Where they have worked best, financial mergers have profited from the simple economies of scale offered by a common information-technology system.

ECONOMIST: Japanese banking

For example, the distance between the centers of two black holes in galaxy clusters distant from each other and the gap between cell walls in a living organism differ on a vast scale, despite their sharing of common structures at the atomic level.

FORBES: Density Of Meaning: Creation As The Flip Side Of Memory

Mountains are at the same time social and political arenas with a wide range of management arrangements, including private property, traditional common property regions, national scale parks and reserves, and international treaties, all embedded within a rapidly changing global economic context that can create tensions between local mountain residents and distant users of mountain resources.

UNESCO: Social and Human Sciences

It brings together industry players to tackle common challenges and create the conditions to achieve full financial inclusion on a global scale.

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Together the Coke and Heinz bottles share a common materials platform that, as others adopt it, will result in growing scale economies, lower unit costs and more stable materials supply.

FORBES: Sustainable Consumption Is a Myth

Economics 101 tells us that this is exactly the type of industry in which the banks could gain economies of scale and create tremendous value by consolidation around open industry standards and a common technology platform.

FORBES: Enabling Lower Cost Peer-To-Peer Money Transfers?

Integrated horticultural infrastructure and a national smart grid have three important things in common: They can begin to have positive effects at a small level and expand to large scale, they are long term, and they produce jobs with money that circulates within our economy.

CNN: Commentary: Green way to create jobs, save cities

Not surprisingly given Microsoft's big cloud push, the emphasis with the upgrade is on improving how well the software scales for internet hosting -- the company wants one common backbone that can handle as little as a small e-mail server to large-scale Azure deployments and virtualization.

ENGADGET: Microsoft delivers Windows Server 2012, puts the enterprise on cloud 8

McKinsey, like the government, thinks that there is something in this, and in other common explanations of Britain's productivity gap, such as failure to exploit economies of scale and a poorly skilled workforce.

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