Small businesses make up some 90-95 percent of all global firms. Many undervalue the importance of information and communication technology (ICT). Within the small business segment there can be significant differences amongst the avid early adopters of ICT and the laggards. Research on early adopters tends be more prevalent as they are perceived to have a more interesting and positive story. However, late adopters and 'laggards' also have their own interesting stories that are under-reported. Small Business and Effective ICT draws on research undertaken over several years and documents the adoption/use of ICT across 'better' users of ICT (Leaders), typical ICT users (Operationals) and late adopters (Laggards). The findings are presented using a re-formulation of the LIASE framework which addresses a number of areas that include ICT literacy (L), information content/communication (I), Access (A), Infrastructure (I), Support (S) and Evaluation (E). Some 60 businesses were investigated in Australia and the UK, with each business presented as a concise vignette. The vignettes serve to show that small businesses are not as conservative in their use of ICT as the literature suggests, with examples of innovative uses of ICT in small businesses provided. Lessons for the effective use of ICT by small businesses are presented. The research design, methods adopted, presentation of findings through the vignettes, and 'take away' lessons have been written in manner to appeal to a broad range of readers including academics, researchers, students and policy makers in the discipline.

This book provides insights into the intellectual property rights (IPR) managerial practices of key IPR executives from a range of multinational companies, including major research and development firms. It identifies gaps in IPR management and considers the Tabular Application Development (TAD) methodology IPR process optimisation model. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach, providing a conceptual framework derived from practice and enriched with theoretical insights, and offering organisational recommendations. In taking into account both Back and Front office processes, Towards Intellectual Property Rights Management will help businesses navigate the maze of IPR and maximise the value they get from innovation.

This book gathers extended versions of the best papers presented at the Global Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Its Application Areas (GJCIE), held in Vienna on July 20-21, 2017. They offer a snapshot of the current state of the art in three main related fields of research, namely industrial engineering, engineering and technology management, and healthcare systems engineering management. The book is intended to integrate theory and practice and to merge different perspectives, from the academic to the industrial and governmental one.

This thesis reports on an innovative production-scheduling model for virtual computer-integrated manufacturing (VCIM) systems. It also describes a robust genetic algorithm for production scheduling in VCIM systems. The model, which is the most comprehensive of its kind to date, is not only capable of supporting collaborative shipment scheduling and handling multiple product orders simultaneously, but also helps cope with multiple objective functions under uncertainties. In turn, the genetic algorithm, characterised by an innovative algorithm structure, chromosome encoding, crossover and mutation, is capable of searching for optimal/suboptimal solutions to the complex optimisation problem in the VCIM production- scheduling model described. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified in a comprehensive case study.

This book examines the different motivational policies used for inventory management. In many competitive markets, sellers use motivational policies to encourage the customers to buy more and these kinds of strategies are used as competitive tools. This book brings together all the motivational policies for lot sizing decisions and offers a useful guide for inventory control. Each chapter applies deterministic inventory models such as economic order quantity (EOQ) and economic production quantity (EPQ), but also stochastic models for the motivational policy covered. The book begins exploring quantity discounts such as all-unit and incremental discounts. It then looks at delayed payment or trade credit policies that are applied by many suppliers and/or wholesalers to increase their sales. The motivational policies covered in the following chapters are dedicated to advance payment/prepayment schemes and also special sales offered by retailers to increase sales levels or decrease the inventory level. Finally the book concludes with a review of announced price increases, which persuades customers to buy a product at the current price, rather than paying more for it in the future. Inventory Control Models with Motivational Policies should be useful for professionals working on supply chains, but also researchers in operations research and inventory management.

