The era of hybrid governance is here. More and more organizations occupy a position between public and private ownership. And value is created not through business or public interests alone, but through distinct forms of hybrid governance. National governments are looking to transform their administrative systems to become more business driven. Likewise, private enterprises are seeing value gains in promoting public interest in their corporate social responsibility programs. But how can we conceptualize, evaluate and measure the value and performance of hybrid governance and organizations? This book offers a comprehensive overview of how hybrids produce value. It explores the drivers, obstacles and complications for value creation in different hybrid contexts: state-owned enterprises, urban policy-making, universities and non-profits from around the world. The authors address several types of value contents, for instance financial, social and public value. Furthermore, the book provides a novel way of understanding multiple forms of doing value in hybrid settings. The book explains mixing, compromising and legitimising as important mechanisms of value creation. Aimed at researchers and students of public management, public administration, business management, corporate social responsibility and governance, this book provides a theoretical, conceptual and empirical understanding of value creation in hybrid organizations. It is also an invaluable overview of performance evaluation and measurement systems and practices in hybrid organizations and governance.

This book breaks new ground by providing a structured and cohesive set of contributions on the actions, developments, problems and theories of corporate social responsibility (CSR). With new case studies from the UN's Least Developed Countries (LDCs), contributors in this book investigate how firms in Eastern and Western countries are responding to and making use of evolving CSR guidelines. The book addresses the following questions: is CSR simply greenwashing or an authentic commitment to responsible corporate citizenship? Has globalization drawn CSR conduct in LDCs closer to that of industrialized countries? Stakeholder theory, actor-network theory and a new orbital theory of accountability are applied to give coherence to the case studies. Other chapters address greenwashing in reports, the impact of CSR in socially stigmatized occupations, an analysis on what responsibility precisely entails in CSR, and the interface between law and CSR. The book also considers the impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry, and includes a contribution from Ukrainian scholars, one written while their city of Kharkiv was under attack by Russian forces. This book will be a useful reference to those interested in discussions on crises, climate change, and SDGs and realizing sustainable goals through CSR.

This book comprises selected peer-reviewed proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Industrial Automation and Smart Manufacturing (ICAIASM) 2019. The contents focus on innovative manufacturing processes, standards and technologies used to implement Industry 4.0, and industrial IoT based environment for smart manufacturing. The book particularly emphasizes on emerging industrial concepts like industrial IoT and cyber physical systems, advanced simulation and digital twin, wireless instrumentation, rapid prototyping and tooling, augmented reality, analytics and manufacturing operations management. Given the range of topics covered, this book will be useful for students, researchers as well as industry professionals.

This book considers governance and policy-making within the maritime sector, and focuses significantly on the dimensional context within which governance works. Recognising the importance of understanding governance and policy at times when the world is faced with social, political, and economic problems, it highlights the fact that both areas are equally significant in understanding today's political economy. By focusing on the maritime sector, a pillar industry supporting international trade activities, the book offers a unique perspective to explain the difficulties of balancing policy-making with governance in order to provide solutions. It also examines the importance of developing a governance process that encourages and accommodates juxtaposition in a way that ensures that the effect of independent policy-making is understood upon the success or otherwise of policies across a range of contexts and problems. Given the in-depth nature of the text, it is of interest to academics, researchers and professionals in the field.

This book is the first work to conduct the emergency logistics optimization problem under the epidemic environment (whether natural or man-made), which provides a new perspective for the application of optimization theory. In this book, the research methods involve epidemic dynamics, scenario-based emergency decision-making method, big data which combines the traditional and emerging technologies. The authors take epidemic outbreak as the research object and deeply integrate the epidemic spread model with the optimization model of emergency resource scheduling, which opens up a novel application area of operations research.

Enhancing Board Effectiveness seeks to examine the conceptualization and role of the board in a variety of contexts and articulate solutions for improving the effectiveness of the board, especially in developing and emerging markets. Enhancing Board Effectiveness with therefore address the following central questions: To what extent is the concept and role of the board evolving? What rights, powers, responsibilities and other contemporary and historical experiences can enhance the effectiveness of the board, especially in the particular contexts of developing and emerging markets? What socio-economic, political, regulatory and institutional factors/actors influence the effectiveness of the board and how can the policies and practices of such actors exert such influences? In what ways can a reconstructed concept of the board serve as a tool for theoretical, analytical, regulatory and pragmatic assessment of its effectiveness? In examining this issues, Enhancing Board Effectiveness will investigate theoretical, socio-economic, historical, empirical, regulatory, comparative and inter-disciplinary approaches. Academics in the relevant fields of accounting, behavioural psychology/economics, development studies, financial regulation, law and management/organizational studies, political economy and, public administration will find this book of high interest.

