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What makes for an innovative company?
Cheesemakers ditch vats, harvest proteins
AGORA-philics open up
Five easy ways to slim kids
Ocean Spray seeks new owner
EU opens help desk for IP issues
Innovation
What makes for an innovative
company?
Inclusivity, flexibility,
structured innovation processes and inspiring leaders.
These are the hallmarks of
innovative companies as determined by management consultancy Accenture
after it interviewed 580 senior executives in 18 countries and measured
their comments against business performance.
It found innovators
• give a higher priority to
innovation in products, services and processes and pay more attention to
their research and development groups
• are more likely to have
translated their key priorities into significant changes to their
businesses
• report much greater success in
using information technology (IT) to address their strategic priorities.
Earlier, Accenture showed that
companies that continued to innovate through downturns in the 1990s were
best positioned for success in the upturns that followed. And other
studies have suggested that innovation can enhance business performance.
Almost all companies surveyed had
been affected by the present downturn and felt the pressure for short-term
results and cost savings. “But the innovative companies have a firmer
grasp of the major strategic issues and a greater willingness to act
boldly in line with their convictions,” Accenture said.
Our research shows that such
companies are:
• inclusive – looking for new
ideas equally from front-line staff, marketing, research and development
and indeed just about any source within the business; less innovative
companies, by contrast, rely overwhelmingly on their corporate strategists
• flexible – giving a higher
priority to building flexibility in their processes and in their
workforce, and readier to use alliances and partnerships, to help them
adapt to changing market conditions
• structured – implementing
formal processes to encourage and test innovation, rather than leaving it
to chance
• inspired by senior executives
who take responsibility for sponsoring the ideas with the greatest range
of business benefits.
Click
here for the full study from Accenture.
Cheesemakers
ditch vats, harvest proteins
US cheesemakers may soon ditch
their traditional vats for a new process based on a combination of
membrane filtration systems and coagulators.
The "vatless" system
makes possible continuous production of Mozzarella-type cheese, enabling
cheesemakers to meet growing consumer product demand while capturing the
pure milk proteins that are key to many nutraceutical applications.
The industry’s marketing body,
Dairy Management Inc, is paying for Cornell University’s Syed Rizvi to
work with the Northeast Dairy Foods Research Center (NDFRC), on the novel
process. In the traditional vat process, 10 pounds of milk makes nine
pounds of whey and one pound of cheese. Cheesemakers then extract whey
protein concentrate, isolates and other functional ingredients. Using
microfiltration and a coagulator, Rizvi was able to produce efficiently a
"zero" whey Mozzarella-type cheese from a smaller quantity of
microfiltered and concentrated skim milk.
Dairy processors can fine-tune the
filters to produce customised fluid permeate and a customised retentate.
These can become ingredients in products that address health issues such
as weight management, food intake, hypertension, and muscle metabolism. There’s
more at www.extraordinarydairy.com.
Research
AGORA-philics open up
Nine publishers have teamed up to
supply scientists in poor developing countries with free or cheap on-line
access to more than 400 scientific journals in Arabic, English, French,
and Spanish on agriculture and related fields. The scheme is part of the
UN Food & Agriculture Organisation’s AGORA initiative. A normal
subscription to the journals costs more than $220,000/y.
The publishers are Blackwell’s,
CABI, Elsevier, Kluwer, Nature, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag,
John Wiley & Sons, and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The
Rockefeller Foundation and other donors fund the project.
AGORA customers include
not-for-profit institutions such as universities and colleges, research
institutes, and government offices. AGORA hopes to encourage more
publishers to contribute their content, and to improve Internet
connectivity in candidate countries.
Nutrition
Five easy ways to slim kids
The US’s American Dietetic
Association has worked with Quaker Oats to develop better ways to keep
children slim and healthy in the face of the obesity epidemic. The new
five step programme is
Become a good nutrition role model.
Eat more whole grains. Eat a healthy breakfast.
Understand portion sizes. Measure your progress.
A Web site to support the programme
is at www.quakeroatmeal.com,
and www.eatright.org/Public/NutritionInformation/92.cfm.
Business
Ocean Spray seeks new owner
Cranberry juice maker Ocean Spray
Cranberries is once again looking for a new owner. This time it is asking
Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Campbell Soup, Cadbury Schweppes and General Mills to
buy the billion dollar a year producer-owned co-op, reports The Daily
Deal.
Intellectual
property
EU opens help desk for IP issues
With intellectual property rights (IPR)
becoming increasingly important to economic growth, the European
Commission has relaunched its IPR Helpdesk with simplified procedures and
better legal safeguards, especially with respect to the EC’s Sixth
Framework research programme (FP6).
A consortium of universities and
other partners from Belgium, Germany, Spain and the UK run the Helpdesk.
It is a free service to help current and potential EU research project
contractors on IP issues. A website provides general information in
English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It includes answers to
frequently asked questions, such as “Who is the owner of the
improvements/refinements made to pre-existing know-how?” and “Do I
have to grant access rights to anybody?”
More from http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org.
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