in the business world; they have to adjust their business process along with the changing environment. Sometimes a change in the business process implies a change into the whole system. Process mining allows for the automated discovery of process models from event logs. Process mining techniques has the ability to support automatically business process (re)design. Typically, these techniques discover a concrete workflow model and all possible processes registered in a given events log. In this paper, detailed comparison among process mining methods used in the business process mining and differences in their approaches have been provided.