Successfully delivering projects at an organization can happen with the careful utilization of a variety of methods and practices. The best approach is a hybrid framework that adapts in real time to your team and its needs. This book addresses the practical realities of project delivery in the 21st century. The agile method is well-known and well-covered. Author Shawn Belling dives deeper with his expertise into organizational management and investigates how to best execute a graceful mix of waterfall methods, agile, and phase-based approaches. Each business and goal requires flexibility for a unique journey to success, and Belling provides the practitioner with practical, real-world examples and patterns of these methodologies. Succeeding with Agile Hybrids is the answer to the diversity of needs within your team. Whether you are an aspiring or current project manager, scrum master, or mid-level manager, this book will greatly benefit you and your goals for project delivery. Hybrid agile is the future, and you will be well-equipped to tackle it with Succeeding with Agile Hybrids on your shelf. What You'll Learn See how hybrid agile is a common de facto approach to project management Review common, practical and real-world examples and patterns of hybrid agile project management Evaluate projects and organizations for using hybrid agile or agile project management Who This Book is For Aspiring or current project managers, scrum masters, or mid-level managers with responsibility for projects or professional services delivery in a technical field. Executive leaders, academic and training programs may also pick this book as a text.

Multi-state System Reliability Analysis and Optimization for Engineers and Industrial Managers presents a comprehensive, up-to-date description of multi-state system (MSS) reliability as a natural extension of classical binary-state reliability. It presents all essential theoretical achievements in the field, but is also practically oriented. New theoretical issues are described, including: * combined Markov and semi-Markov processes methods, and universal generating function techniques; * statistical data processing for MSSs; * reliability analysis of aging MSSs; * methods for cost-reliability and cost-availability analysis of MSSs; and * main definitions and concepts of fuzzy MSS. Multi-state System Reliability Analysis and Optimization for Engineers and Industrial Managers also discusses life cycle cost analysis and practical optimal decision making for real world MSSs. Numerous examples are included in each section in order to illustrate mathematical tools. Besides these examples, real world MSSs (such as power generating and transmission systems, air-conditioning systems, production systems, etc.) are considered as case studies. Multi-state System Reliability Analysis and Optimization for Engineers and Industrial Managers also describes basic concepts of MSS, MSS reliability measures and tools for MSS reliability assessment and optimization. It is a self-contained study resource and does not require prior knowledge from its readers, making the book attractive for researchers as well as for practical engineers and industrial managers.

This edited collection addresses the question of which capabilities and competencies enable Behavioral Operational Research to provide sustained improvement to decision processes. The aim is to show how a focus on capability and competency will not only meet short-term requirements for problem solving and decision support, but also build a solid foundation for the future. The contributors present recent advances in Behavioral OR, with a focus on the ways in which users of models deal with incomplete and imprecise information, subjective boundaries and uncertainty. These chapters are structured around three key dimensions of BOR: capabilities, cognition and aspects of practice.

This book comprises the select proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Trends in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (ICETMIE) 2019. The conference covers current trends in thermal, design, industrial, production and other sub-disciplines of mechanical engineering. This volume focuses on different industrial and production engineering areas such as additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping, computer aided engineering, advanced manufacturing processes, manufacturing management and automation, sustainable manufacturing systems, metrology, manufacturing process optimization, operations research and decision-making models, production planning and inventory control, supply chain management, and quality engineering. The contents of this book will be useful for students, researchers and other professionals interested in industrial and production engineering.

This volume showcases the presentations and discussions delivered at the 2018 POMS International Conference in Rio. Through a collection of selected papers, it is possible to review the impact and application of operations management for social good, with contributions across a wide range of topics, including: humanitarian operations and crisis management, healthcare operations management, sustainable operations, artificial intelligence and data analytics in operations, product innovation and technology in operations management, marketing and operations management, service operations and servitization, logistics and supply chain management, resilience and risk in operations, defense, and tourism among other emerging Operations Management issues. The Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) is one of the most important and influential societies in the subject of Production Engineering and, as an international professional and academic organization, represents the interests of professionals and academics in production management and operations around the world.

