Pôles de développement économique et logistique d'entreprise

Economic development policies such as the Enterprise Zone have been pursued with different designs by state and local governments in many countries. These programs can be defined by a double objective: to promote and control economic growth. This thesis investigates the compatibility of these public policies with the location strategies of the private companies based on their logistical needs. The first step of this research gives a global view on the key elements of the design of the public policies and private strategies. This analysis is based on the study of the relevant experiences of both governments and companies. This analysis shows that on the one hand, the public sphere develops policies with multiple objectives without having a constant strategy and a representative view of the real needs of the companies. On the other hand, the private sphere attempts to adapt itself to the continuously changing conditions and to apply its own (sometimes sub-optimal) strategy. Moreover, the mixed results of the investigated policies show this mismatch. However, the analysis also confirms that in certain cases, the economic development policies and the location strategy of the firms are not completely incompatible. Consequently, the public authorities involved in the implementation of these policies have difficulties to understand, to anticipate, and to integrate the behaviors of the logistical companies in their local development plans. In order to deal with this issue, this thesis develops a conceptual framework that describes the compatibility of the characteristics of a private company and an area managed by the public authorities. In this way, the framework allows the local authority to assess the area from a company's logistical viewpoint. It synthesizes the complex location decision process of the company by integrating the diversity of the decision criteria. This conceptual framework gives the possibility to the public authorities to segment their supply according to the companies' location potential. Finally, a decision support tool is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the conceptual framework. This tool is applied to some practical examples.

Environmental innovation, policy and economic performance

Claudia Pellegrin

The objective of this thesis is to investigate three economic issues related to environmental innovation: evaluating how private investments in environmental innovation react to technological policy; testing whether environmental policy harms economic performance; analyzing whether and how energy-saving process innovation impacts economic performance. This thesis provides novel empirical evidence on these issues by means of econometric analysis on firm-level data. The results from this thesis show that firms' environmental investments react positively to the highest amounts of public subsidy. Environmental policy, contrarily to the expectations, enhances economic performance of firms. Lastly, energy-saving process innovation does not play a significant role in reducing production costs of firms. These results suggest that environmental and economic goals are not in trade-off at the current state and that energy saving is not an incentive per se. Thus, strengthening both environmental policy and technological policy for environmental innovation is recommended.

EPFL2017

Compatibility modeling to support opportunity analysis in new product development

Julie Hohenegger

The general context of this Ph.D. dissertation is the new product development (NPD) which is the process for transforming an opportunity that is a business or technology gap in the current situation into a product available for sale. This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the opportunity analysis in NPD. Therefore, a framework to support opportunity analyses is developed. The framework is structured in two parts: the information search and the modeling of compatibility. Opportunity analyses require a systematic approach to obtain all the information related to the identified opportunity, as well as an approach to determine whether or not this opportunity is compatible with respect to the different attributes/criteria representing the product development context. The state of the art review reveals that such approaches are not available in the published literature. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive framework comprising an information search approach and a compatibility modeling approach to respond to these needs. The early phases of NPD are characterized by uncertainty that corresponds to the difference between the amount of information required to perform a task and the available amount of information. Uncertainty may have serious consequences on NPD, resulting in the worst case in a project failure. Therefore, information is crucial for the product development process. The information search approach developed in this Ph.D. dissertation allows the reduction of this uncertainty. This approach comprises four levels. The first level comprises the activities involved in NPD, such as market analysis and manufacturing. The second level proposes a classification of the different types of information required during the product development process: product-, process-, resource- and context-related. The third level represents the different sources where each type of information can be found. Two main classes are identified: the first one comprises the company departments such as marketing, and manufacturing, while the second class contains the sources from the external environment of the company, such as suppliers, customers, competitors, research communities, and governmental and non governmental organizations. The fourth level contains different methods of collecting information. Two main classes are distinguished: meetings- and documents-related. The links between the different levels are established on the basis of a thorough review of the related literature. Once the NPD activities associated with the identified opportunity are determined, the related information types, the sources where they can be found and the methods for their collections can be easily deduced from the information search approach. The compatibility modeling approach aims at evaluating the compatibility relationships for pairs of alternatives. Two types of compatibility can be distinguished: hard compatibility and soft compatibility. Hard compatibility corresponds to the notion of matching (i.e. the possibility that two alternatives coexist in a specific product development context) and is evaluated with respect to hard attributes/criteria related to the basic laws of nature or to the technical possibilities. Soft compatibility corresponds to the notion of non-degradation (i.e. the shift from a situation where the two alternatives are considered individually to a situation where they are considered together does not induce a degradation in a specific product development context) and is evaluated with respect to soft attributes/criteria such as development cost, and lead time. The core concept of the compatibility modeling approach is the compatibility structure. The crisp compatibility structure is a quadruplet of crisp relations M, C, I, and J, called mutual compatibility, strict incompatibility, mutual incompatibility and mutual incomparability respectively that satisfy a certain number of conditions. The relations M, C, C-1 and I correspond to four different situations: no degradation – no degradation, no degradation – degradation, degradation – no degradation, and degradation – degradation respectively. J corresponds to the situation where the alternatives cannot be compared using one of the relations M, C, C-1 or I. For each attribute/criterion, partial compatibility structures without incomparability are constructed from the impact that an alternative exerts on another and vice-versa. Then, relations characterizing the partial structures are aggregated into a global relation that takes into account all the attributes/criteria. By their nature, crisp compatibility structures cannot express degrees of mutual compatibility, strict incompatibility, mutual incompatibility or mutual incomparability, and are consequently too constraining in practice. Therefore, the crisp compatibility structures are meticulously extended to the case of fuzzy binary relations. A case study from the Swiss company Laurastar illustrates the framework that supports the opportunity analysis. This case study investigates the possibility to collaborate with new suppliers located in Bucharest and Hong-Kong. The compatibility between alternatives related to the supply chain activity is evaluated with respect to the various attributes/criteria.

