Outsourcing

Summary

Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another. The term outsourcing, which came from the phrase outside resourcing, originated no later than 1981. The concept, which The Economist says has "made its presence felt since the time of the Second World War", often involves the contracting out of a business process (e.g., payroll processing, claims processing), operational, and/or non-core functions, such as manufacturing, facility management, call center/call center support. The practice of handing over control of public services to private enterprises (privatization), even if conducted on a limited, short-term basis, may also be described as outsourcing. Outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic contracting, and sometimes includes offshoring (relocating a

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (10)

Related publications

Related people

Related units

Related concepts (46)

Related concepts

Related courses (13)

Ce cours a pour objectif de présenter la fonction logistique de l'entreprise dans le cadre d'une approche globale, de la logistique au supply chain management, en insistant sur l'importance de la demande "client" tirant tous processus de la chaîne d'ajout de valeur du produit ou du service

Why are some firms more successful than others? This is the fundamental question of strategy. A key concern of managers is the complex and uncertain relationship between the firm, its strategy, its performance and its environment. Study competition and strategy from the perspective of top managers.

This course will cover all the aspects of product design and system engineering from learning relevant methods to the actual implementation in a hands-on practice of product development.

Related courses

Related lectures (16)

Related lectures

Background: One of the tasks in the 2017 iDASH secure genome analysis competition was to enable training of logistic regression models over encrypted genomic data. More precisely, given a list of approximately 1500 patient records, each with 18 binary features containing information on specific mutations, the idea was for the data holder to encrypt the records using homomorphic encryption, and send them to an untrusted cloud for storage. The cloud could then homomorphically apply a training algorithm on the encrypted data to obtain an encrypted logistic regression model, which can be sent to the data holder for decryption. In this way, the data holder could successfully outsource the training process without revealing either her sensitive data, or the trained model, to the cloud. Methods: Our solution to this problem has several novelties: we use a multi-bit plaintext space in fully homomorphic encryption together with fixed point number encoding; we combine bootstrapping in fully homomorphic encryption with a scaling operation in fixed point arithmetic; we use a minimax polynomial approximation to the sigmoid function and the 1-bit gradient descent method to reduce the plaintext growth in the training process. Results: Our algorithm for training over encrypted data takes 0.4-3.2 hours per iteration of gradient descent. Conclusions: We demonstrate the feasibility but high computational cost of training over encrypted data. On the other hand, our method can guarantee the highest level of data privacy in critical applications.

BMC2018

Technology In-Sourcing and the Creation of Pioneering Technologies

Vareska van de Vrande

This study analyzes the effect of different external technology sourcing modes on the creation of radical innovation in companies. Moreover, since prior research has indicated that exploration consists of looking beyond both organizational and technological boundaries, the role of technological distance between the partnering firms and the role of technological newness are also included. In particular, this paper examines how they affect the relationship between external technology sourcing and the creation of pioneering technologies (technologies that do not build on any existing technologies), which are used as a proxy for radical innovations. Using a sample of companies that were from the pharmaceutical industry, the results indicate that strategic alliances and corporate venture capital investments have a positive effect on the creation of pioneering technologies, whereas the effect of M&As is found to be negative. Additionally, the results show that the impact of these governance modes on the creation of pioneering technology is indeed affected by the newness of the technology and relatedness of the technological portfolios of the partnering firms. A larger technological distance between the two partnering firms increases the effect of strategic alliances on the creation of pioneering technologies. In addition, the results indicate that technological newness weakens the positive effect of CVC investments and non-equity alliances on the creation of pioneering technologies.

2011

Innovating firms often invest in a number of different technology projects, in different stages of development, using a wide range of distinct technology sourcing modes, such as strategic alliances, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. Recently, firms have also gained an increasing awareness of the potential benefits of corporate venture capital investments. This paper investigates the particular role of corporate venture capital investments in the technology sourcing portfolio of firms. More specifically, we focus on the extent to which corporate venture capital investments are additive or complementary to other modes of technology sourcing when explaining the innovative performance of firms. The results indicate that corporate venture capital investments are particularly beneficial for the innovative performance of firms when they are used in combination with other technology sourcing modes.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2011