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For many decades, it has been recognized that maintenance activities should be adapted to the specific usage of a system. For that reason, many advanced policies have been developed, such as condition-based and load-based maintenance policies. However, these policies require advanced monitoring techniques and rather detailed understanding of the failure behavior, which requires the support of an OEM or expert, prohibiting application by an operator in many cases. The present work proposes a maintenance policy that relieves the high (technical) demands set by these existing policies and provides a more accurate specification of the required (dynamic) maintenance interval than traditional usage-based maintenance.

The methodology followed starts with a review and critical assessment of existing maintenance policies, which are classified according to six different aspects. Based on the need for a technically less demanding policy that appears from this comparison, a new policy is developed. The consecutive steps required for this functional usage profiles based maintenance policy are then critically discussed: usage profile definition, monitoring, profile severity quantification and the possible extension to the fleet level. After the description of the proposed policy, it is demonstrated in three case studies on real systems.

A maintenance policy based on a simple usage registration procedure appears to be feasible, which enables a significantly more efficient maintenance process than the traditional usage-based policies. This is demonstrated by the policy proposed here.

The proposed maintenance policy based on functional usage profiles offers the operators of fleets of systems the opportunity to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their maintenance process, without the need for a high investment in advanced monitoring systems and in experts interpreting the results.

The original contribution of this work is the explicit definition of a new maintenance policy, which combines the benefits of considering the effects of usage or environment severity with a limited investment in monitoring technology.

The aim of this paper is to assess the welfare effects of the newest trends in food safety policies characterised by the shift from public to private intervention.

Food safety policies are analysed through concepts of new economic sociology, with a critical review of the literature on social capital.

The article shows that as food safety and quality attributes responsible for the exchange complexity are simply codified and enforced through standards and third‐party certification, the global value chain governance shifts from a relational type to a power‐based type, with possible negative welfare effects.

Further research would be required to verify the welfare effects suggested on the theoretical ground.

The article makes a useful updating of food safety policies and organisational innovation in the food system.

The paper introduces some new (with respect to the marketing literature related to the food system) concepts and theories of economic sociology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how new technology-based firms’ (NTBF) business and innovation resources affect firm survival.

The study leverages a data set comprised of 131 Swedish NTBFs located in 16 incubators. The first part of the analysis investigates the determinants of firm survival, and the second presents a statistical analysis. The business resources examined in this study consist of business planning and localization variables and four latent variables are developed. Patents at the firm start or during the firm’s first three years are considered as innovation resources.

First, this study shows that the latent business plans variable has a significant positive connection with firm survival. Second, patent development during firms’ initial years is critical to firm survival.

This study is longitudinal, with the first data collection occurring in 2005 and the second in 2014. The firms’ 2013 annual reports suggest that the firms’ survival rate is 55 percent. This longitudinal research that spans eight years shows how the development of patents is highly significant to firm survival.