This book highlights cutting-edge ecodesign research, covering product and service design, smart manufacturing, and social perspectives in ecodesign. Featuring selected papers presented at EcoDesign 2019: 11th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, it also includes diverse, interdisciplinary approaches to foster ecodesign research and activities. In the context of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it addresses the need for the manufacturing industry to design innovations for sustainable value creation, taking into account technological developments, legislation, and consumer lifestyles. Further, the book discusses the concept of circular economy, which originated in Europe and aims to increase resource efficiency by shifting away from the linear economy. Focusing on product life cycle design and management, smart manufacturing, circular economy, and business strategies, and providing useful approaches and solutions to these emerging concepts, this book is intended for both researchers and practitioners working in the broad field of ecodesign and sustainability.

The book provides a holistic and practical approach to lean management throughout the business value chain. The lean management framework and tools demonstrate the optimal design and use of methods, tools and principles for companies and organisations. The author describes comprehensively how lean management enables companies to concentrate on value-adding activities and processes to achieve a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. A wealth of best practices, industry examples and case studies are used to reveal the diversity and opportunities of lean management methodologies, methods and principles. Moreover, the book shows how lean management principles are ultimately applied in industries like automotive, healthcare, education and services industries.

Fostering inclusive green growth in Africa means addressing existing and emerging development challenges, while efficiently managing Africa's natural capital and building resilience to environmental, social and economic risks. Although this new paradigm for development has the potential to create tremendous business opportunities, there are also challenges. This book provides empirical evidence on the conditions for the emergence of green businesses in Africa. It includes 13 case studies, which identify the determinants of small and medium-size enterprises' engagement in inclusive and sustainable growth in rural Africa, and the factors that hinder eco-innovation in business and entrepreneurial activities. Furthermore it discusses appropriate regulations and policies to stimulate the development of green business in Africa. Offering insights into the relationship between eco-innovation, labor productivity and business competitiveness in rural Africa, this book appeals to scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested in a green economy for Africa.

In the age of corporate responsibility, green technology and sustainability continue to grip the consciousness of business and academic institutions. However, development of appropriate business-driven green applications requires an awareness of best practices of the green agenda. Green Technology Applications for Enterprise and Academic Innovation addresses the importance of green technology and sustainability for technology, enterprise, and academic innovation in energy management, renewable energy, and carbon reduction strategies. This book acts as the bridge for practitioners, academia, businesses, industrialists, governmental executives, and students seeking research in this emerging area.

This book provides a platform for discussing the challenges that organizations face in order to implement sustainability, ethics, and effective corporate governance, all of which are important elements of "standing out" from other companies. Examining the background of the New European Consensus on development with the new guiding motto 'Our World, Our Dignity, Our Future', the authors explore how this new legislation on sustainability issues around the world is forcing companies to deal directly with sustainability issues. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda), adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, is the international community's response to global challenges and trends in connection with sustainable development. With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at its core, the 2030 Agenda is a transformative political framework designed to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development globally. It balances the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, including the key issues of governance and peaceful and inclusive societies, and recognizes the essential interlinkages between its goals and targets, i.e., that they must be implemented as a whole and not selectively. The respective chapters in this volume raise a number of questions regarding companies' ability to implement sustainability, ethics, and effective corporate governance. Simultaneously, they explore how organizations must adapt to sustainability-related developments.

This book describes how international negotiations can be conducted in a structured, professional and effective manner. It also offers recommendations based on examples of successful negotiations from both economically leading countries such as the USA, China and Japan, as well as smaller countries such as the Netherlands, Israel and Morocco. Providing practically relevant experiences from middle and top management positions in different business sectors, the contributors focus on all elements of negotiations, spanning from preparation, execution, strategies and tactics to non-verbal communication and psychological factors. Moreover, the chapters offer detailed introductions to more than 25 countries around the globe, which can be used as a reference guide to doing business in the specific contexts.

This book provides professionals, as well as students, with the understanding that Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are now core business principles for sustainably. It encourages social entrepreneurs in their role as forerunners, in creating new business models that develop, facilitate or implement constructive solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues. At the same time, this book views corporate social responsibility as a means of challenging existing entities to realize and modify prior unsustainable and predatory business models; and to increase social, cultural and environmental accountability. By linking these two concepts, this book prompts a paradigmatic awakening, whereby the foundational driver of business creation and management no longer rests on profit maximization, but on improvement of the quality of life for society.

This book addresses the dilemma that firms face in engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) while maintaining a financially sustainable business model in the era of digital transformation. Several strategies that firms have taken to integrate CSR within the business model are also highlighted. To explicate the problems involved, the book primarily focuses on entrepreneurial ventures, given their nascent business model that best illustrates how business leaders can embed the social mission in the firm at the beginning of organizational founding. In this age, sustainability is an innovation's new frontier. For sustainable competitive advantage, the book argues for how companies can build more sustainable products, processes, and practices that benefit the firm and society through maintaining an entrepreneurial philosophy. The target readership consists of academics, students, and practitioners in the areas of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, organizational theory, and strategic management. This book clarifies the critical practices of sustainability-oriented innovative firms and creative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through a review of recent trends in CSR, the authors emphasize that CSR is no longer a "bolt-on" or some kind of window-dressing to satisfy public relations (PR) needs. Credible CSR is critical to business legitimacy and sustainability. Aware of the public's increasing scrutiny, companies are increasingly ramping up their focus on social responsibility, whether by championing women's rights, protecting the environment, or attempting to obliterate poverty, on local, national, or global levels. Simultaneously, more firms face accusations of "greenwashing" - backlash due to consumer mistrust in the intentions behind their CSR practices. While numerous works have highlighted this dilemma and how companies fall short in their prosocial goals or financial objectives (or both), there is a lack of understanding of the ingredients and crucial processes required for the successful implementation of CSR in entrepreneurial enterprises. This book serves to fill that gap.