EPFL2007

Socio-Economic Assessment of Fusion Energy Research, Development, Demonstration and Deployment Programme

Denis Bednyagin

Providing safe, clean and affordable energy supply is essential for meeting the basic needs of human society and for supporting economic growth. From the historical perspective, the constantly growing energy use was one of the main factors, which drove the industrialised countries to the current level of prosperity. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the issue of global energy security became a topic of increasing concern in the international policy agenda. On the one hand, the world is facing the problem of exhaustion of most convenient and cheep fuel reserves. The situation is becoming worse, because of the constantly growing demand in developing countries, and the oligopolistic behaviour of major energy exporting countries. On the other hand, the society is becoming more and more sensitive to the environmental pollution problems, caused by the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. In the face of energy security challenge, national governments ought to implement adequate strategies aimed at liberalisation of energy markets, diversification of energy supply mix, enhancement of energy efficiency, encouragement of investments in energy infrastructures, and promotion of innovation in energy sector. In a longer term perspective, the latter point becomes increasingly important, because the world is relying currently on the consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels, and the development of new safe, clean and resource unconstraint energy technologies is vitally needed. In line with this strategy, the major world economies pursue the joint R&D programme on thermonuclear Fusion technology, which represents numerous advantages due to its inherent safety, avoidance of CO2 emissions, relatively small environmental impact, abundance and world-wide uniform distribution of fuel resources. Considering the importance of the projected environmental and economic benefits of Fusion, the questions are raised whether the current level of financial support is sufficient, and what could be the optimal strategy to proceed with the demonstration of Fusion technology, given the time span and potential risks of Fusion RDDD programme. To put these questions into the context, one has to consider the current trends in energy R&D funding, which has seen a drastic decline ( ~50%) over the last three decades. The liberalisation of energy sector poses additional problem due to the fact that free markets partially failure to provide public goods, such as basic science and R&D, because of the so-called spillover effects meaning that the firms are not able to appropriate the integral results of their R&D investments. Regarding the thermonuclear Fusion technology, the decision makers responsible for national energy policies and allocation of public R&D funds may face the following specific questions: What is the expected net socio-economic payoff (social rate of return) of Fusion R&D programme, including both internal and external costs and benefits? What are the reasonable economic arguments that could justify the increase in public funding of the ongoing and future Fusion R&D activities and would stimulate greater involvement of the private sector? What additional value can be obtained through undertaking a more ambitious Fusion R&D programme (accelerated development path), which requires bigger number of experimental facilities, increased funding, and more intense overall efforts of international scientific and industrial community? In order to provide sound arguments for policymakers seeking to optimise public R&D funding, a robust socio-economic evaluation of the whole Fusion research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDDD) programme is needed. At the present stage, prospective analyses of Fusion technology have been emphasised mainly on the investigation of technological issues, estimation of the direct costs of Fusion power and analysis of its potential role in future energy systems. Meanwhile, methodological tools and practical studies aiming at a more comprehensive socio-economic assessment of global long-term energy R&D programmes, such as Fusion, are still incomplete. The primary difficulty concerns the evaluation of positive externalities that may reveal through different types of spillover effects, including but not limited to knowledge, network and market spillovers. While the presence of these effects has been identified in the economic theory and confirmed by empirical studies, their quantitative analysis in the specific case of large scale energy R&D programmes represents some methodological lacuna and deserves further investigation. Another problem relates to the methodology of cost-benefit analysis, which oftentimes ignores the hidden value of R&D projects arising due to the possible flexibility in managerial decisions. In fact, throughout the course of any R&D project, its prospective cash-flows can be significantly improved by pro-active management of different implementation stages, e.g. expanding the production, if market conditions are favourable, or abandoning, if R&D process appears to be unproductive. As a result, the strategic value of any R&D project normally exceeds its net present value (NPV) calculated with the traditional discounted cash flow (DCF) method. Although this strategic approach to capital budgeting, known as Real Options, has been propagated recently in several publications dealing with appraisal of lumpy irreversible investments, its practical application in the context of Fusion RDDD programme has not been mastered yet to the required extent. A particular challenge consists in the need for adequate treatment of different types of uncertainty in the model structure, parameters and input data. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis consists in complementing the existing studies with an in-depth analysis of the positive externalities (spillover benefits) of Fusion RDDD programme and calculation of its strategic real options value subject to different managerial strategies throughout demonstration and deployment stages. Net social present value of Fusion RDDD programme and potential impact of Fusion R&D activities on the economic performance of the involved private companies are estimated using an integrated modelling framework, which includes the following components: (1) assessment of technological potential for deployment of Fusion power plants based on the simulation of multi-regional long term electricity supply scenarios with PLANELEC model; (2) economic evaluation of Fusion RDDD programme and analysis of different implementation strategies using Real Options model; (3) estimation of the economic value of spillover benefits from participation in Fusion R&D projects at the microeconomic level with the help of financial evaluation model; (4) strategic evaluation of Fusion RDDD programme, taking into account both spillover benefits and real options value, and policy recommendations.