The Middle East was the region least impacted in the 2008 crisis, has investment systems markedly different to the West, is largely governed by Islamic Shari'a, and has varying forms of governance and institutional organization, which are not understood by many, nor how these systems shape entrepreneurial and industrial development. While the Middle East as a region has seen a small growth in entrepreneurship for women, and business scholarship on the Middle East has grown, there is no text in English that has brought critical insights from the Middle East together in a single volume. In examining women's entrepreneurship in the Middle East, this book aims to challenge Global North assumptions about the disempowering impacts of Islamic Shari'a and governance. Referring to the constraints of Islam on women's subjectivity and agency greatly misunderstands religious identity, of both men and women, and the way in which public administration and private sector institutions are organized in very different ways to Western regions. This timely text expands and adds new insights to the theorizations of women's entrepreneurship in the Middle East, through unravelling spatialized themes, and incorporates contemporary themes including: an Islamic science reading of women, work and venturing; changing families and entrepreneurship development; women managing social crises; Islamization, governance and women; Islamic feminist activisms and entrepreneurship; representations of women's entrepreneurship on social media; and women's collectives leading entrepreneurship via Facebook entrepreneurship. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of entrepreneurship, gender, work and organizations.

The world changes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope: trends expand, contract, break up, melt, disintegrate and disappear, while others are formed. Change - as opposed to stasis - is our normal condition, the only certainty in our lives, hence the need to create tools that provide organizations with the means to tackle change and navigate complexity. We must accept the reality of constant change and be prepared for a heavy shift in perspective: interconnection versus separation, acceleration versus linearity and discontinuity versus continuity. Anticipating the future requires more than the traditional predictive models (forecasting) based on the forward projection of past experiences. Advanced methods use anticipation logic (foresight) and build probable scenarios taking into account weak signals, emerging trends, coexisting presents and potential paths of evolution. Corporate foresight is fundamental to interpret and lead change. The two cornerstones of foresight are organization and management. As concerns organization, the authors advocate the separation of research (oriented to the market of tomorrow) from development (oriented to the market of today), the establishment of a foresight unit and the concentration of research activities mainly on the acquisition and recombination of external know-how. As regards management, after an overview of state-of-the-art literature on forecasting methods, the authors propose the implementation of a "future coverage" methodology, which enables companies to measure and verify the consistency between trends, strategic vision and offered products. These organizational and managing tools are then tested in a case study: the Italian company Eurotech SpA, a leader in the ICT sector.

* Proven, highly original career advice from an accomplished writer and entrepreneur * Unique lessons on life, creativity and professionalism that can be applied to establish and successfully operate an independent communications consultancy from anywhere in the world - or to leverage PR expertise in any personal or professional venture * Exclusive insights encapsulating all facets of business and the strategic communications skillset proven to underwrite success

Data virtualization can help you accomplish your goals with more flexibility and agility. Learn what it is and how and why it should be used with "Data Virtualization for Business Intelligence Systems." In this book, expert author Rick van der Lans explains how data virtualization servers work, what techniques to use to optimize access to various data sources and how these products can be applied in different projects. You ll learn the difference is between this new form of data integration and older forms, such as ETL and replication, and gain a clear understanding of how data virtualization really works. "Data Virtualization for Business Intelligence Systems "outlines the advantages and disadvantages of data virtualization and illustrates how data virtualization should be applied in data warehouse environments. You ll come away with a comprehensive understanding of how data virtualization will make data warehouse environments more flexible and how it make developing operational BI applications easier. Van der Lans also describes the relationship between data virtualization and related topics, such as master data management, governance, and information management, so you come away with a big-picture understanding as well as all the practical know-how you need to virtualize your data.
First independent book on data virtualization that explains in a product-independent way how data virtualization technology works. Illustrates concepts using examples developed with commercially available products. Shows you how to solve common data integration challenges such as data quality, system interference, and overall performance by following practical guidelines on using data virtualization. Apply data virtualization right away with three chapters full of practical implementation guidance. Understand the big picture of data virtualization and its relationship with data governance and information management. "

