This book deals with the main challenges of sustainable development and the role of sustainable business and corporate social responsibility in implementing these challenges through sustainable leadership and innovations. It includes the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainability and emphasizes the importance of achieving a socio-environmental balance in society. The theoretical frameworks and insights from sustainable development implementations on macro and micro levels, as well as the practical examples and case studies provided to introduce the concept of sustainable leadership and its impact on sustainable business development, are a scientific novelty in the field of sustainability. The book is comprised of six interconnected chapters that sequentially reveal the principal provisions of sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, and sustainable leadership, together with their correlations. Features: * Provides cutting-edge examples and case studies of sustainable leadership, viewed as the most significant means for the creation of sustainable organizational culture * Includes case studies on the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainability * Addresses scientific aspects of sustainable development and its challenges * Discusses issues of sustainable development at different scales, ranging from macro to mirco levels * Provides policy implications for sustainable business development The theoretical framework and practical case studies presented in Sustainable Development, Leadership, and Innovations make it an invaluable resource and guide to both the academic and business communities. Business leaders, policy makers, and other professionals, as well as academics and graduate students, will all benefit greatly from this text.

This book focuses on the methodological treatment of UML/P and addresses three core topics of model-based software development: code generation, the systematic testing of programs using a model-based definition of test cases, and the evolutionary refactoring and transformation of models. For each of these topics, it first details the foundational concepts and techniques, and then presents their application with UML/P. This separation between basic principles and applications makes the content more accessible and allows the reader to transfer this knowledge directly to other model-based approaches and languages. After an introduction to the book and its primary goals in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 outlines an agile UML-based approach using UML/P as the primary development language for creating executable models, generating code from the models, designing test cases, and planning iterative evolution through refactoring. In the interest of completeness, Chapter 3 provides a brief summary of UML/P, which is used throughout the book. Next, Chapters 4 and 5 discuss core techniques for code generation, addressing the architecture of a code generator and methods for controlling it, as well as the suitability of UML/P notations for test or product code. Chapters 6 and 7 then discuss general concepts for testing software as well as the special features which arise due to the use of UML/P. Chapter 8 details test patterns to show how to use UML/P diagrams to define test cases and emphasizes in particular the use of functional tests for distributed and concurrent software systems. In closing, Chapters 9 and 10 examine techniques for transforming models and code and thus provide a solid foundation for refactoring as a type of transformation that preserves semantics. Overall, this book will be of great benefit for practical software development, for academic training in the field of Software Engineering, and for research in the area of model-based software development. Practitioners will learn how to use modern model-based techniques to improve the production of code and thus significantly increase quality. Students will find both important scientific basics as well as direct applications of the techniques presented. And last but not least, the book will offer scientists a comprehensive overview of the current state of development in the three core topics it covers.

This book reports on the results of an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary workshop on provenance that brought together researchers and practitioners from different areas such as archival science, law, information science, computing, forensics and visual analytics that work at the frontiers of new knowledge on provenance. Each of these fields understands the meaning and purpose of representing provenance in subtly different ways. The aim of this book is to create cross-disciplinary bridges of understanding with a view to arriving at a deeper and clearer perspective on the different facets of provenance and how traditional definitions and applications may be enriched and expanded via an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary synthesis. This volume brings together all of these developments, setting out an encompassing vision of provenance to establish a robust framework for expanded provenance theory, standards and technologies that can be used to build trust in financial and other types of information.

This contributed volume presents a collection of materials on supply chain management including industry-based case studies addressing petrochemical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and reverse logistics topics. Moreover, the book covers sustainability issues, as well as optimization approaches. The target audience comprises academics, industry managers, and practitioners in the field of supply chain management, being the book also beneficial for graduate students

This volume problematizes different facets of management education in India---pedagogy, curricula, and disciplinary and institutional practices---from the perspective of the Global South. The essays in this volume bring out the institutional challenges of crafting a relevant academic programme that converses with both national specificities and global realities. Coming from diverse academic specializations, the contributors traverse the interface of their respective disciplines with management education. In doing so, they engage with the ongoing global debate on management education. This volume fills a noticeable gap of serious, scholarly reflection on the state of management education. While there have been sporadic reflections and occasional critiques, a critical stocktaking of the institutional and disciplinary aspects of management education has been long wanting. This volume is of interest to scholars and practitioners of management education across the globe, and is likely to generate debate on its contemporary relevance and future trajectory.