The proceedings focus on selected aspects of the current and upcoming trends in transportation, logistics and decision-making. In detail the included scientific papers analyze the problem of Decision Making under Uncertainty, Stochastic Optimization, Transportation, Logistics and Intelligent Business. The variety of the papers delivers added value for both scholars and practitioners. This book is the documentation of the symposium "The Sixth International Forum on Decision Sciences", which took place in Jinan, Shandong province, China.

This book gathers a selection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the International Conference on Operations Research (OR 2019), which was held at Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany, on September 4-6, 2019, and was jointly organized by the German Operations Research Society (GOR) the Austrian Operations Research Society (OEGOR), and the Swiss Operational Research Society (SOR/ASRO). More than 600 scientists, practitioners and students from mathematics, computer science, business/economics and related fields attended the conference and presented more than 400 papers in plenary presentations, parallel topic streams, as well as special award sessions. The respective papers discuss classical mathematical optimization, statistics and simulation techniques. These are complemented by computer science methods, and by tools for processing data, designing and implementing information systems. The book also examines recent advances in information technology, which allow big data volumes to be processed and enable real-time predictive and prescriptive business analytics to drive decisions and actions. Lastly, it includes problems modeled and treated while taking into account uncertainty, risk management, behavioral issues, etc.

Corporate sustainability, now regarded as a vitally important topic on the agenda for businesses, has in recent years not only become embedded in postgraduate study, but is now also widely taught at the undergraduate level in business schools. Corporate Sustainability Leadership reflects the growing need for an accessible text at all levels of study. The book brings the topic of corporate sustainability fully up to date by incorporating new directions in the areas of corporate responsibility and sustainability. Written by the authors of the highly successful Understanding Business Ethics, this book provides a primary resource for any undergraduate or graduate corporate sustainability class. Unlike other textbooks in corporate sustainability, which are often edited collections from multiple authors, this book develops themes throughout each chapter using a consistent voice to ensure an integrative learning experience for both students and instructors. With ten chapters and ten cases, all of which are supplemented with online test banks, instructor guides, and PowerPoint slides, this textbook provides enough content for a complete class on corporate sustainability. Using stakeholder theory as a foundation, Corporate Sustainability Leadership allows readers to develop a better understanding of how organizations can effectively satisfy the needs of their critical stakeholders. It addresses the issues of corporate sustainability from both a micro and macro perspective. Micro issues related to corporate sustainability include leadership, organizational change, management decision making, human resource organizational strategies, organizational ethics, organizational culture, corporate sustainability reporting, corporate sustainability performance, and corporate compliance. The macro issues addressed include suppliers, corporate sustainability communications, consumers, the natural environment, governments, NGOs, and the developing world. In addition, there are ten unique company cases from organizations that are household names, such as Bayer, Shell, Volkswagen, and Dow Chemical.

Corporate sustainability, now regarded as a vitally important topic on the agenda for businesses, has in recent years not only become embedded in postgraduate study, but is now also widely taught at the undergraduate level in business schools. Corporate Sustainability Leadership reflects the growing need for an accessible text at all levels of study. The book brings the topic of corporate sustainability fully up to date by incorporating new directions in the areas of corporate responsibility and sustainability. Written by the authors of the highly successful Understanding Business Ethics, this book provides a primary resource for any undergraduate or graduate corporate sustainability class. Unlike other textbooks in corporate sustainability, which are often edited collections from multiple authors, this book develops themes throughout each chapter using a consistent voice to ensure an integrative learning experience for both students and instructors. With ten chapters and ten cases, all of which are supplemented with online test banks, instructor guides, and PowerPoint slides, this textbook provides enough content for a complete class on corporate sustainability. Using stakeholder theory as a foundation, Corporate Sustainability Leadership allows readers to develop a better understanding of how organizations can effectively satisfy the needs of their critical stakeholders. It addresses the issues of corporate sustainability from both a micro and macro perspective. Micro issues related to corporate sustainability include leadership, organizational change, management decision making, human resource organizational strategies, organizational ethics, organizational culture, corporate sustainability reporting, corporate sustainability performance, and corporate compliance. The macro issues addressed include suppliers, corporate sustainability communications, consumers, the natural environment, governments, NGOs, and the developing world. In addition, there are ten unique company cases from organizations that are household names, such as Bayer, Shell, Volkswagen, and Dow Chemical.

How do firms from emerging economies strive for the internationalization of their business? This comprehensive two-volume collection tackles this question by taking a closer look at underexplored issues, including bottom of the pyramid (BoP) business models, value creation and co-creation, employee commitment and the 'born global' concept. Taking both a geographic and thematic approach to the topic, the first volume addresses universal challenges such as inclusive innovation, the ethics of corporate leadership, and knowledge management, and also places a special emphasis on China. Providing an overview of the strategies and operations involved in internationalizing Chinese firms, this book is an essential read for those researching emerging markets and globalization in general, as well as Asian Business more specifically.

