European manufacturing industries are changing fast. Amid the pressures of globalisation, emerging markets and shifting geographical patterns of consumption and production, competition and collaboration need to be redefined. The book contains roadmaps for survival in the emerging global competitive arena by and for practitioners, as well as concrete examples and theoretical studies across industries. New forms of cooperation are analysed which combine intensive collaboration with high competition in networks of excellence among suppliers, manufacturers and customers. The success factors...

The first part of this book gives a self-contained and mathematically rigorous exposition of classical conformal symmetry in n dimensions and its quantization in two dimensions. The second part surveys some more advanced topics of conformal field theory.