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Corporate entrepreneurship in the public sector: exploring the peculiarities of public enterprises
(2021)
Entrepreneurship is predominantly treated as a private-sector phenomenon and consequently its increasing importance in the public sector goes largely unremarked. That impedes the research field of entrepreneurship being capable of spanning multiple sectors. Accordingly, recent research calls for the study of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) as it manifests in the public sector where it can be labeled public entrepreneurship (PE). This dissertation considers government an essential entrepreneurial actor and is led by the central research question: What are the peculiarities of the public sector and how do they impact public enterprises’ entrepreneurial orientation (EO)?
Accordingly, this dissertation includes three studies focusing on public enterprises. Two of the studies set the scope of this thesis by investigating a specific type of organization in a specific context—German majority-government-owned energy suppliers. These enterprises operate in a liberalized market experiencing environmental uncertainties like competitiveness and business transformation.
The aims and results of the studies included in this dissertation can be summarized as follows: The systematic literature review illuminates the stimuli of and barriers to entrepreneurial activities in public enterprises and the potential outcomes of such activities discussed so far. The review reveals that research on EO has tended to focus on the private sector and consequently that barriers to and outcomes of entrepreneurial activities in the public sector remain under-researched. Building on these findings, the qualitative study focuses on the interrelated barriers affecting entrepreneurship in public enterprises and the outcomes of entrepreneurial activities being inhibited. The study adopts an explorative comparative causal mapping approach to address the above-mentioned research goal and the lack of clarity around how barriers identified in the public sphere are interrelated. Furthermore, the study bases its investigation on the different business segments of sales (competitive market) and the distribution grid (natural monopoly) to account for recent calls for fine-grained research on PE. Results were compared with prior findings in the public and private sector. That comparison indicates that the barriers revealed align with aspects discussed in prior research findings relating to both sectors. Examples include barriers associated with the external environment such as legal constraints and barriers originating from within the organization such as employee behavior linked to a value system that hampers entrepreneurial action. However, the most important finding is that a public enterprise’s supervisory board can hinder its progress, a finding running counter to those of previous private-sector research and one that underscores the widespread prejudice that the involvement of a public shareholder and its nominated board of directors has a negative effect on EO. The third study is quantitative (data collection via a questionnaire) and builds on both its predecessors to examine the little understood topic of board behavior and public enterprises’ social orientation as predictors of EO. The study’s results indicate that social orientation represses EO, whereas board strategy control (BSC) does not seem to predict EO. Regarding BSC, we find that the local government owners in our sample are less involved in BSC. The third study also examines board networking and finds its relationship with EO depends on the ownership structure of the public-sector organization. An important finding is that minority shareholders, such as majority privately-owned enterprises and hub firms, repress EO when engaging in board networking.
In summary, this doctoral thesis contributes to the under-researched topic of CE in the public sector. It investigates the peculiarities of this sector by focusing on the supervisory board and social oriented activities and their impact on the enterprise’s EO in the quantitative study. The thesis addresses institutional questions regarding ownership and the last study in particular contributes to expanding resource dependence theory, and invites a nuanced perspective: The original perspective suggests that interorganizational arrangements like interfirm network ties and equity holdings reduce external resource dependency and consequently improve firm performance. The findings within this thesis expose resource delivery to potential contrary effects to extend the understanding of interorganizational action with important implications for practice.
After more than three decades of electronic design automation, most layouts for analog integrated circuits are still handcrafted in a laborious manual fashion today. This book presents Self-organized Wiring and Arrangement of Responsive Modules (SWARM), a novel interdisciplinary methodology addressing the design problem with a decentralized multi-agent system. Its basic approach, similar to the roundup of a sheep herd, is to let autonomous layout modules interact with each other inside a successively tightened layout zone. Considering various principles of self-organization, remarkable overall solutions can result from the individual, local, selfish actions of the modules. Displaying this fascinating phenomenon of emergence, examples demonstrate SWARM’s suitability for floorplanning purposes and its application to practical place-and-route problems. From an academic point of view, SWARM combines the strengths of procedural generators with the assets of optimization algorithms, thus paving the way for a new automation paradigm called bottom-up meets top-down.