This textbook approaches optimization from a multi-aspect, multi-criteria perspective. By using a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach, it avoids the limits and oversimplifications that can come with optimization models with one criterion. The book is presented in a concise form, addressing how to solve decision problems in sequences of intelligence, modelling, choice and review phases, often iterated, to identify the most preferred decision variant. The approach taken is human-centric, with the user taking the final decision is a sole and sovereign actor in the decision making process. To ensure generality, no assumption about the Decision Maker preferences or behavior is made. The presentation of these concepts is illustrated by numerous examples, figures, and problems to be solved with the help of downloadable spreadsheets. This electronic companion contains models of problems to be solved built in Excel spreadsheet files. Optimization models are too often oversimplifications of decision problems met in practice. For instance, modeling company performance by an optimization model in which the criterion function is short-term profit to be maximized, does not fully reflect the essence of business management. The company's managing staff is accountable not only for operational decisions, but also for actions which shall result in the company ability to generate a decent profit in the future. This calls for management decisions and actions which ensure short-term profitability, but also maintaining long-term relations with clients, introducing innovative products, financing long-term investments, etc. Each of those additional, though indispensable actions and their effects can be modeled separately, case by case, by an optimization model with a criterion function adequately selected. However, in each case the same set of constraints represents the range of company admissible actions. The aim and the scope of this textbook is to present methodologies and methods enabling modeling of such actions jointly.

Healthcare systems across the globe are currently facing perhaps the greatest challenges and pressures to date as the need to improve outcomes, efficiency, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and sustainability have significantly risen. Further, the emerging focus on value-based healthcare has increased performance expectations. To improve capability to face these challenges, doctors were "transformed" by health organizations and systems into more hybrid figures, i.e., doctor-managers and most recently clinical leaders. Yet, in many cases their engagement hasn't worked as expected or desired, and there is still much ambiguity on what is the set of expectations attached to the new hybrid role. Providing a systematic review of previous literature about the progressively worrying challenge in transforming doctors to clinical leaders, Lega and Pirino offer a qualitative analysis of different advanced countries facing the issue of training this hybrid role. Finding improved practices applicable elsewhere, they conclude with a case study focus on the Italian system. Developing and Engaging Clinical Leaders in the "New Normal" of Hospitals suggests specific policy and practice recommendations on how the system should evolve with regards to clinical leadership.

This book presents a variant of UML that is especially suitable for agile development of high-quality software. It adjusts the language UML profile, called UML/P, for optimal assistance for the design, implementation, and agile evolution to facilitate its use especially in agile, yet model based development methods for data intensive or control driven systems. After a general introduction to UML and the choices made in the development of UML/P in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 includes a definition of the language elements of class diagrams and their forms of use as views and representations. Next, Chapter 3 introduces the design and semantic facets of the Object Constraint Language (OCL), which is conceptually improved and syntactically adjusted to Java for better comfort. Subsequently, Chapter 4 introduces object diagrams as an independent, exemplary notation in UML/P, and Chapter 5 offers a detailed introduction to UML/P Statecharts. Lastly, Chapter 6 presents a simplified form of sequence diagrams for exemplary descriptions of object interactions. For completeness, appendixes A-C describe the full syntax of UML/P, and appendix D explains a sample application from the E-commerce domain, which is used in all chapters. This book is ideal for introductory courses for students and practitioners alike.

This book introduces several simple analytical approaches to aid the seamless integration of renewable distributed generation. It focuses on the idea of intelligent integration, which involves locating and developing suitable operational characteristics of renewable distributed generation. After reviewing the options available, the best location should be chosen, an appropriately sized operation should be installed and the most suitable operational characteristics should be adopted. Presenting these simple analytical approaches, their step-by-step implementation and a number of cases studies using test distribution systems, the book clearly demonstrates the technical, economic and environmental benefits of intelligent integration.

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.

