Science

Short news science – Delta 11

Racing team
The Formula Student Racing team DUT12 has started building their all-electric racing car. Last month the students laminated the first half of the outer shell.

They succeeded in reducing the weight and making a smoother finish by using a new production process. Other students assembled the first 30-Volt battery units from 24 modules. All parts for the engines have arrived as well, and assembly of these will start soon. The parts will also have to be tested in order to program the controllers.

www.dutracing.nl

 

The governments of the Pigs (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in troubled waters, impelled to liberalize their labour markets in order to escape the economic crises. Of course economically this makes sense, but they must explain it to their citizens. Or does it make sense?

Giuseppe Simigliani, who completed his Master’s degree in management at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, doesn’t think this is a very good strategy. “The austerity measures imposed by the European Union will destroy the economies in the long term,” he says, before rephrasing to this rather harsh statement. “The economies will perform worse.”

 For some companies liberalizing the labor market is indeed advantageous, the young engineer believes. This is especially the case for small, still growing, innovative companies. “We call those companies Schumpeterian 1 companies,” says Simigliani. The spin-off companies of YesDelft are examples of these types of companies.

“Old, large innovative firms with strict guidelines for the amount of money they spend on research & development belong to the Schumpeterian 2 type of companies. For them a liberalized labour market is not good in the long run. If the market is liberalized they will fire people or hire people with short term contracts. They do this because it’s cheaper, but they underestimate the role of tacit knowledge, the knowhow of people who have been working for the company for a long time.” 

For his research, Simigliani investigated about 150 innovative manufacturing companies. He added more scales to the Schumpeter 1 and Schumpeter 2 subdivision and categorized the companies. “I made a kind of Schumpeterness taxonomy,” Simigliani says, laughing, since the word Schumpeterness doesn’t really exist. He then looked at the amount of short- versus long-term contracts the firms had and how successful the companies were in exporting their products. The results were very clear. I didn’t expect such results.”

According to Simigliani, governments that want to liberalize their labour markets should not impose the same rules for all companies. “The labour market should be flexible for young companies and stable for older companies. This is a new sound,” the researcher concludes.

Simigliani is the first to be interviewed for the new series ‘The Graduate’, which will appear on this page every other week.


Food City

How to feed 9 billion people by 2050, most of whom will live in cities? ‘Food for the City’ (NAI Publishers) is a book that offers 13 views of how to continue feeding the cities, as proposed by a farmer, philosopher, chef and an urbanist – to name a few. The book, edited by Brigitte van de Sande, will be presented this Thursday evening, 5 April, in The Hague, starting at 17:00. And yes, food will be served.

bit.ly/HttBAw



Delta conference

Students, professors and delegates from the Deltaprogramme were welcomed to the first Knowledge Conference by Rector Karel Luyben and Delta Commissioner Wim Kuijken last Tuesday. The programme ranged from multifunctional dikes to building with nature and tsunami adaptation. The tongue in cheek competition ‘Delta’s next top model’ was won by Professor Guus Stelling (CEG), who improved on his own hydrological models, which he had created 20 years ago. The letdown of the event, according to Ties Rijcken (MSc), was the absence of research funds.



Reconnecting Rotterdam

TU alumnus Aart de Koning (MSc) was rewarded the biannual ‘Cuperus Prize’ for his thesis on traffic management. MP Charlie Aptroot presented the award at the Intertraffic event, held in Amsterdam on 28 March. De Koning designed a plan to reconnect Rotterdam with its harbor by means of public transport. Running passenger trains on freight rails, transport by boat and a new public transport tunnel were some of his original ideas. De Koning graduated at both CEG and Architecture and now works with Goudappel Coffeng in Deventer.

 

Editor Redactie

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