After more than three decades of electronic design automation, most layouts for analog integrated circuits are still handcrafted in a laborious manual fashion today. Obverse to the highly automated synthesis tools in the digital domain (coping with the quantitative difficulty of packing more and more components onto a single chip – a desire well known as More Moore), analog layout automation struggles with the many diverse and heavily correlated functional requirements that turn the analog design problem into a More than Moore challenge. Facing this qualitative complexity, seasoned layout engineers rely on their comprehensive expert knowledge to consider all design constraints that uncompromisingly need to be satisfied. This usually involves both formally specified and nonformally communicated pieces of expert knowledge, which entails an explicit and implicit consideration of design constraints, respectively.
Existing automation approaches can be basically divided into optimization algorithms (where constraint consideration occurs explicitly) and procedural generators (where constraints can only be taken into account implicitly). As investigated in this thesis, these two automation strategies follow two fundamentally different paradigms denoted as top-down automation and bottom-up automation. The major trait of top-down automation is that it requires a thorough formalization of the problem to enable a self-intelligent solution finding, whereas a bottom-up automatism –controlled by parameters– merely reproduces solutions that have been preconceived by a layout expert in advance. Since the strengths of one paradigm may compensate the weaknesses of the other, it is assumed that a combination of both paradigms –called bottom-up meets top-down– has much more potential to tackle the analog design problem in its entirety than either optimization-based or generator-based approaches alone.
Against this background, the thesis at hand presents Self-organized Wiring and Arrangement of Responsive Modules (SWARM), an interdisciplinary methodology addressing the design problem with a decentralized multi-agent system. Its basic principle, similar to the roundup of a sheep herd, is to let responsive mobile layout modules (implemented as context-aware procedural generators) interact with each other inside a user-defined layout zone. Each module is allowed to autonomously move, rotate and deform itself, while a supervising control organ successively tightens the layout zone to steer the interaction towards increasingly compact (and constraint compliant) layout arrangements. Considering various principles of self-organization and incorporating ideas from existing decentralized systems, SWARM is able to evoke the phenomenon of emergence: although each module only has a limited viewpoint and selfishly pursues its personal objectives, remarkable overall solutions can emerge on the global scale.
Several examples exhibit this emergent behavior in SWARM, and it is particularly interesting that even optimal solutions can arise from the module interaction. Further examples demonstrate SWARM’s suitability for floorplanning purposes and its application to practical place-and-route problems. The latter illustrates how the interacting modules take care of their respective design requirements implicitly (i.e., bottom-up) while simultaneously paying respect to high level constraints (such as the layout outline imposed top-down by the supervising control organ). Experimental results show that SWARM can outperform optimization algorithms and procedural generators both in terms of layout quality and design productivity. From an academic point of view, SWARM’s grand achievement is to tap fertile virgin soil for future works on novel bottom-up meets top-down automatisms. These may one day be the key to close the automation gap in analog layout design.
Service robots need to be aware of persons in their vicinity in order to interact with them. People tracking enables the robot to perceive persons by fusing the information of several sensors. Most robots rely on laser range scanners and RGB cameras for this task. The thesis focuses on the detection and tracking of heads. This allows the robot to establish eye contact, which makes interactions feel more natural.
Developing a fast and reliable pose invariant head detector is challenging. The head detector that is proposed in this thesis works well on frontal heads, but is not fully pose-invariant. This thesis further explores adaptive tracking to keep track of heads that do not face the robot. Finally, head detector and adaptive tracker are combined within a new people tracking framework and experiments show its effectiveness compared to a state-of the-art system.
Reconstructing 3D face shape from a single 2D photograph as well as from video is an inherently ill-posed problem with many ambiguities. One way to solve some of the ambiguities is using a 3D face model to aid the task. 3D morphable face models (3DMMs) are amongst the state of the art methods for 3D face reconstruction, or so called 3D model fitting. However, current existing methods have severe limitations, and most of them have not been trialled on in-the-wild data. Current analysis-by- synthesis methods form complex non linear optimisation processes, and optimisers often get stuck in local optima. Further, most existing methods are slow, requiring in the order of minutes to process one photograph.
