Business Networks Reloaded

Business networks are an important economic phenomenon of increasing practical importance throughout Europe. This volume examines business networks from an interdisciplinary perspective, with many contributions dealing with a certain form of business network, the so-called cooperative or non-hierarchical. With regard to this specific form of cooperation the volume presents new economic findings, proposes a definition and discusses the governance structure of those networks.Moreover, this book explores whether the research results can also be applied to hierarchical, centralized business networks. With medium-sized companies and all the more with large companies, business networks also pose the question of the compatibility with anti-trust law. This collection dedicates three contributions to this important question. They are complemented by chapters on liability of the network and its members towards third parties and contributions discussing duties of loyalty and the interpretation of agreements. Drawing on new research from Italy, Spain, Germany and Norway, this work illustrates the European legal perspective on business networks.

With the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, the companies that will succeed in the future are those who operate under a constant state of innovation. Not just that, they will often need to ensure that they pursue 'open innovation'. This book explores the contractual basis for innovation, examining the legal challenges raised by contracts to innovate. Offering a dual perspective, it takes an empirical approach to examine how agreements are structured to overcome the inherent uncertainty implicit in innovative activity. It also presents a legal framework for contracts to innovate, based on the duty of loyalty to the contractual network, which could provide guidance to navigate the uncertainty of these relationships.

This collection celebrates the immense contribution of Sarah Worthington to the field of private law. Defining the subject broadly, experts from the judiciary and the academy address contemporary challenges arising in the fields of agency, company law and insolvency, contract law, equity, the law of money, personal property, restitution and unjust enrichment. The breadth of the contributors' expertise and their willingness to offer innovative and insightful solutions to difficult problems perfectly mirror Sarah Worthington's rigorous and inspirational approach to private law scholarship.

This open access book focuses on theoretical and empirical intersections between governance, knowledge and space from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions elucidate how knowledge is a prerequisite as well as a driver of governance efficacy, and conversely, how governance affects the creation and use of knowledge and innovation in geographical context. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, public administration, political science, sociology, and organization studies provide original theoretical discussions along these interdependencies. Moreover, a variety of empirical chapters on governance issues, ranging from regional and national to global scales and covering case studies in Australia, Europe, Latina America, North America and South Africa demonstrate that geography and space are not only important contexts for governance that affect the contingent outcomes of governance blueprints. Governance also creates spaces. It affects the geographical confines as well as the quality of opportunities and constraints that actors enjoy to establish legitimate and sustainable ways of social and environmental co-existence.

This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge. The individual contributions help integrate network arguments of connectivity, geographical arguments of contiguity and contextuality into a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which people and organizations are constrained by and make use of space and networks for learning and innovation. Experts in the fields of geography, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, management and organizational studies develop conceptual models and propose empirical research that illustrates the ways in which networks and geography play together in processes of innovation, learning, leadership, and power. This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

As data centers grow in size and complexity, enterprises are adopting server virtualization technologies such as VMware, VMotion, NIC teaming, and server clustering to achieve increased efficiency of resources and to ensure business resilience. However, these technologies often involve significant expense and challenges to deal with complex multisite interconnections and to maintain the high availability of network resources and applications. Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS presents Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) based solutions that provide high-speed, low-latency network and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) isolation between data centers resulting in significant cost savings and a highly resilient virtualized network. The design guidance, configuration examples, and best practices presented in this book have been validated under the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) System Assurance program to facilitate faster, more reliable and more predictable deployments. The presented solutions include detailed information about issues that relate to large Layer 2 bridging domains and offer guidance for extending VLANs over Layer 3 networks using VPLS technology. Implementing this breakthrough Data Center Interconnect (DCI) strategy will evolve your network to support current server virtualization techniques and to provide a solid foundation for emerging approaches. The book takes you from the legacy deployment models for DCI, problems associated with extending Layer 2 networks, through VPN technologies, to various MST-, EEM-, and GRE-based deployment models and beyond. Although this book is intended to be read cover-to-cover, it is designed to be flexible and allow you to easily move between chapters to develop the solution most compatible with your requirements. Describes a variety of deployment models to effectively transport Layer 2 information, allowing your virtualization solution to operate effectively Explains benefits and trade-offs of various solutions for you to choose the solution most compatible with your network requirements to ensure business resilience Provides detailed design guidance and configuration examples that follow Cisco best practice recommendations tested within the CVD This book is part of the Networking Technology Series from Cisco Press®, which offers networking professionals valuable information for constructing efficient networks, understanding new technologies, and building successful careers.

This guide empowers network and system administrators to defend their information and computing assets--whether or not they have security experience. Skoudis presents comprehensive, insider's explanations of today's most destructive hacker tools and tactics, and specific, proven countermeasures for both UNIX and Windows environments.