Abstract

Innovation systems are not bound by administrative or political boundaries. Using information theory, we measure innovation-systemness as synergy among size-classes, postal addresses, and technological classes (NACE-codes) of firm-level data collected by Statistics Italy at different scales. Italy is organized in twenty regions, but there is also a traditional divide between the North and the South of the country. At which levels is how much innovation-systemness indicated? The greatest synergy is retrieved by considering the country in terms of Northern and Southern Italy as two sub-systems, with Tuscany included as part of Northern Italy. We suggest that separate innovation strategies could be developed for these two parts of the country. The current focus on regions for innovation policies may to some extent be an artifact of the statistics and EU policies. In terms of sectors, both medium- and high-tech manufacturing (MHTM) and knowledge-intensive services (KIS) are proportionally integrated in the various regions

Abstract

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate potential synergies between an electronic waybill (e-Waybill) and other Intelligent Transport System (ITS) services. An e-Waybill service, as presented in this thesis, should be able to perform the functions of a paper waybill (which is an important transport document and contains essential information about a consignment) and it should contain at least the information specified in a paper waybill. To investigate synergies between the e-Waybill solutions and ITS services, we present 5 conceptual e-Waybill solutions that differ in where the e-Waybill information is stored, read, and written. These solutions are further investigated for functional and technical requirements (non-functional requirements), which can potentially impose constraints on a potential system that should implement the e-Waybill service. A set of 20 ITS services are considered for synergy analysis in this thesis. These services are mainly for road transport, however most of them are relevant to be considered for utilization in other modes of transport as well. For information synergy analysis, the e-Waybill solutions are assessed based on their synergies with ITS services. For different ITS services, the required input information entities are identified; and if at least one information entity can be provided by an e-Waybill at the right location we regard it to be a synergy. The result from our synergy analysis may support the choice of practical e-Waybill systems, which has the possibility to provide high synergy with ITS services. This may lead to a higher utilization of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions. Additionally, a service design method has been proposed for supporting the process of designing new ITS services, which primarily utilizes on functional synergies with already existing ITS services. In order to illustrate the usage of the suggested method, we have applied it for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service is to support the process of identifying when, where, and by whom a consignment has been damaged and who was responsible when the consignment was damaged.

Abstract

Citation analysis can provide us with models of the evolutionary dynamics in scholarly and scientific communication. We propose to distinguish between institutional research evaluation (usually, ex post) and knowledge evaluation ex ante, in relation to directionality in citation analysis. We discuss the theoretical literature on communication systems which distinguishes between information and meaning, in which the concept of redundancy plays an important role as measure of the potential of a communication system. This is the basis for a model of knowledge dynamics which differentiates between observable variation and latent selection environments. We use indicators at the journal level and analyze the citation environments of journals in both the cited and citing directions. Among journals, the citing direction can be analyzed by co-citation and indicates the integration of knowledge from different fields. The cited direction can analogously be analyzed by bibliographic coupling and represents the extent to which the cited journal has become relevant for different disciplines, hence indicates knowledge diffusion. We apply this analysis on three different case studies of journal-journal relations: a small scale study of the journal Public Understanding of Science, a random sample of 100 journals, and a large-scale analysis of the set of JCR 2016 journals. Combined, the results seem to confirm the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity cannot be captured by one-dimensional citation analysis. Both citing and cited directions are relevant for knowledge and research evaluations, respectively. We raise the question whether indicators of interdisciplinarity can be developed by combining both directions in citation analysis, indicate further research, and discuss the normative implications of our preliminary results.