Fraunhofer-Institut für System- und Innovationsforschung ISI

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"Unternehmenskultur 4.0" bei einem Zulieferbetrieb gestalten

2021 , Jackwerth-Rice, Thomas , Lerch, Christian , Weiß, Peter , Jehnichen, Thomas , Derse, Matthias , Meier, Mario , Wernet, Marius

Vor dem Hintergrund industrieller Transformationsprozesse sowie zunehmend dynamischer und kundenindividueller Anforderungen können produzierende Unternehmen digitale Technologien gezielt nutzen, um Arbeitsabläufe effizienter zu organisieren. Vernetzte Produktionssysteme bieten dabei eine Möglichkeit, um Fabrikabläufe leichter planen und steuern zu können. Ihre Einführung bedarf allerdings einer ""Unternehmenskultur 4.0"". Diese zeichnet sich durch ein hohes Maß an Vertrauen in digitale Lösungen aus, trotz der hohen Komplexität und damit verbundenen ungewissen Nutzengewinne. Am Beispiel eines digitalen Werkzeugmanagements wird gezeigt, wie ein mittelständischer Zulieferbetrieb eine solche Unternehmenskultur gezielt stärken kann.

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Auswirkungen der Coronapandemie auf die Entwicklung von Kommunen und Landkreisen in Deutschland

2021 , Ottendörfer, Eva , Bieker, Susanne , Kaiser, Urban , Frieling, Hendrik , Gölz, Sebastian , Neumann, Marcel , Guckenbiehl, Pascal , Henze-Sakowsky, Annika , Schmitt, Anna , Richter, Christine , Pollmer, Uta

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Patents and corporate credit risk

2020 , Frey, Carl Benedikt , Neuhäusler, Peter , Blind, Knut

A vast literature documents a positive relationship between patents and companies stock market performance. Nevertheless, evidence on the influence of patents on companies' debt capacity remains sparse. In this article, we examine the relationship between companies' patent portfolios and their credit rating, providing relevant, albeit indirect, evidence on patents as a debt funding mechanism. Using a panel dataset on 155 U.S. firms, we find a positive relationship between companies' credit rating and the size of their patent portfolio. Our indicators for valuable patents, however, provide a mixed picture. While there is a positive link between the average family size of a company's patent portfolio and its credit ratings, we surprisingly find a significant negative relationship between patent forward citations and companies ratings. We hypothesize that this finding is the result of citations being associated with patent lawsuits, potentially incurring substantial losses on creditors.

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Innovation and standardization as drivers of companies' success in public procurement

2020 , Blind, Knut , Pohlisch, Jakob , Rainville, Anne

There is a significant potential to improve the benefits from public procurement through a better understanding of drivers in company success at the micro-level, an area that has received little study to date. To increase these impacts on innovation and markets, policy makers have opened procurement to innovation, including the strategic incorporation of formal standards in calls for tenders. Consequently, companies offering innovative solutions should have higher chances to be successful in public tenders. In addition, companies who engage in standardization activities at standards development organizations may have a competitive advantage in submitting tenders. Examining the case of Germany, this paper empirically investigates the effects of German manufacturing companies' innovation activities and their engagement in national standardization on the receipt of contracts within domestic procurement competitions. The results of our empirical analyses based on German companies surveyed within the framework of the Community Innovation Survey show that being successful in product innovation and being engaged in standardization are significant positive predictors of companies' success in public procurement. With implications for policy-makers and practitioners, this shows that public procurement is indeed open for solutions from companies active in innovation and standardization.

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DeepKneeExplainer: Explainable knee osteoarthritis diagnosis from radiographs and magnetic resonance imaging

2021 , Karim, Rezaul , Jiao, Jiao , Döhmen, Till , Cochez, Michael , Beyan, Oya , Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich , Decker, Stefan

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease, which significantly affects middle-aged and elderly people. Although primarily identified via hyaline cartilage change based on medical images, technical bottlenecks like noise, artifacts, and modality impose an enormous challenge on high-precision, objective, and efficient early quantification of OA. Owing to recent advancements, approaches based on neural networks (DNNs) have shown outstanding success in this application domain. However, due to nested non-linear and complex structures, DNNs are mostly opaque and perceived as black-box methods, which raises numerous legal and ethical concerns. Moreover, these approaches do not have the ability to provide the reasoning behind diagnosis decisions in the way humans would do, which poses an additional risk in the clinical setting. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable method for knee OA diagnosis based on radiographs and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which we called DeepKneeExplainer. First, we comprehensively preprocess MRIs and radiographs through the deep-stacked transformation technique against possible noises and artifacts that could contain unseen images for domain generalization. Then, we extract the region of interests (ROIs) by employing U-Net architecture with ResNet backbone. To classify the cohorts, we train DenseNet and VGG architectures on the extracted ROIs. Finally, we highlight class-discriminating regions using gradient-guided class activation maps (Grad-CAM++) and layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP), followed by providing human-interpretable explanations of the predictions. Comprehensive experiments based on the multicenter osteoarthritis study (MOST) cohorts, our approach yields up to 91% classification accuracy, outperforming comparable state-of-the-art approaches. We hope that our results will encourage medical researchers and developers to adopt explainable methods and DNN-based analytic pipelines towards an increasing acceptance and adoption of AI-assisted applications in the clinical practice for improved knee OA diagnoses.