This book explores a range of important theoretical and practical issues in the field of computational network application tools, while also presenting the latest advances and innovations using intelligent technology approaches. The main focus is on detecting and diagnosing complex application performance problems so that an optimal and expected level of system service can be attained and maintained. The book discusses challenging issues like enhancing system efficiency, performance, and assurance management, and blends the concept of system modeling and optimization techniques with soft computing, neural network, and sensor network approaches. In addition, it presents certain metrics and measurements that can be translated into business value. These metrics and measurements can also help to establish an empirical performance baseline for various applications, which can be used to identify changes in system performance. By presenting various intelligent technologies, the book provides readers with compact but insightful information on several broad and rapidly growing areas in the computation network application domain. The book's twenty-two chapters examine and address current and future research topics in areas like neural networks, soft computing, nature-inspired computing, fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation, machine learning, smart security, and wireless networking, and cover a wide range of applications from pattern recognition and system modeling, to intelligent control problems and biomedical applications. The book was written to serve a broad readership, including engineers, computer scientists, management professionals, and mathematicians interested in studying tools and techniques for computational intelligence and applications for performance analysis. Featuring theoretical concepts and best practices in computational network applications, it will also be helpful for researchers, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in the fields of soft computing, neural networks, machine learning, sensor networks, smart security, etc.

This book provides a broad understanding of whether law plays a role in influencing patterns of sustainable consumption and, if so, how. Bringing together legal scholars from the Global South and the Global North, it examines these questions in the context of national, transnational and international law, within single and plural legal systems, and across a range of sector-specific issue areas. The chapters identify how traditional legal disciplines (e.g. constitutional law, consumer law, public procurement, international public law), sector-related regulation (e.g. energy, water, waste), and legal rules in specific areas (e.g. eco-labelling and packing) engage with the concept of sustainable consumption. A number of the contributions describe this relationship by isolating a national legal system, while others approach it from the vantage point of legal pluralism, exploring the conflicts and convergences of rules between multiple international treaties (or guidelines) and those between the rules of international and transnational law (or both) vis-a-vis national legal systems. While sustainable consumption is recognised as an important field of interdisciplinary research linking virtually all social science disciplines, legal scholarship, in contrast, has neglected the importance of the field of sustainable consumption to the law. This book fills the gap.

This text targets an academic audience without focusing on a specific discipline. Its sound decisional models and analytical scrutiny combine with a broad cross-disciplinary perspective to attempt to give its readers a full understanding of the bargaining process. Features include: a cross-disciplinary approach; reliable and verifiable models for successful and constructive negotiation; and analytical commentary from a professional perspective.

This book provides insights into recent trends and innovation of technologies aiming to provide sustainable and energy efficient computing. The authors discuss approaches to provide solutions to real life societal issues and problems using sustainable and energy efficient computing approaches. The book gathers research and state of the art reviews on solutions for societal benefits by using sustainable approaches of computing. The book also intends to provide use-cases for certain real life societal problems. The book can be used by researchers of similar areas, technologists, environmentalists, educationists, research scholars and UG/PG Students as well.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR), examining economic sciences and managements to show the complexity of the contemporary perception and development of CSR in Poland. It considers well-being of workers, the importance of the common good and social innovations in relation to profit. It addresses consumers and organizations, underlining the role and importance of small and medium sized enterprises. This book shows the possibility of improvement management systems by using CSR in business operations. It is valuable reading for academics working in corporate social responsibility, business ethics and in Polish management more generally.

This book explores the concepts of sustainability and governance in relation to the governance of corporations - hence the ubiquity of the term corporate governance - and other bodies. It examines how these concepts are regularly used by politicians and by the media. The two concepts are however largely treated as being separate and discrete, and given equal coverage. The argument in this book is that the two concepts are inter-related and that good governance is a prerequisite for sustainability. The focus of the book therefore is different from most, as it seeks to integrate these two important issues. The approach used in this book is based on the tradition of the Social Responsibility Research Network - a worldwide body of scholars that, over its 20-year history, has sought to broaden the discourse and to treat all research as inter-related and business-relevant. The book examines diverse aspects of the changes to corporate and institutional behaviour that have recently manifested by focusing on these two aspects of sustainable development. Thus, the authors explore engagement and partnership between organisations, in order to consider the extent to which the focus has changed so much that we need to think about new approaches to our understanding of sustainability and differing effects in practice. The international mix of authors makes this an original contribution, sharing some of the best ideas from around the world.

This book provides a critical overview of technologies that are used within the fashion industry and supply chain, with a special emphasis on how they engender sustainability and the circular economy. The chapters present contemporary case studies alongside new research on technologies such as 3D printing, 3D scanning and recycling technology to assess the effect they will have on the future of fashion and its global supply chain.

This book presents an eclectic mix of interesting new areas in the domain of economics, management and sustainability. Written by leading experts, it provides valuable food for thought, with essays introducing new lines of research and empirical research papers offering sound research methodology. The book not only provides answers, but also raises numerous interesting questions concerning the areas covered to whet readers' appetites to learn more. Professor Anup Sinha is a respected teacher and is a great mind with wide-ranging academic interests spanning from economics and sustainability to management. As well as in various other places in India and the US, he has taught at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and Presidency College (now a University) Calcutta for almost three decades. To commemorate his contributions, this festschrift presents a collection of essays that are broadly subdivided into four sections: Economic Development; Vulnerabilities and Inclusive Growth; Sustainability and Corporate Governance; and Innovation and Management.