Achieving Successful Business Outcomes: Driving High Performance & Effective Transformations in a Continuously Evolving Business Environment Navigating in space is exponentially more difficult than navigating on the road - because there are too many directions to investigate, too many unknowns to be prepared for and infinite pathways to chart in the galactic system. So it is with business. Business environments are extremely demanding and change continuously, precipitated by innumerable actors and conditions. Business success cannot be predicated on the pedigree of a leader or a prescribed theory alone, as start-ups have amply proven. Large companies have tried to copy nimble-footed start-ups while start-ups, after achieving a certain size, have been forced to adapt to unchartered territory. Disruptions seems to be the order of the day. This book is about achieving successful business outcomes. An aircraft has a complex dashboard of dials, where only a critical few need to be monitored continuously, and other subsets warrant attention only during specific phases of the flight. A well-modeled business can be managed successfully using a similar strategy. But the larger question is how to model a business, with closely correlated variables, to represent the reality of the environment and to allow for devising, formulating and adjusting business strategy and actions in real-time. The author uses a simple but well-researched STA-Triangle (space, time and action) model to achieve this purpose. The core of the STA model is to help navigate effectively in a rapidly changing business environment. Unlike traditional business studies that use a single lens to define business rules or organizational practices, it uses the combination of space, time and action as the driver of outcomes - something fundamental and core to human thinking across the ages. This book contains both theoretical and practical applications - the former helps propel further research and analysis and the latter helps practicing leaders confidently drive their firms forward in any environmental conditions. It will also help causal readers understand how the future is evolving and how different organizations are responding to this change. The author includes more than a hundred supporting examples and tools that help create highly incisive and unique views for calibrating strategy and execution. Visit the authors' website at www.alokksinha.com

Buying decision making is a complicated process, in which a consumer's decision is under the influence of others. The buyer's decision making is directed in such a way that they must act as a consumer in society. Media and family are key socializing agents for adolescents. Moreover, changes in the socio-cultural environment in India necessitate that adolescents' influence in family's buying decision making should be investigated. In comparison to Western society, Indian society is quite different when compared in terms of family composition and structure, behavior, values and norms which impact adolescents' buying decision making. Adolescents, Family and Consumer Behaviour studies the role of consumer socialization agents for adolescents, examining socio-economic factors that influence adolescents' buying decision making in Indian urban families. It aims to discover the influence tactics that adolescents employ and to qualitatively analyse how marketers in turn influence adolescents. It addresses the topics with regard to strategic management and marketing and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of management, entrepreneurship, small business management, and human resource management.

Since the 1980s, governments have often sought to encourage entrepreneurship on the assumption that it creates small businesses which are the primary drivers of job creation. Largely because of this assumption, entrepreneurship has become a valid subject for academic research attracting extensive funding. Yet despite this explosion of scholarship, there is no accepted model of how entrepreneurship operates or even a commonly accepted definition of what it is. Simon Bridge posits that this is because entrepreneurship has been studied as if it were a deterministic science, based on the false assumption that it exists as a specific discrete identifiable phenomenon operating in accordance with consistent, predictable 'rules'. This challenging book contends that this misdirected search has produced more questions than answers. Accepting that entrepreneurship as we have conceived it does not exist could lead to new and valuable insights into what the different forms of entrepreneurship are and how they might be influenced. Scholars, advanced students and policy makers will find this a thought-provoking insight into the myths and misconceptions of 'entrepreneurship'.

This book develops a novel industry emergence framework to explain the features, interaction, and synchronization of key elements for the birth and growth of new industries. Organized around seven elements-firm strategy, technology, investment, supply networks, production, markets, and government-Theyel's framework provides inventors, managers, investors, scholars, and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of how industries emerge, helping them to be more successful at influencing the birth and growth of new industries. Understanding industry emergence is important because new industries can offer the advancement of technology, improvements in human health and the environment, growth of firms, creation of jobs, and economic development. With learning objectives, theory, tools, case studies, and end-of-chapter questions, Industry Emergence will be a useful resource for students and professionals in engineering, science, business, and policy.

