Nowadays companies need higher educated engineers to develop their competences to enable them to innovate. This innovation competence is seen as a remedy for the minor profitable business they do during the financial crises. Innovation is an element to be developed on the one hand for big companies as …

Conventional dairy husbandry systems acknowledge animal welfare guided by Brambel’s five freedoms. The concept of natural, or normal behaviour would in contrast to Brambel’s convention, be based on stability through chance and offers a less anthropocentric and more naturalistic approach. The present …

Pitch size varies in official soccer matches and differently sized pitches are adopted for tactical purposes in small-sided training games. Since interactive team behaviour emerges under constraints, the authors evaluate the effect of pitch size (task) manipulations on interactive team behaviour in small-sided …

Outsourcing of business processes and information technology (IT) operations is an important trend in large and middle-sized organizations. However, outsourcing could affect the organization’s ability to align its IT with business strategy and operations. This article reports a qualitative study into …

Companies are on the verge to think about retention of older workers (workers above 50) in their company. Thus organisations, more specifically small and middle-sized enterprises (SMEs), are busy with the development of concepts how to make the time between 50 and retirement age of 65 or 67 for employees …

Although critical differences exist between large companies and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), limited empirical research has been done on human resource (HR)-related corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this paper we study aging workforce management (AWM) as a component of CSR. Our …

On the basis of empirical research, a competence-based model of the internationalization process of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) is developed. The model focuses on so-called International Market-Entry Core Competencies (IMECC), which are global management competences considered crucial during …

According to the Dutch parliament, Holland is still recovering from the Euro crisis. The Euro crisis starts with the malfunctioning tax system of Greece and the consequences are felt throughout the whole of Europe. It is a very difficult time for companies and especially for exporting companies. However, …

The contribution of purchasing to the development and growth of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the overall performance of supply chain has been neither rigorously examined nor empirically substantiated. This paper provides empirical evidence on how purchasing variables (relationship, …

An existing fuel cell hybrid distribution truck, built for demonstration purposes, is used as a case study to investigate the effect of stack (kW) and battery (kW, kWh) sizes on the hydrogen consumption of the vehicle. Three driving cycles, the NEDC for Low Power vehicles, CSC and JE05 cycle, define …