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Energiekompendium. Ein Nachschlagewerk für Grundbegriffe, Konzepte und Technologien. 2., unveränderte Auflage

Das Gelingen der Energiewende erfordert einen weitreichenden Wandel des derzeitigen Energiesystems. Dazu müssen alle Bereiche des Systems enger miteinander verzahnt und in ihrer Gesamtheit umgestaltet werden. Eine wichtige Säule dessen ist die Energieforschung. Dieses Nachschlagewerk richtet sich an alle, die angesichts der vielfältigen Themen einen einfachen und grundlegenden Einstieg in die Begrifflichkeiten der Energieforschung suchen. Die Beiträge sollen dem Leser durch eine Fokussierung auf das Wesentliche helfen, sich schnell mit vielfältigen Themen der Energiewende vertraut zu machen und sich darin zu orientieren. Dazu decken über 3800 Stichwörter bzw. rund 2200 Beiträge sowohl Grundbegriffe aus Forschung und Technik, damit in Verbindung stehende Konzepte als auch zahlreiche energietechnologische Begriffe ab, die sich über die gesamte Energiewandlungskette hinweg erstrecken. Das Energiekompendium fasst Fachbegriffe für jedermann verständlich zusammen und ermöglicht einen schnellen und unkomplizierten Einstieg in alle Themenbereiche rund um die Energiewende. Es basiert auf dem Online-Lexikon »EnArgus-Wiki«, ein Informationssystem zu den Projekten aus dem Energieforschungsprogramm.

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Knowledge proximity and firm innovation

2020 , Rammer, Christian , Kinne, Jan , Blind, Knut

We analyse the geographic proximity of innovative firms to different types of knowledge sources in an urban environment on a microgeographic scale. Based on a comprehensive panel data set of manufacturing and service firms in the German capital city Berlin, we investigate the characteristics of firms' knowledge environment while differentiating by the type of innovation. Geocoded firm locations at the level of individual addresses allows us to describe the knowledge environment of firms on a very fine microgeographic scale. We find that innovative firms are located in places with higher numbers of same-sector firms, more start-ups and a higher inflow of other firms. They also locate in closer proximity to universities and research institutes. These differences decay rapidly within a few metres (50-250 m), indicating a truly microgeographic scope of knowledge sources in urban environments.

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Finding and analysing energy research funding data: The EnArgus system

2021 , Oppermann, Leif , Hirzel, Simon , Güldner, Alexander , Heiwolt, Karoline , Krassowski, Joachim , Schade, Ulrich , Lange, Christoph , Prinz, Wolfgang

This paper presents the concept, a system-overview, and the evaluation of EnArgus, the central information system for energy research funding in Germany. Initiated by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), EnArgus establishes a one-stop information system about all recent and ongoing energy research funding projects in Germany. Participants ranging from laypersons to experts were surveyed in three workshops to evaluate both the public and expert interfaces of the EnArgus system in comparison to peer systems. The results showed that the EnArgus system was predominantly evaluated positively by the various participants. It contributes to making the energy sector more transparent and offers clear advantages for professional use compared to similar systems. The system's semantic processing enables more precise hits and better coverage by including semantically related terms in search results; its intelligence makes it fail-safe, rendering it suitable for areas where poor results can have dire consequences. Reporting on an actual real-world system, the paper also provides a roadmap-view of how electronic filing of administrative project data can be semantically enhanced and opened-up to provide the basis for new ways into the data that are key for future breakthrough AI interfaces.

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What motivates the engineers to patent?

2020 , Potekhina, Anna , Blind, Knut

Corporate R&D engineers, being usually the initiators of a patent, are important contributors to the patenting performance of their employers. Hence, patenting motives of R&D engineers encompass an interesting and promising research field. However, the literature on patenting motivation of the engineers in the corporate context is scarce. We apply self-determination theory on human motivation to investigate patenting motives of a sample of local R&D engineers in China employed by a European-based multi-national corporation. Factor analysis reveals four groups of motives: ""reward and recognition"", ""reputation and promotion"", ""making a contribution"" and ""interest and sense of achievement"". The results of multiple hierarchical regression show the influence of working climate on ""making a contribution"" and ""interest and sense of achievement"" motivation factors. Implications for patent management are discussed.

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Secure IT without vulnerabilities and back doors

2020 , Weber, Arnd , Heiser, Gernot , Kuhlmann, Dirk , Schallbruch, Martin , Chattopadhyay, Anupam , Guilley, Sylvain , Kasper, Michael , Krauß, Christoph , Krüger, Philipp S. , Reith, Steffen , Seifert, Jean-Pierre

Increasing dependence on information technology calls for strengthening the requirements on their safety and security. Vulnerabilities that result from flaws in hardware and software are a core problem which market mechanisms have failed to eliminate. A strategy for resolving this issue should consider the following options: (1) private- and public-sector funding for open and secure production, (2) strengthening the sovereign control over the production of critical IT components within an economic zone, and (3) improving and enforcing regulation. This paper analyses the strengths and weaknesses of these options and proposes a globally distributed, secure supply chain based on open and mathematically proved components. The approach supports the integration of legacy and new proprietary comp onents.

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