This study evaluates the effectiveness of IFC's strategic priority of private sector development in frontier countries (high-risk and/or low-income) by supporting micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) during fiscal years (FY)1994-2006. IFC has channeled its support to MSME's by: i) indirect financing through financial intermediaries, and ii) by indirect institution-building support via specialized regional small and medium enterprise (SME) development facilities. This evaluation analyzes IFC's development results and provides recommendations on how IFC's performance can be improved in this area going forward.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2008, held in Monte Porzio Catone, Italy, in June 2008. The 31 revised full papers presented together with 4 reports on workshops and tutorials and 3 keynote addresses were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers address different development modes, roles in the value chain, stakeholders’ viewpoints, collaborative development, as well as economic and quality aspects. The papers are organized in topical sections on quality and measurement, cost estimation, capability and maturity models, systems and software quality, software process improvement, lessons learned and best practices, and agile software development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2007, held in Riga, Latvia in July 2007. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 4 reports on workshops and tutorials and 4 keynote addresses were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers constitute a balanced mix of academic and industrial aspects; they are organized in topical sections on global software development, software process improvement, software process modeling and evolution, industrial experiences, agile software development, software measurement, simulation and decision support, processes and methods.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Measurement, IWSM-Mensura 2007, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in November 2007. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers deal with aspects of software measurement like function-points measurement, effort and cost estimates, prediction, industrial experiences in software measurement, planning and implementing measurement, measurement-based software process improvement, best practices in software measurement, usability and user interaction measurement, measurement of open source projects, teaching and learning software measurement as well as new trends and ontologies for software measurement.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations, KMO 2021, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in July 2021. The 28 full papers and 9 short papers accepted for KMO 2021 were selected from 86 submissions and are organized in topical sections on: knowledge management models and analysis; knowledge transfer and learning; knowledge and service innovation; knowledge and organization; information systems and information science; privacy and security; intelligent science and data mining; AI and new trends in IT.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, SPICE 2017, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in October 2017. The 34 full papers presented together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: SPI in agile approaches; SPI in small settings; SPI and assessment; SPI and models; SPI and functional safety; SPI in various settings; SPI and gamification; SPI case studies; strategic and knowledge issues in SPI; education issues in SPI.

Progress in collaborative networks continues showing a growing number of manifestations and has led to the acceptance of Collaborative Networks (CN) as a new scientific discipline. Contributions to CN coming from multiple reference disciplines has been extensively investigated. In fact developments in CN have benefited from contributions of multiple areas, namely computer science, computer engineering, communications and networking, management, economy, social sciences, law and ethics, etc. Furthermore, some theories and paradigms defined elsewhere have been suggested by several research groups as promising tools to help define and characterize emerging collaborative organizational forms. Although still at the beginning of a long way to go, there is a growing awareness in the research and academic world, for the need to establish a stronger theoretical foundation for this new discipline and a number of recent works are contributing to this goal. From a utilitarian perspective, agility has been pointed out as one of the most appealing characteristics of collaborative networks to face the challenges of a fast changing socio-economic context. However, during the last years it became more evident that finding the right partners and establishing the necessary preconditions for starting an effective collaboration process are both costly and time consuming activities, and therefore an inhibitor of the aimed agility. Among others, obstacles include lack of information (e.g. non-availability of catalogs with normalized profiles of organizations) and lack of preparedness of organizations to join the collaborative process. Overcoming the mismatches resulting from the heterogeneity of potential partners (e.g. differences in infrastructures, corporate culture, methods of work, and business practices) requires considerable investment. Building trust, a pre-requisite for any effective collaboration, is not straight forward and requires time. Therefore the effective creation of truly dynamic collaborative networks requires a proper context in which potential members are prepared to rapidly get engaged in collaborative processes. The concept of breeding environment has thus emerged as an important facilitator for wider dissemination of collaborative networks and their practical materialization. The PRO-VE'05 held in Valencia, Spain, continues the 6th event in a series of successful working conferences on virtual enterprises. This book includes selected papers from that conference and should become a valuable tool to all of those interested in the advances and challenges of collaborative networks.