Grounded in extensive research and field testing, Design-Centered Entrepreneurship presents a concise problem-solving approach to developing a unique business concept. Step-by-step guidelines provide insight into exploring market problem spaces, uncovering overlooked opportunities, reframing customer problems, creating business solutions, and sustaining success and an entrepreneurial culture. Drawing on methodologies from the world of design, the book helps students of entrepreneurship fill in the missing piece that transforms opportunity recognition into a viable business concept. Plenty of useful diagrams help to organize key concepts, making them easily accessible to readers. This second edition has been updated to include social entrepreneurship, more international examples and enhanced support materials. The digital supplements include a virtual creative problem-solving profile, slides, and an instructor manual. Design-Centered Entrepreneurship is the ideal text for entrepreneurship and new venture creation courses with a focus on design thinking.

Finance Mathematics is devoted to financial markets both with discrete and continuous time, exploring how to make the transition from discrete to continuous time in option pricing. This book features a detailed dynamic model of financial markets with discrete time, for application in real-world environments, along with Martingale measures and martingale criterion and the proven absence of arbitrage. With a focus on portfolio optimization, fair pricing, investment risk, and self-finance, the authors provide numerical methods for solutions and practical financial models, enabling you to solve problems both from mathematical and from financial point of view.

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 this book, Edosa explores common challenges which limit the value that organisations can get from data. What makes his book unique is that he also tackles one of the unspoken barriers to data adoption-fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the intangible, fear of the investment needed and, yes, fear of losing your job to a machine. With his talent for distilling clarity from complexity, Edosa tackles this and many other challenges. -Tim Carmichael, Chief Data Officer, Chalhoub Group This book offers fresh insight about how to solve the interactional frictions that hamper the flow of data, information and knowledge across organisations. Yet, rather than being stuck with endless polarising debates such as breaking down silos, it shifts focus back towards the ultimate "to what end." -Jacky Wright, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Microsoft US If you care about AI transformation, empowering people or advancing organisational success in an increasingly digital world, then you should read this book. -Yomi Ibosiola, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Union Bank A retail giant already struggling due to the Covid-19 pandemic was faced with a disastrous situation when-at the end of a critical investment in an artificial intelligence project that had been meant to save money-it suddenly discovered that its implementation was likely to leave it worse off. An entire critical service stream within an insurer's production system crashed. This critical failure resulted in the detentions of fully insured motorists for allegedly not carrying required insurance. Making Data Work details these two scenarios as well as others illustrating the consequences that arise when organizations do not know how to make data work properly. It is a journey to determine what to do to "make data work" for ourselves and for our organisations. It is a journey to discover how to bring it all together so organisations can enable digital transformation, empower people, and advance organisational success. It is the journey to a world where data and technology finally live up to the hype and deliver better human outcomes, where artificial intelligence can move us from reacting to situations to predicting future occurrences and enabling desirable possibilities.

This book is designed to help MIS and information center managers and their staffs to efficiently and cost effectively meet the needs of end-users in their organizations. Focusing on managerial aspects of information centers, Robert J. Thierauf explores the ways in which new information technology--spreadsheets, query languages, report writers, word processing, etc.--can be placed in the hands of end-users without the interdepartmental conflict and loss of systems control often associated with such transitions.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Intended as an applied guide for hands-on practitioners, the book includes detailed examples and in-depth explanations of how to build and run a blockchain from scratch. Through its conceptual background and hands-on exercises, this book allows students, teachers and crypto enthusiasts to launch their first blockchain while assuming prior knowledge of the underlying technology. How do I build a blockchain? How do I mint a cryptocurrency? How do I write a smart contract? How do I launch an initial coin offering (ICO)? These are some of questions this book answers. Starting by outlining the beginnings and development of early cryptocurrencies, it provides the conceptual foundations required to engineer secure software that interacts with both public and private ledgers. The topics covered include consensus algorithms, mining and decentralization, and many more. "This is a one-of-a-kind book on Blockchain technology. The authors achieved the perfect balance between the breadth of topics and the depth of technical discussion. But the real gem is the set of carefully curated hands-on exercises that guide the reader through the process of building a Blockchain right from Chapter 1." Volodymyr Babich, Professor of Operations and Information Management, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University "An excellent introduction of DLT technology for a non-technical audience. The book is replete with examples and exercises, which greatly facilitate the learning of the underlying processes of blockchain technology for all, from students to entrepreneurs." Serguei Netessine, Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania "Whether you want to start from scratch or deepen your blockchain knowledge about the latest developments, this book is an essential reference. Through clear explanations and practical code examples, the authors take you on a progressive journey to discover the technology foundations and build your own blockchain. From an operations perspective, you can learn the principles behind the distributed ledger technology relevant for transitioning towards blockchain-enabled supply chains. Reading this book, you'll get inspired, be able to assess the applicability of blockchain to supply chain operations, and learn from best practices recognized in real-world examples." Ralf W. Seifert, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at EPFL and Professor of Operations Management at IMD