Written by leading authorities in database and Web technologies, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners alike. The popularity of the Web and Internet commerce provides many extremely large datasets from which information can be gleaned by data mining. This book focuses on practical algorithms that have been used to solve key problems in data mining and can be applied successfully to even the largest datasets. It begins with a discussion of the MapReduce framework, an important tool for parallelizing algorithms automatically. The authors explain the tricks of locality-sensitive hashing and stream-processing algorithms for mining data that arrives too fast for exhaustive processing. Other chapters cover the PageRank idea and related tricks for organizing the Web, the problems of finding frequent itemsets, and clustering. This third edition includes new and extended coverage on decision trees, deep learning, and mining social-network graphs.

While there are many books on knowledge management, knowledge governance is a concept that has not been so well explored, and is much less understood. Knowledge governance refers to choosing structures and mechanisms that can influence the processes of sharing and creating knowledge.
The book argues that knowledge governance is a distinct issue in management and organization because knowledge processes differ on several dimensions from routine and more traditional processes. The relationship between governance issues and knowledge processes is under-researched, theoretically as well as empirically. Thematically, knowledge governance cuts across fields such as general management, human resource management, the management of intellectual capital, innovation theory, strategic management, technology strategy, and international business. Not surprisingly, existing ideas are developed from the perspectives of different fields and from different underlying disciplinary foundations; however, it often remains unclear how these ideas relate together and how they differ in terms of unit of analysis, mode of analysis, underlying logic and assumptions, etc.
This book is an important step towards overcoming the existing fragmentation in the field by providing a multi-disciplinary collection of chapters on knowledge governance. While the single chapters accentuate the pluralism in the field, they all examine issues that constitute the essence of knowledge governance.

The ACADEMY OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS (UK and Ireland Chapter) Published in association with the UK and Ireland Chapter of the Academy of International Business. This brand new edited collection addresses the growing uncertainty and socio-economic challenges of globalisation and its profound implications for the strategies and operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Responding to the new balance in international business, the authors offer valuable insights into the co-evolutionary processes involved in headquarters-subsidiary relationships, the need for novel strategies by MNEs to retain competitive advantage, improve performance and contribute to the global economy.

This book studies accounts of alternative organisations in India and provides critical insights on if and why alternative organisations matter to management theory and practice, how management theory can be applied to the context of alternative organisations, and how, from an alternate organisational perspective, existing debates in management can be enriched. Some other questions examined in this book are: what are spaces of organising outside corporations? How do these alternative organisational forms challenge our assumptions about a globalised, monolithic capitalist order? How do we understand the organisational lives of those marginalised, silenced and oppressed? How can we imagine an alternative organisational reality? It includes cases from different parts of India that explore the functioning of a Special Investigation Team constituted by the Supreme Court of India, Mritshilpis (idol-makers), homeless shelters, panchayats, Shahid Hospital, Budhan Theater, Swaraj University, and organisations that promote social inclusivity.

This book discusses the successes and challenges of leveraging organizational learning in effective strategy development and execution. The authors introduce a framework that helps organizations develop core capabilities to enable them to shift direction rapidly and proactively shape future environments. They also offer a wide selection of cases to illustrate this framework. While some cases highlight fundamental strategic change over time, others are snapshots of mechanisms gradually put in place to jointly optimize learning and performance. There is no one best or right way to leverage strategic organizational learning; different practices may lead to the same outcome and similar practices may lead to different outcomes. The system dynamics underlying such learning - not the simple adoption of one or other practice - are key to success in institutionalizing a performance-based learning approach.

This book describes a variety of quantitative methods that are vital to planning and control in the operations of the industrial world, from suppliers to manufacturing plants to distribution centers and to the dealers and stores. The topics include: forecasting, measuring forecast error, determining the order quantity, safety stock, when and how much inventory to replenish, all this for individual items and for a distribution network where the items are housed in multiple locations. Further quantitative methods are: manufacturing control, just-in-time, assembly, statistical process control, distribution network, supply chain management, transportation and reverse logistics. The methods are proven, practical and doable for most applications. The material in Elements of Manufacturing, Distribution and Logistics presents topics that people want and should know in the work place. The presentation is easy to read for students and practitioners. There is little need to delve into difficult mathematical relationships, and numerical examples are presented throughout to guide the reader on applications. Practitioners will be able to apply the methods learned to the systems in their locations, and the typical professional will want the book on their bookshelf for reference. Everyone in professional organizations like APICS, DSI and INFORMS; MBA graduates, people in industry, and students in management science, business and industrial engineering will find this book valuable.