This book examines the managerial dimensions of business intelligence (BI) systems. It develops a set of guidelines for value creation by implementing business intelligence systems and technologies. In particular the book looks at BI as a process - driven by a mix of human and technological capabilities - to serve complex information needs in building insights and providing aid in decision making. After an introduction to the key concepts of BI and neighboring areas of information processing, the book looks at the complexity and multidimensionality of BI. It tackles both data integration and information integration issues. Bodies of knowledge and other widely accepted collections of experience are presented and turned into lessons learned. Following a straightforward introduction to the processes and technologies of BI the book embarks on BI maturity and agility, the components, drivers and inhibitors of BI culture and soft BI factors like attention, sense and trust. Eventually the book attempts to provide a holistic view on business intelligence, possible structures and tradeoffs and embarks to provide an outlook on possible developments in BI and analytics.

Creative Problem Solving • Total Systems Intervention • Robert L. Flood and Michael C. Jackson Department of Management Systems and Sciences, University of Hull, UK In the modern world organisations are faced with innumerable and multifaceted issues which cannot be captured in the minds of a few experts and solved with the aid of some super-method. It would be equally wrong to revert to a trial and error approach. We need to retain rigorous and formalised thinking, while admitting the need for a range of problem solving methodologies. The future prospects of management science will be much enhanced if (a) the diversity of issues confronting managers is accepted, (b) work on developing a rich variety of problem solving methodologies is undertaken, and (c) we continually ask the question: "What kind of issue can be ‘managed’ with which sort of methodology?" This volume, Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention, amounts to the bringing together of a huge human effort in the area of the management sciences. Each particular methodology that we have presented in this book is the realisation of years of work by many people, and the management and organisation theory to which we refer goes back nearly a century and has employed armies of researchers. Total systems intervention stands at the top of this mountain of effort and is able to offer an overview of the management-oriented disciplines which enables managers and decision makers to gain a command over how to employ them as a whole.

Practicing business with a conscience leaves no sector untouched. It trickles into how we treat our employees; approach our work in general; address stakeholders; engage in accounting, financial, and production management practices; implement and manage information technology; communicate on a direct and indirect basis; and market what we stand for. Business has encountered an interesting evolution in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, with social media as a catalyst aiding greater understanding and improvement regarding the critical value of soft skills, workplace diversity, change readiness, moral responsibility, sustainable awareness, and a general socially responsible mindset. This amalgamate spirit of business as we envision it in both the near and far future has found its way in all segments of business education, research, and practice. Adhering to the global trend of increased responsibility and evoking a constructive change in the narrative of business, this Research Companion serves as a critical reference work for business scholars and practitioners in various settings. It brings together contributing scholars from multiple business areas, from a variety of cultures and locations of the world, in order to achieve the compilation of a reference work that will find an expansive appeal. Including insights from the broad business spectrum ranging from internal managerial practices to strategic applications, including international sensitivity, this volume highlights the urgency for increased awareness in business decision-making on all fronts. It will be of great value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of corporate social responsibility, business ethics, leadership, organizational studies, and entrepreneurship.

There are many books written for the accounting and finance community. However, there are very few books written to help the non-financial career professionals who still need to understand the conceptual fundamentals of accounting and finance. In 20 years of teaching this material to non-financial professionals, Dr. Bonner has perfected a teaching approach that works to help the non-financial professional engage with the material to use financial information in leveraging their career without becoming overloaded with information that is not helpful to them. Learning this material takes repetition, application, and building the thinking processes necessary for effectiveness. Many think the challenge with finance is the math, but as this book will demonstrate, it is a conceptual problem. If you understand the conceptual framework, you will understand the math. Dr. Julie Bonner is currently a tenured professor at Central Washington University in the information technology and administrative management department. Her career has spanned business and education for over 30 years. Initially, she received a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting, whereafter she earned an MBA and then a doctorate in organizational leadership.