This illuminating text/reference surveys the state of the art in data science, and provides practical guidance on big data analytics. Expert perspectives are provided by authoritative researchers and practitioners from around the world, discussing research developments and emerging trends, presenting case studies on helpful frameworks and innovative methodologies, and suggesting best practices for efficient and effective data analytics. Features: reviews a framework for fast data applications, a technique for complex event processing, and agglomerative approaches for the partitioning of networks; introduces a unified approach to data modeling and management, and a distributed computing perspective on interfacing physical and cyber worlds; presents techniques for machine learning for big data, and identifying duplicate records in data repositories; examines enabling technologies and tools for data mining; proposes frameworks for data extraction, and adaptive decision making and social media analysis.

This is the first book devoted to mobility management, covering the important principles, technologies and applications of mobility management based on years of academic research and industry experiences. The content is organized according to the reference models proposed by the authors, and emphasizes on technical principles rather than protocol details; a systematic and comprehensive introduction is presented yet without losing focuses; the existing technologies in cellular system, mobile Internet and IMS/SIP are also extensively compared. This book can be an indispensable reference for mobile communication engineers, computer network engineers, researchers and anyone else involved in academic, industrial and standardization activities on mobility management.

This book draws new attention to domain-specific conceptual modeling by presenting the work of thought leaders who have designed and deployed specific modeling methods. It provides hands-on guidance on how to build models in a particular domain, such as requirements engineering, business process modeling or enterprise architecture. In addition to these results, it also puts forward ideas for future developments. All this is enriched with exercises, case studies, detailed references and further related information. All domain-specific methods described in this volume also have a tool implementation within the OMiLAB Collaborative Environment - a dedicated research and experimentation space for modeling method engineering at the University of Vienna, Austria - making these advances accessible to a wider community of further developers and users. The collection of works presented here will benefit experts and practitioners from academia and industry alike, including members of the conceptual modeling community as well as lecturers and students.

This book covers advancements across business domains in knowledge and information management. It presents research trends in the fields of management, innovation, and technology, and is composed of research papers that show applications of IT, analytics, and business operations in industry and in educational institutions. It offers a combination of scientific research methods and concepts, with contributions from globally renowned authors; presents various management domains from a number of countries for a global perspective; and provides a unique combination of topics and methods while giving insights on the management domain using a holistic approach. The book provides scholars with a platform to derive maximum utility in the area of management, research, and technology by subscribing to the idea of managing business through performance and management technology.

Sebastian Meiswinkel studies optimization problems that arise at container ports from a classic optimization as well as from a mechanism design point of view. The first part of this dissertation is focused on scheduling problems with selfish job owners that have private information about their characteristics. Afterwards the transportations of containers between the quay and a storage area is considered. Variants of this problem are analyzed for utilization of reach stackers and straddle carriers.

This book focusses on the challenges and changes organizational management faces in an era when the need to develop environmentally aware processes meets high levels of competition. It covers the synergetic effects, how re-use, recycling, waste reduction, and other sustainable production strategies can add value, low costs and time of production. Sustainable business behavior is not only an environmental perspective on management, but more and more contains an organizational perspective. Taking into account these issues, green and lean management appears as the way managers can drive their employees to continuously improve the management processes that add value to the organization and costumers. This book provides information on principles, strategies, models, and applications of green and lean management, and at the same time communicates the latest research activity relating to this scientific field world-wide.

Wei Yen explores how differences in world views between Eastern and Western thought and culture have on management and leadership behaviors. In The Geography of Thought Richard Nisbett showed how the thought and culture of the East is rooted in Chinese Confucian ideals while that of the West goes back to the early Greeks. In From Great Wall to Wall Street, Wei Yen explores how these differences impact today's leadership and management practices. He delves deeply into the two cultures and their philosophical roots, and explains why there can exist significant misunderstandings between the two camps. Yen was born in China, raised in Hong Kong, educated both there and in the US and then spent half his working life in the US and half in Asia. From his vantage point, straddling both cultures he compares and contrasts the pragmatic, wholistic Chinese (or Asian) management style with the rational and analytical Western management style. He shows their pros and cons, the areas where they differ and situations where one may be more successful than the other. Yen argues that understanding traditional Chinese culture, and how it affects management behaviors and current events, can help decision makers make better decisions in business, finance and politics. He further combines culture with credit analysis to argue that it is unlikely that China will suffer a financial collapse despite a slowing economy and high debt levels. Equally, he shows how that same philosophical traditions also lie behind China's inability to innovate or project the "soft power" that the West's globally successful popular culture has achieved. How can the West take advantage of China's epic rise to strike win-win outcomes? How can the Chinese be more integrated into the global community and become a better global citizen in the future? How can policy makers make more realistic policies? None of these can be accomplished without first understanding where each other is coming from.

