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Sustainable value management reveals a new space for studying business models. The traditional approach is based on the assumption that the goal of any business is to make money. All decisions regarding supply and production should be made to maximize profit. The discrepancy in creating non-economic value is sometimes the result of separating ownership from control over an enterprise. Although shareholders are interested in maximizing profit, management that actually makes decisions can also pursue other goals. In addition to economic aspects, the management intentions of modern managers are also influenced by factors arising from the organizational culture built, co-created within the organization and sometimes with the participation of external actors such as suppliers and customers. The sources of the creation of social values will be the management intentions of top management, often initiated by the adopted values and rules on the basis of which resources are bound within the structure of the business model. The value of sustainability is based on the identification of those creative sources that relate to economic and social value. Economic value is created through social value and vice versa. This allows the complementarity of the value created to be mutually supportive. The business model that integrates both of these values should be more resistant to crises than the one that is oriented only toward producing economic value. Concurrent implementation of economic and social goals increases resilience and affects the success of modern business models. This is due to the specificity of the business ecosystem that is built as part of the business model, which, in essence, is based on the use of social factors to merge the business model into a complex ecosystem capable of producing value.

Technology: general issues

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Electrochemical energy storage technologies play key roles for storing electricity harvested from renewable energy resources of an intermittent nature, such as solar and wind, and for utilizing electricity for a range of applications, such as electric vehicles and flights, wearable electronics, and medical implants. This book collects original research work on the fabrication of various nanomaterials, their applications in battery and supercapacitor technologies, and the investigation of the underlying structure-property-performance correlation in these complex energy systems.

Technology: general issues

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Microfluidic platforms are increasingly being used for separating a wide variety of particles based on their physical and chemical properties. In the past two decades, many practical applications have been found in chemical and biological sciences, including single cell analysis, clinical diagnostics, regenerative medicine, nanomaterials synthesis, environmental monitoring, etc. In this Special Issue, we invited contributions to report state-of-the art developments in the fields of micro- and nanofluidic separation, fractionation, sorting, and purification of all classes of particles, including, but not limited to, active devices using electric, magnetic, optical, and acoustic forces; passive devices using geometries and hydrodynamic effects at the micro/nanoscale; confined and open platforms; label-based and label-free technology; and separation of bioparticles (including blood cells), circulating tumor cells, live/dead cells, exosomes, DNA, and non-bioparticles, including polymeric or inorganic micro- and nanoparticles, droplets, bubbles, etc. Practical devices that demonstrate capabilities to solve real-world problems were of particular interest.

Technology: general issues

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Energy storage is one of the most important enablers for the transformation to a sustainable energy supply with greater mobility. For vehicles, but also for many stationary applications, the batteries used for energy storage are very flexible but also have a rather limited lifetime compared to other storage principles. This Special Issue is a collection of articles that collectively address the following questions: What are the factors influencing the aging of different energy storage technologies? How can we extend the lifetime of storage systems? How can the aging of an energy storage be detected and predicted? When do we have to exchange the storage device? The articles cover lithium-ion batteries, supercaps, and flywheels.

Technology: general issues

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The collection is diverse in the topics covered as well as the contributors, who come from across the globe. The overall topic is inherently a complex one since it integrates the exceptional complexity of cancer biology and treatment with the large and rapidly growing number of potential nanostructures and modifications that could be applied to treatment. In both cancer and nanotechnology, a very small change of a relevant variable can generate exceptional variability in biological outcome, creating inherent challenges to clinical adoption. As with many high-potential fields in medicine, the recognition of exceptional potential for nanotechnology in cancer therapy, with associated expectations of rapid clinical impact, has been followed by disappointingly slow progress that highlights not failure but rather unrealistic expectations for rapid progress. We have passed that period of expected rapid clinical impact for nanoparticle treatment of cancer and are now well-entrenched in the more realistic phase of exploiting the easiest applications, in this case packaging of established chemotherapy drugs, while carefully studying the exceptional numbers of relevant variables that must be evaluated for efficacy and safety of innovative strategies. Although never as rapid as hoped, the progress is clear and clinical impact is growing.

Technology: general issues