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The support and influence of industrial business associations (IBAs) for the internationalisation process of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is questioned. This qualitative case study on the textile industry in Portugal illustrates how SMEs are influenced by their IBA. Findings suggest that it has a preponderant role in supporting the international expansion of associated SMEs. Particularly, the promotion and organisation of trade fairs seem to foster first entries and continuous international expansion in the same way the IBA seems to influence their foreign market selection. However, SMEs feel that the IBA’s work could still be improved by their facilitating more matchmaking processes, promoting collaborations, improving their seizing of available internationalisation opportunities, and providing more information about agents and distributors in foreign markets. Thus, we can say that, despite the internet and global opportunities that firms can directly benefit from, the role of IBAs is still relevant for SME’s internationalisation, and there is still room for improvement.

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The topic of digital transformation has become increasingly prevalent in recent decades. Its importance is justified by the fact that not only can it change the way companies operate, but also bring to light new business strategies. Indeed, companies have ramped up operational data collection opportunities and adopted digital practices to facilitate new flows of design information, allow teams to interoperate in different ways, or improve system performance. Given that a digital transformation occurs under certain sociotechnical contexts and with specific purposes, their success can critically depend on the ability to unambiguously describe this context and the intended transformation in the form of new operational scenarios. One of the challenges faced when attempting a digital transformation is that these efforts can be ad-hoc and poorly structured, which does not tie the transformation to strategic objectives and operational strengths and limitations. This paper aims at addressing this issue by leveraging an existing systems engineering analysis method called Concept of Operations to provide structure to the digital transformation process. Our work shows that this method has the potential to accelerate the sociotechnical system redesign cycle and generate actionable decisions aligned with strategic goals and operational strengths and limitations.

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The requirements of a software are the characteristics of the system, being identified based on information provided by the users or by experts in the business; and the effective management of this information is essential to ensure that the system meets the needs of those who will use it. According to research, one of the problems that negatively impacts the software development process is related to the conduction of the project requirements management activity. And in order to alleviate this problem, we carried out a research to verify if taxonomies, as tools used by the area of information management, can be applied in the context of requirements management. For this, we developed a taxonomy to meet a real software project and the results were evaluated in relation to its complexity, satisfaction, resources involved and adaptability. The present research is characterized in terms of nature as an applied research, aiming at solving real-world problems; as for the objectives, as exploratory and descriptive; and as for the approach, mixed methods are used, since it combines qualitative and quantitative forms of research in the same study. As for the methodological procedures, the bibliographic research was chosen to understand the concepts related to information management, taxonomies and requirements management. The evaluation results showed that taxonomies can contribute to the activities of the requirements management process and consequently increase the chances of project success. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

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