Bringing together theoretical and empirical studies from the Journal of Information Technology, this book provides a definitive guide to research discovered on the growing global sourcing phenomenon. Paying particular attention to Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), theoretical chapters explore insightful ways of thinking about the different facets of outsourcing, and provide useful information to practitioners and researchers. Empirical chapters report the findings of 405 major research studies into the risks and successes of relationships between customer and vendor, the development of trust in these relationships, the factors affecting locations for offshoring, and specialized offshoring organizations such as captive centres. In this comprehensive study, the editors present an expert review of the historical development of this field, and offer analysis of emerging findings and practices for the future.

Important insights into the true purpose of IT?from a CIO's perspective

Focusing on the qualities required to transform an organization through the lens of the CIO, this book provides practical advice on how to address key issues, as well as create a context for the type of leadership qualities required to broaden the CIO's impact in every aspect of the corporation. Provides practical advice on key issues for leadership qualitiesLooks at the differences between leadership and management and the need for effectiveness in both disciplinesExplores relationship management, communication skills, change management, developing human capital, sustainability, alignment, and qualities of great leaders

A timely look at how the IT function can become totally aligned with the strategies and operational direction of the business enterprise, Lessons in IT Transformation reveals how CIOs can?and should?evolve from managers of utility services to business leaders who can drive revenue, value, and process redesign.

Covers the largest scope of developing, emerging and transition economies (DETE). Investigates a full set of factors including context, financial strategy, innovation and performance of firms in DETE. Looks at both the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship, finance, innovation and development in DETE. Provides insightful business and policy implications. Contributions come from researchers and practitioners around the world, who focus on entrepreneurial finance, innovation and developmental issues of DETE in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America.

Plastics have occupied an important place in the modern medical industry. It has substituted traditional devices and products made of metal, other materials, and ceramics. Over recent years, increased reliance on transparent plastic pharmaceutical and medical products has produced remarkable breakthroughs that improve medical attention delivery and allow it to be more comfortable for the masses to live better and longer lives. The purpose of this handbook is to provide a strategic perspective on the market to identify opportunities for growth and promising niches in the medical plastics market. It also helps in analyzing emerging trends in medical plastics to facilitate new product development. The medical plastics market is a new field with a broad scope and unending opportunities for manufacturers and suppliers and medical practitioners from healthcare. With a combination of the right material and technology, it has a lot to offer to the patients with affordable pricing. By keeping the worth of the medical plastics market in mind, we have set some objectives. This book identifies growth factors in the medical plastics market and analyzes critical factors of success to compete. The author presents background on the medical plastics market by its usage, products, processes, and innovation. He also reviews existing studies on the medical plastics market for topics like market size, market growth, segment growth, and geographic markets.

In many countries, business practitioners, policy makers, pundits and laypeople want to know how strong China really is in business. In the preceding century, the overall tone of business comments on China was filled with fanfare and ovation. However, despite economic performance and seemingly inexorable growth, some global data in areas such as labour productivity and digital competitiveness, show a different and more nuanced picture. This collection provides a multi-level reality check on the Chinese economy, firm performance and managerial ties. Given that China must transform its economy and business that can pull global talent together to produce high-end technologies for radically innovative products and services, this book proposes two questions. First, can China restructure its economy from a low-cost growth model to a high value-added innovative model without incurring major structural inertia? Second, can Chinese firms outperform competitors in global high value markets without relying on state initiatives, central funding mechanisms and public R&D institutions? This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Asia Pacific Business Review.