This thesis presents an algorithm to reconstruct 3D face shape from a single image as well as from sets of images or video frames in real-time. We introduce a solution for linear fitting of a PCA shape identity model and expression blendshapes to 2D facial landmarks. To improve the accuracy of the shape, a fast face contour fitting algorithm is introduced. These different components of the algorithm are run in iteration, resulting in a fast, linear shape-to- landmarks fitting algorithm. The algorithm, specifically designed to fit to landmarks obtained from in-the-wild images, by tackling imaging conditions that occur in in-the-wild images like facial expressions and the mismatch of 2D–3D contour correspondences, achieves the shape reconstruction accuracy of much more complex, nonlinear state of the art methods, while being multiple orders of magnitudes faster.
Second, we address the problem of fitting to sets of multiple images of the same person, as well as monocular video sequences. We extend the proposed shape-to-landmarks fitting to multiple frames by using the knowledge that all images are from the same identity. To recover facial texture, the approach uses texture from the original images, instead of employing the often-used PCA albedo model of a 3DMM. We employ an algorithm that merges texture from multiple frames in real-time based on a weighting of each triangle of the reconstructed shape mesh.
Last, we make the proposed real-time 3D morphable face model fitting algorithm available as open-source software. In contrast to ubiquitous available 2D-based face models and code, there is a general lack of software for 3D morphable face model fitting, hindering a widespread adoption. The library thus constitutes a significant contribution to the community.
Das Gehör ist mehr als jedes andere Sinnesorgan für die menschliche Sprache und ihre Entwicklung verantwortlich und stellt auf kleinstem Raum ein anatomisch und physiologisch einzigartiges Gebilde dar. Es beeindruckt vor allem durch seinen großen Dynamikbereich.
Während im Bereich der Hörschwelle der eben hörbare Schalldruck etwa 20 μPa beträgt, können die Drucke und Amplituden bis zur Schmerzgrenze noch etwa zweimillionenfach gesteigert werden. Derartige physiologische Schalldrücke sind jedoch immer noch verschwindend klein gegenüber den ebenfalls auf das Ohr einwirkenden statischen Luftdruckschwankungen, wie sie beispielsweise beim Treppensteigen, Zug- bzw. Autofahren, Fliegen oder beim Naseputzen vorkommen. Zwar führen diese zu einer veränderten Wahrnehmung, jedoch nicht zu einer Schäadigung des Ohrs. Diese Fähigkeit, trotz großer statischer Druckschwankungen in der Umgebung, gleichzeitig winzige physiologische Schalldrücke wahrnehmen zu können, ist hauptsächlich in den nichtlinearen, viskoelastischen Eigenschaften der Gelenke und Bänder des Mittelohrs sowie des Trommelfells begründet.
Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, dieses nichtlineare Verhalten des Mittelohrs bei großen Belastungen und großen Verschiebungen durch nichtlineare, räumliche Ersatzmodelle auf mechanischer Basis abzubilden. Zur Charakterisierung der nichtlinearen Eigenschaften der Gerhörknöchelchenkette werden statische und dynamische Messungen an humanen Felsenbeinen durchgeführt. Ein besonderes Augenmerk ist auf die Charakterisierung der nichtlinearen, viskoelastischen Eigenschaften des Ringbands, des Trommelfells, der Trommelfellsehne und der beiden Mittelohrgelenke gerichtet. Im Blick auf die klinische Praxis wird zum einen anhand von Messergebnissen das Schädigungsrisiko bei einer Stapeschirurgie diskutiert sowie die Auswirkungen von Vorspannungen im Mittelohrapparat am Beispiel des aktiven Implantats Carina untersucht.
Compared to diesel or gasoline, using compressed natural gas as a fuel allows for significantly decreased carbon dioxide emissions. With the benefits of this technology fully exploited, substantial increases of engine efficiency can be expected in the near future. However, this will lead to exhaust gas temperatures well below the range required for the catalytic removal of residual methane, which is a strong greenhouse gas. By combination with a countercurrent heat exchanger, the temperature level of the catalyst can be raised significantly in order to achieve sufficient levels of methane conversion with minimal additional fuel penalty. This thesis provides fundamental theoretical background of these so-called heat-integrated exhaust purification systems. On this basis, prototype heat exchangers and appropriate operating strategies for highly dynamic operation in passenger cars are developed and evaluated.