This book provides a theoretical and application-oriented analysis of deterministic scheduling problems in advanced planning and computer systems. The text examines scheduling problems across a range of parameters: job priority, release times, due dates, processing times, precedence constraints, resource usage and more, focusing on such topics as computer systems and supply chain management. Discussion includes single and parallel processors, flexible shops and manufacturing systems, and resource-constrained project scheduling. Many applications from industry and service operations management and case studies are described. The handbook will be useful to a broad audience, from researchers to practitioners, graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

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.

Uses practical business cases in regional Australia to illustrate opportunities and challenges confronting businesses in non metropolitan regions

This text aims to differentiate itself from other business statistics texts in two important ways. It seeks: to present the material in a non-technical manner to make it easier for a student with limited mathematical background to grasp the subject matter; and to develop an intuitive understanding of the techniques by framing them in the context of a management question, giving layman-type explanations of methods, using illustrative business examples and focusing on the management interpretations of the statistical findings. This further edition continues the theme of using Excel as a computational tool to perform statistical analysis. While all statistical functions have been adjusted to the Excel (2013) format, the statistical output remains unchanged. Using Excel to perform the statistical analysis in this text allows a student: To examine more realistic business problems with larger datasets; To focus more on the statistical interpretation of the statistical findings; and to transfer this skill of performing statistical analysis more easily to the work environment. Its overall purpose is to develop a management student's statistical reasoning and statistical decision-making skills to give him or her a competitive advantage in the workplace.

In this volume recent advances in the use of modern quantitative models for the analysis of various problems related to the dynamics of social and economic systems are presented. The majority chapters describe tools and techniques of broadly perceived computational intelligence, notably fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, neural networks and some non-standard probabilistic and statistical analyses. Due to the high complexity of the systems and problems considered, in many situations it is necessary to consider at the same time analytic, topological and statistical aspects and apply appropriate procedures and algorithms. This volume is a direct result of vivid discussions held during the Fifth International Workshop on Dynamics of Social and Economical Systems (DYSES) which was held at Benevento, Italy September 20-25, 2010, as well as a couple of post-workshop meetings and consultations.

This book is based on the review of literature on different themes related to business and management in the Asia Pacific context. All seven chapters included in this book explore the past, present and future of business and research. They cover diverse topics in the Asia Pacific context ranging from different ways of thinking to innovation implementation and efficiency, responsible tourism, internal marketing to leadership. This book will be useful for researchers, practitioners and policy makers. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

Optimization Tools for Logistics covers the theory and practice of the main principles of operational research and the ways it can be applied to logistics and decision support with regards to common software. The book is supported by worked problems and examples from industrial case studies, providing a comprehensive tool for readers from a variety of industries.

Within entrepreneurship education, Team Academy is seen by some as an innovative pedagogical model that enhances social connectivity, as well as experiential, student-centred, and team-based learning. It also creates spaces for transformative learning to occur. This second book of the Routledge Focus on Team Academy book series includes chapters from contributors working with the TA methodology in academic institutions around the world that discuss the challenges, benefits, and approaches to embedding the TA methodology in practice (around coaching, assessment, transformative learning, partnerships, programme evolution, etc.). This book is aimed at academics, practitioners, and learners engaged in the Team Academy methodology, pedagogy, and model, as well as those interested in the area of entrepreneurial team learning. Readers will be inspired to innovate in their delivery methodologies and to explore learning-by-doing approaches to creating value. The book also aims to challenge the discourse around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, offering insights, research, stories, and experiences from those learning and working in the Team Academy approach.