This work focuses on the creation of new knowledge, and how this has happened throughout all ages, as far back as the time of ancient philosophy to today. A product of integral research, it covers the process of creating new knowledge, leveraging existing knowledge, sometimes resulting in cutthroat innovations. It also includes knowledge systems such as conventional university systems to Mode 2 university concepts, culminating on integral research to innovation. This book will help the reader to realise that the subject of knowledge creation is no longer business as usual. Many innovations have been created for human benefit in general, but such innovations may have benefited only parts of society. The challenge in the world is that, while new innovations may be brilliant, there are sections of society who continue to slip into poverty. Modern innovators must also consider such communities and come up with appropriate interventions. This book will open the eyes of innovators to new possibilities. In addition, the subject of knowledge should not be an elitist affair. One may stand to gain a lot by seeing the knowledge in other people, whatever their station in life. This realisation can enable serious innovators to widen their scope in terms of the sources of existing knowledge which can be improved and reassessed as new knowledge. Such existing knowledge can be identified by engaging the very communities that may be affected by a problem or challenge. Such communities will have had time to interrogate their situations and think of possible solutions to such, though they might not have the economic capacity to implement such solutions. This is always a useful starting point if one is seeking a solution to a community problem. This book will be useful to students interested in the subject of knowledge and innovation, from under-graduate to PhD level. It will also benefit captains of industry, executives and managers who are interested in improving their knowledge improvement cycles in their companies.

This open access book, published to mark the 15th anniversary of the International Software Quality Institute (iSQI), is intended to raise the profile of software testers and their profession. It gathers contributions by respected software testing experts in order to highlight the state of the art as well as future challenges and trends. In addition, it covers current and emerging technologies like test automation, DevOps, and artificial intelligence methodologies used for software testing, before taking a look into the future. The contributing authors answer questions like: "How is the profession of tester currently changing? What should testers be prepared for in the years to come, and what skills will the next generation need? What opportunities are available for further training today? What will testing look like in an agile world that is user-centered and fast-paced? What tasks will remain for testers once the most important processes are automated?" iSQI has been focused on the education and certification of software testers for fifteen years now, and in the process has contributed to improving the quality of software in many areas. The papers gathered here clearly reflect the numerous ways in which software quality assurance can play a critical role in various areas. Accordingly, the book will be of interest to both professional software testers and managers working in software testing or software quality assurance.

Recent research shows that collaboration and social networking foster knowledge sharing and innovation by sparking new connections, ideas, and practices. Yet these informal networks are often misunderstood and poorly managed. Building on the groundbreaking, bestselling first edition, Knowledge Management Handbook: Collaboration and Social Networking, Second Edition focuses on two key elements in knowledge management: collaboration and social networking.

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To Innovate, Connect the People"

Jay Liebowitz, one of the top knowledge management authorities in the world, brings together 15 articles by researchers and practitioners who are among the leaders in their fields. They present numerous applications, concepts, techniques, methodologies, issues, and trends related to collaboration and social networking in a knowledge management context. They also point out areas that need more work, such as how to measure the impact of knowledge-sharing efforts in terms of innovation, profits, and customer perceptions.

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What Can You Learn from Your Informal Organization?"

Packed with case studies, this handbook explores how you can share knowledge, make connections, and generate new ideas through collaboration and interaction. It is a valuable reference and classroom text for those engaged in knowledge management, particularly from a collaboration and social networking perspective.

Despite the growing attention towards the importance of practical wisdom in business today, little research has been done about the concept of practical wisdom in the Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern traditions. Contemporary studies of wisdom are dominated by the philosophical traditions of Western thought, which is based on the ancient Greek concepts of wisdom. Much less is known about how practical wisdom, as illuminated by these other traditions, can be implemented in today's organizational settings. This book thus fills an important gap in understanding wisdom and how it is applied in a poly-cultural world. Wisdom is culturally bound. Wisdom is poly-cultural and interweaves individuality and communality. Practical wisdom is inextricably connected to many needs of contemporary personal and professional life. Moreover, the increasingly growing poly-culturality around the world requires a better understanding of how practical wisdom is understood in different cultures and traditions. Accordingly, there is a need for a) poly-cultural understanding of the concept of wisdom and b) the role of practical wisdom in a world crying out for wisdom. This book underlines the importance of developing a poly-cultural and interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of practical wisdom in today's complex environment. The book offers significant insight into the implications of the non-Western traditions of wisdom and how such an understanding of the non-Western traditions can help us better and more critically understand and appropriately address new multi-faceted complex emerging phenomena. While the Western traditions offer valuable insight into the implication of wisdom in modern life, an integrated view that brings together the Western and non-Western traditions can provide a more critical and practical insight into how to apply practical wisdom in a contemporary poly-cultural environment.

