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This article studies the conditions of extracurricular internships carried out by Spanish journalism students in order to describe their regular professional routines, the elements that most frequently determine their work and their level of satisfaction with the stay. A survey was conducted in the universities of Málaga and Complutense of Madrid (n=210), whose results present an asymmetric internship system: among other findings, the training conditions depend on factors such as the type and size of the company or the section where the students are allocated; the supervision is dissimilar, with company tutors being much more dedicated than the academic ones, hardly known by the interns; and more than half of the students have been compelled to sign pieces they find unethical or barely professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of innovation and technology development in a country's economy, there has been an increasing need for selecting indicators to measure the degree of innovation of its companies. The indicators related to patents offer an excellent measure of this capability and can be used as an important source of information by innovative organizations, although the studies assessing this utility are scarce. This study, conducted throughout 2007, proposes a technology watch oriented analysis of the level of use of patent databases from more than 500 Spanish companies that have issued at least one patent in the period 1988-1998, followed by discussion of the study results. The analysis took into account global data, company size and sector of activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work shows how the characteristics of the current business environment, in which knowledge and human resources are considered of high importance, should be propitious for implanting technologies like intranets. Nevertheless, this is not happening in Spain's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). One of the causes of the low rate of adoption is the difficulty for managers to value and measure the benefits generated by intranets inside the organisations. With the traditional methods of economic valuation being questioned, we present the example of an analysis of benefits that intranets generated for 80 SMEs of the ICT sector, carried out by means of a methodology of measurement that combines qualitative and quantitative indicators. The results obtained show the positive contribution of intranets to these organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]