Technological innovation is a core aspect of corporate and national competitiveness and it is not only complex-requiring cooperation and coordination among many stakeholders-but it also involves high risk due to uncertainty. Financial markets are a key to successful technological innovation. This book looks at how traditional financing and non-traditional ones transform corporate innovation strategy. This book reviews Korean companies to illustrate the impact of financialization on technological innovation through the relationships among financialization, managerial myopia and short-termism of innovation strategy. It does so by conducting an empirical study using Korean firm and USPTO data from the period of 1980 to 2017. By analyzing the innovation capabilities of Korean companies and presenting indicators of technological competitiveness, it offers insights into how financialization has influenced organizational behaviour, causing them to shift strategy formulation, decision making for production, investment and technological innovation away from a long-term perspective to short-term one. This concise book will be of interest to those interested in strategy and entrepreneurship innovation, especially policy makers focusing on financialization or national level innovation strategies.

This book follows on the authors' successful development of the Three-Pillar Model (3-P Model) for organizing and leading in disruptive times. Its focus is on helping the reader to implement the model and providing a wide variety of application cases for these VUCA times (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity), including global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. The book covers a broad range of organizations: private and public sector, NGOs, local and global governmental institutions, global organizations such as UN, etc. In addition, it shows how the 3-P Model can be applied to challenges in organization design, management and leadership.

This is an academic book that explains in reahty, examines theoretically, and analyzes statistically information system investment in the banking industry with regard to the process of the information technology revolution. This kind of comprehensive research on the banking industry is the first in the world. It could be seen as an application study for Japanese financial deregulation after 1997. However, our project, the Workshop of Information System Investment, is a theoretical research venture, consisting originally, when it began in 1994, of economists and computer scientists. It aimed to measure the effect of com puter hardware and software on the modern economy, based on the microdata of each firm, and to extend the frontiers of economic science. It was, coin- dentally, the time when this project began full-scale operation, in July 1997, that the voluntary closure of Yamaichi Securities was decided. The failure of the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank was disclosed in November of the same year, and the breakdown, temporary nationalization, buying out, and mergers of several banks succeeded one another. Our research therefore suddenly got into the social spotlight on the application stage. Part I is the first history and strategic guidelines of information systems in the banking industry. Part II summarizes the economic analyses of informa tion system investment in the United States, Europe, and Japan. These parts are foundations for the statistical analyses in Part III."

The book offers a comprehensive introduction to methods for solving multiple criteria decision making and group decision making problems with hesitant fuzzy information. It reports on the authors' latest research, as well as on others' research, providing readers with a complete set of decision making tools, such as hesitant fuzzy TOPSIS, hesitant fuzzy TODIM, hesitant fuzzy LINMAP, hesitant fuzzy QUALIFEX, and the deviation modeling approach with heterogeneous fuzzy information. The main focus is on decision making problems in which the criteria values and/or the weights of criteria are not expressed in crisp numbers but are more suitable to be denoted as hesitant fuzzy elements. The largest part of the book is devoted to new methods recently developed by the authors to solve decision making problems in situations where the available information is vague or hesitant. These methods are presented in detail, together with their application to different type of decision-making problems. All in all, the book represents a valuable reference guide for graduate students and researchers in the both fields of fuzzy logic and decision making.

State-owned enterprises make up roughly 10 percent of the world economy, yet they are woefully understudied. This handbook offers the first synthesis of the topic since the 1980s and offers a comprehensive reference for a generation. The authors provide a detailed explanation of the theory that underpins the expansion of state-owned enterprises in the 21st century. Each chapter delivers an overview of current knowledge, as well as identifying issues and relevant debates for future research. The authors explain how state-owned enterprises are used in both developed and developing countries and offer an insight into complex and fascinating organizations such as the German municipal conglomerates or the multinational companies owned by states. New modes of governance and regulation have been invented to make sure they act in the public interest. This handbook brings together a wealth of international scholars, offering multiple theoretical perspectives to help shape a brave new world. It will be of interest to teachers and students of Economics, Public Administration and Business, academics, established researchers and PhD students seeking rigorous literature reviews on specific aspects of SOEs, as well as practitioners and decision makers in international organizations.

This book presents the concept of a fuzzy-based recommender system for user account privacy settings that can be used for citizen participation on online political platforms. The elaborated components are exemplarily based on the needs of a political platform implemented during the presidential election in Ecuador. The book readdresses the issue of privacy paradox demonstrating that, indeed, users' actual decisions of being private in most cases diverge with their initial privacy intentions. The two concepts presented in the book - the citizen privacy profile framework and the prototype fuzzy-based privacy settings recommender system - can be adapted by different organizations such as government institutions, NGOs, or private online service providers to meet their specific needs. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the areas of usage modeling, privacy, system design, and for service providers in eDemocracy.