This book provides specialists and executives with a clear, yet practical set of recommendations to meet the challenges of digital transformation and ensure long-term success as a leader in a primarily digital business world. The authors describe the fundamental principles of digitization and its economic opportunities and risks, integrating them into a framework of classic and new management methods. The book also explores how increasing digitization - not only of communication, but of complete value chains - has led to a need to establish a digital business leadership. Digitization is changing people and markets: it causes the upheaval of entire industries, creates new digital-centric companies, and forces established companies to cope with the transformation activities associated with these digitization processes. New approaches and methods have to be learned, tried and tested patterns of thinking have to be explored, and last but not least, innovation activities have to be understood as continuous necessities. At the same time, digital business offers considerable opportunities for renewing competitive advantages, improving existing process structures and realigning products, services and business models.

This book highlights the growing number of 'post-bureaucratic' firms that are abandoning hierarchical organizational forms in favor of self-managing teams. Addressing the need to outperform, these new organization types foresee the benefits of an organic structure with new and more indirect forms of control, and aim to coordinate the activities of highly-skilled workers without relying on a bureaucratic superstructure. The chapters explore the tensions that exist between external and internal institutional forces. As new forms of control strategies emerge, mostly value-based, this book accounts for the cognitive categories, conventions, rules and logic that should be integrated and combined with traditional forms of managerial controls in order to enable co-existence with established bureaucratic frameworks. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of organizational behavior and innovation management, and also practitioners and managers aiming to shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to post-bureaucratic forms.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of software processes, covering in particular the following essential topics: software process modelling, software process and lifecycle models, software process management, deployment and governance, and software process improvement (including assessment and measurement). It does not propose any new processes or methods; rather, it introduces students and software engineers to software processes and life cycle models, covering the different types ranging from "classical", plan-driven via hybrid to agile approaches. The book is structured as follows: In chapter 1, the fundamentals of the topic are introduced: the basic concepts, a historical overview, and the terminology used. Next, chapter 2 covers the various approaches to modelling software processes and lifecycle models, before chapter 3 discusses the contents of these models, addressing plan-driven, agile and hybrid approaches. The following three chapters address various aspects of using software processes and lifecycle models within organisations, and consider the management of these processes, their assessment and improvement, and the measurement of both software and software processes. Working with software processes normally involves various tools, which are the focus of chapter 7, before a look at current trends in software processes in chapter 8 rounds out the book. This book is mainly intended for graduate students and practicing professionals. It can be used as a textbook for courses and lectures, for self-study, and as a reference guide. When used as a textbook, it may support courses and lectures on software processes, or be used as complementary literature for more basic courses, such as introductory courses on software engineering or project management. To this end, it includes a wealth of examples and case studies, and each chapter is complemented by exercises that help readers gain a better command of the concepts discussed.

This book investigates the formation, configuration and consolidation of elites amongst Kenya's Maasai. The Maasai ethnic group is one of the world's most anthropologized populations, but research tends to focus on what appears to be their dismal situation, analysing how their culture hinders or challenges modern ideas of economic and political development. This book instead focuses on the Maasai men and women who rise to the position of elites, overcoming the odds to take on positions as politicians, professors, CEOs, and high-end administrators. The twenty-first century has seen new opportunities for progression beyond the social reproduction of family wealth, with NGOs, missionaries, tourists and researchers providing new sources of global capital flows. The author, who is Maasai herself, demonstrates the diverse local, national, and global resources and opportunities which lead to social mobility and elite formation. The book also shows how female elites have been able to navigate a patriarchal society in their journey to attaining and maintaining elite status. This book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of anthropology, political science, international development, sociology, and African studies.

Supporting employee entrepreneurship is among major challenges contemporary organizations face. Many facets of corporate entrepreneurship are investigated, and the body of knowledge in the field is growing rapidly; nevertheless, there are still knowledge and research gaps to be filled. Notably, while there are studies linking HRM with corporate entrepreneurship, studies on connections between CSR-oriented practices and corporate/employee entrepreneurship are to be developed. The main goal of this book is to explain relationships between corporate volunteering and employee entrepreneurship in organisations. The book combines two extremely vivid fields of research: entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. Based on their own research, the authors present how participation in corporate volunteering, as one of the CSR practices in organisations, leads to strengthening employee entrepreneurial behaviour. The book offers a framework showing the role of CSR practices in shaping entrepreneurial and innovative employees' behaviour. This book is aimed mainly at postgraduates, researchers and academics in the fields of entrepreneurship and corporate volunteering. As it touches vital fields of managerial education and management, it will also be of interest to master level students at universities or business schools as well as business practitioners.

