Tomasz Gołębiowski

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the relationship between innovation cooperation with domestic and foreign science-based partners (research and scientific institutions), and the innovation efficiency of Polish firms, as well as the role that firms’ size and absorptive capacity play in this relationship. The analysis covered 7,783 large and medium-sized manufacturing firms (CIS survey PNT-02). 2,795 of them declared the introduction of process and/or product innovation in the years 2008–2010, and among them 745 showed cooperation with institutional partners. The results of the structural model (SEM) indicate that both the absorptive capacity and size are important determinants of cooperation with those partners. The study revealed a statistically significant relationship between innovation cooperation and innovation efficiency, measured as the percentage of sales of innovative products in total sales.

The paper is aimed at the analysis of the concept of firm’s embeddedness and its influence on firm’s competitive advantage in the context of resource-based view of a firm, business networks theory, and international business theories. Embeddedness is characterized by the number of functional areas of the firm involved with external partners and the number of these partners, intensity and sustainability of linkages, and interdependence of relationships’ actors. The right level of embedding is crucial for augmenting and exploitation of the knowledge available to the firm. Therefore, embeddedness has been recognized as a significant determinant of firm’s sustainable competitive advantage in international markets. The paper discusses the specific issues related to relationship management, incl. those connected with the level and nature of embeddedness in transnational corporations (TNC). Analysis covers both the internal embeddedness, i.e. in linkages within the internal TNC network, and the external embeddedness, i.e. in relationships of headquarters or foreign subsidiaries with independent actors in a host country.

Selected result of GPR surveys, which were carried out on the dike of the Vistula River, three days after the flood in 2010, was presented in the paper. Radargram was processed in a standard way, which allowed 2D visualization of main loose zones in the examined dike. Theoretical background of numerical modelling of electromagnetic wave field in the geological medium was presented in the paper. The results of numerical modelling were used for the evaluation of water and air saturation of loose zones during radargram interpretations.

A standard measurement procedure currently applied in the ground penetrating radar (gpr) method is shortoffset reflection profiling. as this procedure delivers data that is suited only for qualitative interpretation, its application should be limited exclusively to reconnaissance surveys. There are various other techniques used in gpr surveying that may be regarded as non-standard, such as multi-offset and adaptable-polarisation surveying and tomography. because these techniques deliver information that allows for quantitative interpretation, they could be applied for the detailed examination of geological media and investigations of various buried anthropogenic targets. This paper focuses on the application of non-standard gpr techniques for the detection of high-porosity zones in river dikes. results from both field surveys and numerical modelling are presented.