This book provides an understanding of innovation models and why they are important in the business context, and considers sources of innovation and how to apply business frameworks using real-world examples of innovation-led businesses. After providing a solid background to the key concepts related to innovation models, the book looks at why innovation takes place and where the sources of innovation lie, from corporate research to crowd-sourced and government-funded initiatives. Innovation models across manufacturing, services and government are explored, as well as measuring innovation, and the impact of design thinking and lean enterprise principles on innovation and sustainability-driven imperatives. Offering a truly comprehensive and global approach, Business Innovation should be core or recommended reading for advanced undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA and Executive Education students studying Innovation Management, Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship.

The concept of processes is at the heart of software and systems engineering. Software process models integrate software engineering methods and techniques and are the basis for managing large-scale software and IT projects. High product quality routinely results from high process quality.

Software process management deals with getting and maintaining control over processes and their evolution. Becoming acquainted with existing software process models is not enough, though. It is important to understand how to select, define, manage, deploy, evaluate, and systematically evolve software process models so that they suitably address the problems, applications, and environments to which they are applied. Providing basic knowledge for these important tasks is the main goal of this textbook.

Munch and his co-authors aim at providing knowledge that enables readers to develop useful process models that are suitable for their own purposes. They start with the basic concepts. Subsequently, existing representative process models are introduced, followed by a description of how to create individual models and the necessary means for doing so (i.e., notations and tools). Lastly, different possible usage scenarios for process management are highlighted (e.g. process improvement and software process simulation).

Their book is aimed at students and researchers working on software project management, software quality assurance, and software measurement; and at practitioners who are interested in process definition and management for developing, maintaining, and operating software-intensive systems and services."

Within Entrepreneurship Education, Team Academy (TA) is seen by some as an innovative pedagogical model that enhances social connectivity, as well as experiential, student-centred, and team-based learning. It also creates spaces for transformative learning to occur. This fourth book of the Routledge Focus on Team Academy book series the TA model is examined outside of the traditional TA-based settings (industry, schools, communities of practice, etc.) in different countries (Brazil, Japan, UK, Finland, Argentina, Tanzania, Spain, etc.). The legacy that this has left in learners and practitioners who have engaged with the model is also explored. This book is aimed at academics, practitioners, and learners engaged in the Team Academy methodology, pedagogy and model, as well as those interested in the area of entrepreneurial team learning. Readers will be inspired to innovate in their delivery methodologies and to explore learning-by-doing approaches to creating value. The book also aims to challenge the discourse around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, offering insights, research, stories, and experiences from those learning and working in the Team Academy approach.

This edited three volume edition brings together significant papers previously published in the Journal of information Technology (JIT) over its 30 year publication history. The three volumes of Enacting Research Methods in Information Systems celebrate the methodological pluralism used to advance our understanding of information technology's role in the world today. In addition to quantitative methods from the positivist tradition, JIT also values methodological articles from critical research perspectives, interpretive traditions, historical perspectives, grounded theory, and action research and design science approaches. Volume 1 covers Critical Research, Grounded Theory, and Historical Approaches. Volume 2 deals with Interpretive Approaches and also explores Action Research. Volume 3 focuses on Design Science Approaches and discusses Alternative Approaches including Semiotics Research, Complexity Theory and Gender in IS Research. The Journal of Information Technology (JIT) was started in 1986 by Professors Frank Land and Igor Aleksander with the aim of bringing technology and management together and bridging the 'great divide' between the two disciplines. The Journal was created with the vision of making the impact of complex interactions and developments in technology more accessible to a wider audience. Retaining this initial focus, the JIT has gone on to extend into new and innovative areas of research such as the launch of JITTC in 2010. A high impact journal, JIT shall continue to publish leading trends based on significant research in the field.

The book deals with the management of information systems security and privacy, based on a model that covers technological, organizational and legal views. This is the basis for a focused and methodologically structured approach that presents "the big picture" of information systems security and privacy, while targeting managers and technical profiles. The book addresses principles in the background, regardless of a particular technology or organization. It enables a reader to suit these principles to an organization's needs and to implement them accordingly by using explicit procedures from the book. Additionally, the content is aligned with relevant standards and the latest trends. Scientists from social and technical sciences are supposed to find a framework for further research in this broad area, characterized by a complex interplay between human factors and technical issues.