For decades, outsourcing has been a major international phenomenon in business. The areas of Technology, Information Technology and Management represent a unique case for outsourcing both in terms of benefits and potential interorganisational problems. This fully updated text has been brought up to date with this new landscape, including discussion of Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Things, cloud computing, low code and DevOps and agile. With a range of new global case studies in manufacturing, logistics, chemical industry and cloud services, this textbook offers a strong grounding in real-world industrial experience that effectively combines theory with practice. Uniquely, this book focuses on both sides of the outsourcing relationship, providing a balanced exploration of the ways in which these partnerships can be managed successfully. Accessible and cutting-edge, the third edition of Managing Information Technology Outsourcing provides an in-depth, practical perspective on this important and far-reaching challenge in information technology management. It is an ideal text for students, academics and practitioners alike.

This book addresses the topic of exploiting enterprise-linked data with a particular focus on knowledge construction and accessibility within enterprises. It identifies the gaps between the requirements of enterprise knowledge consumption and "standard" data consuming technologies by analysing real-world use cases, and proposes the enterprise knowledge graph to fill such gaps. It provides concrete guidelines for effectively deploying linked-data graphs within and across business organizations. It is divided into three parts, focusing on the key technologies for constructing, understanding and employing knowledge graphs. Part 1 introduces basic background information and technologies, and presents a simple architecture to elucidate the main phases and tasks required during the lifecycle of knowledge graphs. Part 2 focuses on technical aspects; it starts with state-of-the art knowledge-graph construction approaches, and then discusses exploration and exploitation techniques as well as advanced question-answering topics concerning knowledge graphs. Lastly, Part 3 demonstrates examples of successful knowledge graph applications in the media industry, healthcare and cultural heritage, and offers conclusions and future visions.

This book aims to identify promising future developmental opportunities and applications for Tech Mining. Specifically, the enclosed contributions will pursue three converging themes: The increasing availability of electronic text data resources relating to Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I). The multiple methods that are able to treat this data effectively and incorporate means to tap into human expertise and interests. Translating those analyses to provide useful intelligence on likely future developments of particular emerging S&T targets. Tech Mining can be defined as text analyses of ST&I information resources to generate Competitive Technical Intelligence (CTI). It combines bibliometrics and advanced text analytic, drawing on specialized knowledge pertaining to ST&I. Tech Mining may also be viewed as a special form of "Big Data" analytics because it searches on a target emerging technology (or key organization) of interest in global databases. One then downloads, typically, thousands of field-structured text records (usually abstracts), and analyses those for useful CTI. Forecasting Innovation Pathways (FIP) is a methodology drawing on Tech Mining plus additional steps to elicit stakeholder and expert knowledge to link recent ST&I activity to likely future development. A decade ago, we demeaned Management of Technology (MOT) as somewhat self-satisfied and ignorant. Most technology managers relied overwhelmingly on casual human judgment, largely oblivious of the potential of empirical analyses to inform R&D management and science policy. CTI, Tech Mining, and FIP are changing that. The accumulation of Tech Mining research over the past decade offers a rich resource of means to get at emerging technology developments and organizational networks to date. Efforts to bridge from those recent histories of development to project likely FIP, however, prove considerably harder. One focus of this volume is to extend the repertoire of information resources; that will enrich FIP. Featuring cases of novel approaches and applications of Tech Mining and FIP, this volume will present frontier advances in ST&I text analytics that will be of interest to students, researchers, practitioners, scholars and policy makers in the fields of R&D planning, technology management, science policy and innovation strategy.