|
Deming pioneer sets up innovation office
Green tea gives hard disks longer life
Food to go goes home
Europe is RFID-ready
French boffins beat government ban
Competition trumps education
BRIEFLY
Australia’s Proteome Systems
and SGE International have joined up to develop a range of liquid
chromatographic kits specifically for proteomics applications and configured
to interface easily with the electrospray source of mass spectrometers.
These kits will enable researchers to gain new insights into the role of
proteins in disease and to speed the discovery of new diagnostic and drug
targets.
A European Commission expert group
has published 25 recommendations on the ethical, legal and social
implications of genetic testing. The recommendations include a call
for screening for rare diseases, as well as a regulatory framework outlining
when such tests should be carried out, and for what purpose the results
should be used. The recommendations are the basis for a conference, to be
held on 6 and 7 May in Brussels. For further information on the event and
the recommendations, please click
here.
The coordinators of the EU-funded
project QualityLowInputFood have published three calls for proposals.
They cover information on the effect of dairy management practice,
development of nutrient budget-based precision farming system and software
for vegetable crops, and environmental and sustainability audits. Only
institutions in the enlarged EU are eligible; for details click
here.
The British Institute of Food
Research (IFR) is organising a conference on the identification and
exploitation of knowledge relevant to food processing waste. The event runs
in Norwich, UK from 25 to 28 April. For details click
here.
Innovation
Deming pioneer sets up innovation
office
Showa Denko (SDK), a specialist
chemicals firm that pioneered total quality management in Japan and won the
first Deming Prize for quality management in 1951, has established an
innovation office to coordinate and encourage innovations at the firm’s
various factories.
In addition to improving production
processes, SDK began total productive maintenance (TPM) activities at its
Oita Petrochemical Complex in September 1997. Since then, the company has
also cut equipment failures/accidents, customer complaints, and costs. Total
cost savings to date are worth around 25 billion yen (193 million euros),
the firm says.
The firm’s new three-year Sprout
Project will seek innovations in marketing and supply chain management as
well as production to cut all kinds of losses and to share best practices
across the group. SDK hopes this will save an extra 20 billion yen (154m
euros).
Green tea gives
hard disks longer life
A new biodegradable machining
compound made partly from green tea is three to four times more effective
than toxic counterparts.
The new compound is used for
polishing the read-write heads of computer disk drives. The fluids are
critical because imperfections in read-write heads must be less than 10
angstroms high; larger defects can cause the head to crash into the disk,
causing data loss.
In addition, the fluid's possible
biocompatibility and high affinity for ceramics and metals may lead to
applications in wastewater treatment, where the compound could remove heavy
metal contaminants from water, and medicine, where the compound may have
advantages for delivering certain cancer treatments.
NPD
Food to go goes home
On-the-go food is more about
convenience than portability says new research from US-based InsightExpress.
Nearly three in four customers say they eat "on-the-run meals" in
the home.
An on-line survey of 500
grocery-shopping Americans showed that nine out of 10 buy portable
convenience foods and eat them with nearly every meal. Lunch is most popular
with 55% eat to-go products as part of their mid-day meal, followed by
breakfast (40%), mid-afternoon snack (38%) and dinner (37%). Portable meals
are eaten at home (72%), in the car (44%), at the office (39%), at a
recreational activity (17%) and at school (14%).
Reasons for buying prepared foods
include reduced preparation time (70%), individual packaging (34%), and
taste (28%). Nearly 3 out of 4 (72%) shoppers say that portable foods
replace meals or foods they used to eat.
Nutritional value is important to
three out of five fast food shoppers, and 59% say they are more likely to
buy convenience food if they are more nutritional.
Supply
chain
Europe is RFID-ready
Radio frequency identification (RFID)
is high on the agendas of European retailers, food manufacturers and
logistic service providers, according to an international study undertaken
by UK-based IT consultancy LogicaCMG.
RFID is the new barcoding. RFID makes
it possible to identify and track objects, such as supermarket goods,
without time delays or the need for human intervention. As a result, supply
chain logistics are more streamlined and efficient and this ultimately leads
to lower costs and higher revenues.
But worldwide, consumer activists
have raised concerns that tracking might invade consumers’ privacy.
Retailers already make millions selling point of sale data to manufacturers.
But until store cards came in, these data were not attributable to
individuals. RFID tags mean that manufacturers might be able to track
products into the home.
The study shows that half of the 50
companies interviewed in Europe are planning to deploy RFID pilot projects
this year, and most plan to go live within the next three years. These will
use Returnable Transport Items (RTIs), such as crates and pallets. Companies
will not begin to tag consumer products until 2008 when prices of tags will
have dropped.
Research
French boffins beat government ban
The French government last week
rescinded its axing of 550 research jobs. The move broke a strike by
government scientists and clears the way for renewed talks between the
government and the scientific community over the future of research in
France, reports The Scientist.
Science minister François Fillon,
reinstated 550 permanent posts in public research institutes and also kept
he temporary posts thatwere to replace them. In addition, he said 1000 new
posts are to be created in universities for professors who are also involved
in research.
Development
Competition trumps education
Poor countries should put their
consumers first. This means competition is more important than education for
developing countries, says William Lewis, author of The Power of
Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability.
Billions spent on infrastructure,
technology, capital markets, education, and health care in the post-war,
post-colonial period have left developing countries mostly worse off, he
points out.
Free competition and access to
markets does more to raise standards of living for consumers than almost
anything else, he argues.
Lewis’s conclusions are based on
studies at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). Since 1990, MGI has studied
g the dynamics and evolution of six to 13 industries in Australia, Brazil,
France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, South Korea,
Sweden, the UK, and US. They looked firms from state-of-the-art auto plants
to black-market street vendors.
“Economic progress depends on
increasing productivity, which depends on undistorted competition. When
government policies limit competition, even unintentionally, more efficient
companies can’t replace less efficient ones. Economic growth slows and
nations remain poor,” he says.
To understand what makes countries
rich or poor, you must understand what drives productivity. Like Michael
Porter, writing in the New Wealth of Nations, Lewis found that
microeconomic factors are as or more important than macroeconomic factors.
Studies of Brazil, India, and Russia
show that companies concentrate on making money by exploiting the
instability rather than by raising their productivity.
Secondly, the income level of a
country is determined, above all, by the productivity of its largest
industries. High productivity in the unglamorous "old-economy"
sectors—retailing, wholesaling, construction—is most important, since
more people work in them. High-tech enclaves and financial markets are less
influential.
Over and over again, MGI found
industries in which more productive innovators were excluded and less
productive companies favoured. This meant lower productivity. The main
obstacles to economic growth in poor countries are the many policies that
distort competition. Instead of attempting to achieve social objectives by
limiting competition, countries should allow fair competition and thereby
generate more national income, which can then be redistributed through taxes
and government subsidies for the desperately poor.
Even more important, countries have
bad policies because they benefit certain people. In rich countries, special
interests generally aren’t allowed to have their way so much that they can
significantly undermine the common good. Most poor countries lack these
limits. But to have healthy economies, countries must allow unsuccessful
owners and managers to fail so that more productive ones can take their
place. In that healthier economy, workers will find a better job market.
The answer lies in focusing on
consumers, not producers. A consumption mind-set requires some notion of
individual rights, including the right to buy what you want from anybody who
wishes to sell it to you. Consumers want to patronize companies that offer
better products and services or lower prices. Those are the companies that
survive if competition is equal.
|