The scientific advances that underpin economic growth and human health would not be possible without research investments. Yet demonstrating the impact of research programs is a challenge, especially in areas that span disciplines, industrial sectors, and encompass both public and private sector activity. All areas of research are under pressure to demonstrate benefits from federal funding of research. This exciting and innovative study demonstrates new methods and tools to trace the impact of federal research funding on the structure of research, and the subsequent economic activities of funded researchers. The case study is food safety research, which is critical to avoiding outbreaks of disease. The authors make use of an extraordinary new data infrastructure and apply new techniques in text analysis. Focusing on the impact of US federal food safety research, this book develops vital data-intensive methodologies that have a real world application to many other scientific fields.

This research monograph aims at presenting an integrated assessment approach to describe, model, evaluate and improve the eco-efficiency of existing and new grinding processes and systems. Various combinations of grinding process parameters and system configurations can be evaluated based on the eco-efficiency. The book presents the novel concept of empirical and physical modeling of technological, economic and environmental impact indicators. This includes the integrated evaluation of different grinding process and system scenarios. The book is a valuable read for research experts and practitioners in the field of eco-efficiency of manufacturing processes but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This contributed volume brings together research papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics, held in Bremen, Germany in February 2014. The conference focused on the identification, analysis and description of the dynamics of logistics processes and networks. Topics covered range from the modeling and planning of processes, to innovative methods like autonomous control and knowledge management, to the latest technologies provided by radio frequency identification, mobile communication, and networking. The growing dynamic poses wholly new challenges: logistics processes and networks must be(come) able to rapidly and flexibly adapt to constantly changing conditions. The book primarily addresses the needs of researchers and practitioners from the field of logistics, but will also be beneficial for graduate students.

This book discusses the main techniques and newest trends to manage and optimize the production and service systems. The book begins by examining the three main levels of decision systems in production: the long term (strategic), the middle term (tactical) and short term (operational). It also considers online management as a new level (a sub level of the short term). As each level encounters specific problems, appropriate approaches to deal with these are introduced and explained. These problems include the line design, the line balancing optimization, the physical layout of the production or service system, the forecasting optimization, the inventory management, the scheduling etc. Metaheuristics for Production Systems then explores logistic optimization from two different perspectives: internal (production management), addressing issues of scheduling, layout and line designs, and external (supply chain management) focusing on transportation optimization, supply chain evaluation, and location of production. The book also looks at NP-hard problems that are common in production management. These complex configurations may mean that optimal solutions may not be reached due to variables, but the authors help provide a good solution for such problems. The effective new results and solutions offered in this book should appeal to researchers, managers, and engineers in the production and service industries.

The papers in volume 6 of Research in Competence-Based Management identify, elaborate theoretically, and investigate empirically a number of new kinds of dynamics in industries and product markets. In so doing, the papers develop some important new competence perspectives on both traditional and contemporary industry dynamics. Most approaches to developing competence theory have adopted an "inside-out" approach, i.e. micro-level analyses of sources of organizational competence lead to theory that predicts industry-level interactions and outcomes. The papers in this volume, however, largely adopt an "outside-in" approach to theory development that suggests how further understanding of firm-level competences may be enabled through macro-level analyses of the resources and capabilities organizations must develop to participate in new kinds of industry and product-market dynamics.