"Freemium Economics" presents a practical, instructive approach to successfully implementing the freemium model into your software products by building analytics into product design from the earliest stages of development.

Your freemium product generates vast volumes of data, but using that data to maximize conversion, boost retention, and deliver revenue can be challenging if you don't fully understand the impact that small changes can have on revenue. In this book, author Eric Seufert provides clear guidelines for using data and analytics through all stages of development to optimize your implementation of the freemium model. "Freemium Economics" de-mystifies the freemium model through an exploration of its core, data-oriented tenets, so that you can apply it methodically rather than hoping that conversion and revenue will naturally follow product launch.

By reading "Freemium Economics," you will: Learn how to apply data science and big data principles in freemium product design and development to maximize conversion, boost retention, and deliver revenue Gain a broad introduction to the conceptual economic pillars of freemium and a complete understanding of the unique approaches needed to acquire users and convert them from free to paying customers Get practical tips and analytical guidance to successfully implement the freemium model Understand the metrics and infrastructure required to measure the success of a freemium product and improve it post-launch Includes a detailed explanation of the lifetime customer value (LCV) calculation and step-by-step instructions for implementing key performance indicators in a simple, universally-accessible tool like Excel

This book provides a complete framework for contemporary shareholder activism and its implications for US corporate governance, which is based on director primacy theory. Under director primacy theory, shareholders do not wish to be involved in the management of the company; in the rare event that they wish to be involved, it is considered a transfer of power from the board of directors to shareholders, which in turn reduces the efficiency of centralised decision-making in public companies. However, this book demonstrates that shareholders do not use their power to transfer corporate control from the board to themselves, and that some form of shareholder activism is even collaborative, which is a new paradigm for US corporate governance. This book shows that while monitoring remains a key contribution of shareholders, they also bring new informational inputs to corporate decision-making that could not be obtained under the traditional board model. Accordingly, contemporary shareholder activism enhances the board's decision-making and monitoring capacity, without undermining the economic value of the board's authority. Therefore, this book argues that the complete approach of contemporary shareholder activism should be accommodated into US corporate governance. In doing so, this book considers not only legal and regulatory developments in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, but also the governance developments through by-law amendments. Furthermore, the author makes several recommendations to soften the current director primacy model: establishing a level playing field for private ordering, adopting the proxy access default regime, the majority voting rule, the universal proxy rules, and enhancing the disclosure requirements of shareholders. The book will be of interest to academics and students of corporate governance, both in the US and internationally.

The purpose of this book is to offer insights into the complex and often unclear context of public sector management, providing a new theoretical and practical approach to the analysis and interpretation of these issues. The book is grounded in the awareness that the public sector has too often shown inefficiencies, despite the expensive measures taken, and from manifold perspectives such as the economic, social, organizational, and institutional ones, among others. It acknowledges the lack of behavioral, cultural, and context-oriented research in the field, thus proposing to innovate the debate and to expand the current understanding of which organizational features characterize modern public administrations, what factors influence the predominance of different models, with a special focus on the Italian setting, benefiting from a wholly comprehensive innovative methodological approach. The findings offer key implications for theory, practice, and policy-making, contending the importance of holistic approaches to the debate and abandoning pre-constituted schemes to put forth the relevance of behavioral models. It offers a key message: contextual-specific and cultural factors influencing individual behaviors are important and should better influence policy-making processes, towards "glocalization" in order to improve quality.

This book looks at how multinational enterprises address sustainability within their business activities. Contextualized within a rapidly developing country in Asia, it explores how management practices, tools and techniques are implemented by foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the Philippines. The book introduces a useful three-stage and six-step sustainability assessment framework for company practices. The three stages are framed around impact identification, impact assessment and impact monitoring, with the six steps associated with these stages, including the initiation step, scoping, impact analysis, alternative selection, monitoring and evaluation, and feedback and follow-up. The book also highlights how voluntary guidelines and global sustainability platforms play an instrumental role in directing the practices of organisations when implementing corporate sustainability.