This paper discusses the use of multi-criteria decision analysis for supporting strategic decision making in organisations. It begins by exploring the notions of strategic decisions and the strategic decision-making process. We suggest that structuring strategic objectives, dealing with high...

The UK government is actively encouraging the transfer of science and technology innovation to the business sector through a range of initiatives (http://www.ost.gov.uk/enterprise/knowledge/sec.htm). In part, this is seen as a ‘third mission’ for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs),...

Over the past 15 years, a crucial part of the U.K. Government's agenda has been to develop industrial and innovation policies in support of entrepreneurship and the creation of new businesses. They included significant investment in an incubator fund, increased funding for the exploitation of...

From the beginning of chaos research until today, the unpredictability of chaos has been a central theme. It is widely believed and claimed by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists alike that chaos has a new implication for unpredictability, meaning that chaotic systems are unpredictable...

The top managers of a biotechnology startup firm agreed to participate in a system dynamics modeling project to help them think about the firm's growth strategy. The article describes how the model was created and used to stimulate debate and discussion about growth management. The paper...

Questions remain regarding how the skill of operational probabilistic forecasts is most usefully evaluated or compared, even though probability forecasts have been a long-standing aim in meteorological forecasting. This paper explains the importance of employing proper scores when selecting...

Department of Health staff wished to use systems modelling to discuss acute patient flows with groups of NHS staff. The aim was to assess the usefulness of system dynamics (SD) in a healthcare context and to elicit proposals concerning ways of improving patient experience. Since time...

Insight into the likely weather several months in advance would be of great economic and societal value. The DEMETER project has made coordinated multi-model, multi-initial-condition simulations of the global weather as observed over the last 40 years; transforming these model simulations into...

There is an increasing demand for putting a shadow price on the environment to guide public policy and incentivize private behaviour. In practice, setting that price can be extremely difficult as uncertainties abound. There is often uncertainty not just about individual parameters but about the...

This article proposes goodness-of-fit tests for dynamic regression models, where regressors are allowed to be only weakly exogenous and arbitrarily correlated with past shocks. The null hypothesis is stated in terms of the lack of serial correlation of the errors of the model. The tests are...