This book addresses emerging legal and economic issues in competition and investment in air transport, against the backdrop of the role governments and airlines should play in avoiding protectionism and encouraging innovation and creativity. It evaluates current trends in air transport and the direction the industry is taking in the twenty first century. There are discussions on key aspects of air transport, such as safety assurance and environmental protection, as they are impacted by competition. The rapid evolution of aerospace transport and its effect on competition in air transport is also examined. A recurring theme of the book is the influence of creative destruction and disruptive innovation on air transport. This is addressed through an in-depth study of the contentious areas of law relating to the abuse of dominant positions and state aid, as reflected in the ongoing claim by the three largest US carriers against Gulf carriers such as Emirates Airlines, Etihad and Qatar Airways. The US carriers claim that Emirates and Etihad - which operate air services into the United States by virtue of an open-skies agreement between the US and The United Arab Emirates - are using generous subsidies given to them by their g overnments to illegally capture the "legitimate" market belonging to the US carriers. These issues are clarified in the book using analyses of competition law and investment law as they apply to air transport, free-trade-agreement analogies and an open-skies case study.

The book develops manufacturing concepts and applications beyond physical production and towards a wider manufacturing value chain incorporating external stakeholders that include suppliers of raw materials and parts, customers, collaborating manufacturing companies, manufacturing service providers, and environmental organisations. The focal point of the value chain remains as a manufacturing system and its operations whiles flows of parts/materials and information and services across the supply/value chain tiers are taken into account. The book emphasises on the two innovative paradigms of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) and the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) along with their incorporated development. RMS, as a relatively new paradigm, has been introduced to meet the requirements of 'the factories of the future', which is aimed by Industry 4.0, though introducing greater responsiveness and customised flexibility into production systems, in which changes in product volumes and types occur regularly. Manufacturing responsiveness can be achieved by RMS through reconfiguring the production facilities according to changing demands of products and new market conditions. The book addresses challenges of mass-customisation and dynamic changes in the supply-chain environment by focusing on developing new techniques related to integrability, scalability and re-configurability at a system level and manufacturing readiness in terms of financial and technical feasibility of RMS. It demonstrate the expected impacts of an RMS design on operational performance and its supply/value chain in the current/future manufacturing environment facing dynamic changes in the internal/external circumstances. In order to establish a circular economy through the RMS value chain, an integrated data-based reconfiguration link is introduced to incorporate information sharing amongst the value chain stakeholders and facilitate grouping products into families with allocation of the product families to the corresponding system configurations with optimal product-process allocation. Decision support systems such as multi criteria decision making tools are developed and applied for the selection of product families and optimising product-process configuration. The proposed models are illustrated through real case studies in applicable manufacturing firms.

This proceedings volume examines the state-of-the art of productivity and efficiency analysis and adds to the existing research by bringing together a selection of the best papers from the 8th North American Productivity Workshop (NAPW). It also aims to analyze world-wide perspectives on challenges that local economies and institutions may face when changes in productivity are observed. The volume comprises of seventeen papers that deal with productivity measurement, productivity growth, dynamics of productivity change, measures of labor productivity, measures of technical efficiency in different sectors, frontier analysis, measures of performance, industry instability and spillover effects. These papers are relevant to academia, but also to public and private sectors in terms of the challenges firms, financial institutions, governments and individuals may face when dealing with economic and education related activities that lead to increase or decrease of productivity. The North American Productivity Workshop brings together academic scholars and practitioners in the field of productivity and efficiency analysis from all over the world. It is a four day conference exploring topics related to productivity, production theory and efficiency measurement in economics, management science, operations research, public administration, and related fields. The papers in this volume also address general topics as health, energy, finance, agriculture, utilities, and economic dev elopment, among others. The editors are comprised of the 2014 local organizers, program committee members, and celebrated guest conference speakers.

This book constructs a model of the knowledge value chain in the university and analyzes the university knowledge value-added mechanism in the process of Industry-University Collaborative Innovation. The efficiency of university knowledge value-added of Provinces in China is measured. The book illustrates the operating mechanism between enterprise subsystems and college subsystems in the collaborative innovation system, and establishes a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model with parallel decision making units to assess the performance of Industry-University Collaboration Innovation in China by considering the complex internal structure of the collaborative innovation system. The book also addresses various behaviors of knowledge agents in the knowledge sharing process. The research findings of this book will provide some policy implications to help policy makers to establish a more effective collaborative and interactive innovation system. The focus on China offers a unique contribution, because the form that university-industry collaborations take differs widely from country to country. The United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China differ vastly in the way that they implement their respective R&D policies. Some of these differences stem from national culture, others from the historical evolution of the institutions that support innovation efforts, and some from the extent of available resources.

This book explores how the management science of logistics changes working lives and contributes to the making of world regions. With a focus on the port of Kolkata and changing patterns of Asian regionalism, the volume examines how logistics entwine with political power, historical forces, labour movements, and new technologies. The contributors ask how logistical practices reconfigure both Asia's relation to the world and its internal logic of transport and communication. Building on critical perspectives that understand logistics as a political technology for producing and organizing space and power, Logistical Asia tracks how digital technologies and material infrastructure combine to remake urban and regional territories and produce new forms of governance and subjectivity.

This book explores the nature and uniqueness of leadership in Iceland within a business and economic context. Starting with an analysis of Iceland's geographical location, historical development and societal culture, the authors critically examine the major elements of the Icelandic business environment from an individual to a global level, and from economic prosperity to financial collapse. They particularly focus on leadership and human resource management within this unique societal culture and discuss the specific issues that are unique to Iceland, i.e. entrepreneurship, gender egalitarianism, equality, low power-distance, reflecting on, and orienting within contemporary leadership theories. The book covers a variety of analytical methods and cases, providing a unique introduction to leadership in Iceland, and opening avenues for further research into this relatively new phenomenon.

The proceedings volume consists of academic papers on decision-making under uncertainty, smart decision, stochastic optimization, management simulation and its applications. It presents some compelling and valuable results on the cutting-edge modeling methods and the practical case studies in the operations management process for power, transportation, and logistics companies.

This book describes how a deeper knowledge and understanding of cultural differences represents a meaningful and useful tool for management of companies, and in particular SMEs, in the People's Republic of China. After introductory chapters on the internationalization of SMEs and the role played by management in this process, the authors explore the implications of academic discourses on culture and its dimensions for company management. The influence of Chinese cultural roots and the country's current cultural environment on management is then examined, with provision of guidance on response to the identified challenges. A key feature of the book is the presentation of important recent fieldwork in the main economic regions of China. This research further clarifies how business culture and cultural differences impact on company activities in China and casts light on various aspects of the adaptive capability of SMEs within the country, highlighting the value of cultural awareness and intelligence. The book will be of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

Increasingly the importance of corporate governance for economic development in developing economies like Tanzania is indisputable. This book explores the effectiveness of corporate governance in Tanzania and asks how it can be further developed and improved so as to make a difference in the contribution of state-owned enterprises to the economy. The book tries as fairly as possible to probe further into effective corporate governance, using cases of public entities, highlighting shortfalls in their governance and the consequent multiplier effects on socio-economic life. On the other hand, the book also aims to present examples of good governance in multi-layered ways, to show that there is room for creativity and innovation in applying principles of good corporate governance. Recognising that context is crucial, the book starts by assessing Tanzania's socio-historical and economic context, and gauging various applicable metrics. Using historical and theoretical lenses, including the ethics-accountability relationship, the author aims to improve our understanding of corporate failures and consequent waste in Tanzania. Explaining failures in governance is far from straightforward, as by definition they operate beyond rules and regulations, systems and processes, yet the author draws from decades of local experience and expertise in order to assess the real situation on the ground. The Tanzania case will be of considerable interest to researchers looking at questions of corporate governance and economic development both within the country itself, and across Africa.