This book focuses on database law (a branch of intellectual property law) and further explores the legal protection currently available for data and data-related products in India. It offers a comparative study of the position of copyright law in protecting databases in the US and EU, while also presenting responses from the Indian database industry and its aspirations regarding the role of copyright law in database protection. India is undoubtedly leading the way as a knowledge economy. Its strengths are its information technology capability and its knowledge society, as well as its booming database industry - aspects that also necessitate the study of the role of law, as well as the protection of data and databases, in India. This book examines the growing importance of copyright law for protecting databases as well as for ensuring access in information societies. The book concludes with a discussion of key principles to be kept in mind in the context of drafting legal regimes for databases in India that will both benefit the database industry and ensure accessibility.

This book shows how the systems approach is employed by scientists in various countries to solve specific problems concerning railway transport. In particular, the book describes the experiences of scientists from Romania, Germany, the Czech Republic, the UK, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland. For many of these countries there is a problem with the historical differences between the railways. In particular, there are railways with different rail gauges, with different signaling and communication systems, with different energy supplies and, finally, with different political systems, which are reflected in the different approaches to the management of railway economies. The book's content is divided into two main parts, the first of which provides a systematic analysis of individual means of providing and maintaining rail transport. In turn, the second part addresses infrastructure and management development, with particular attention to security issues. Though primarily written for professionals involved in various problems concerning railway transport, the book will also benefit manufacturers, railway technical staff, managers, and students with transport specialties, as well as a wide range of readers interested in learning more about the current state of transport in different countries.

This volume collects research papers addressing topical issues in economics and management with a particular focus on dynamic models which allow to analyze and foster the decision making of firms in dynamic complex environments. The scope of the contributions ranges from daily operational challenges firms face to strategic choices in dynamic industry environments and the analysis of optimal growth paths. The volume also highlights recent methodological developments in the areas of dynamic optimization, dynamic games and meta-heuristics, which help to improve our understanding of (optimal) decision making in a fast evolving economy.

This book grows from a conference on the state of the art and recent advances in Efficiency and Productivity. Papers were commissioned from leading researchers in the field, and include eight explorations into the analytical foundations of efficiency and productivity analysis. Chapters on modeling advances include reverse directional distance function, a new method for estimating technological production possibilities, a new distance function called a loss distance function, an analysis of productivity and price recovery indices, the relation of technical efficiency measures to productivity measures, the implications for benchmarking and target setting of imposing weight restrictions on DEA models, weight restrictions in a regulatory setting, and the Principle of Least Action. Chapters on empirical applications include a study of innovative firms that use innovation inputs to produce innovation outputs, a study of the impact of potential "coopetition" or cooperation among competitors on the financial performance of European automobile plants, using SFA to estimate the eco-efficiency of dairy farms in Spain, a DEA bankruptcy prediction model, a combined stochastic cost frontier analysis model/mixture hazard model, the evolution of energy intensity in nine Spanish manufacturing industries, and the productivity of US farmers as they age.

This book investigates organizational learning from a variety of information processing perspectives. Continuous change and complexity in regulatory, social and economic environments are increasingly forcing organizations and their employees to acquire the necessary job-specific knowledge at the right time and in the right format. Though many regulatory documents are now available in digital form, their complexity and diversity make identifying the relevant elements for a particular context a challenging task. In such scenarios, business processes tend to be important sources of knowledge, containing rich but in many cases embedded, hidden knowledge. This book discusses the possible connection between business process models and corporate knowledge assets; knowledge extraction approaches based on organizational processes; developing and maintaining corporate knowledge bases; and semantic business process management and its relation to organizational learning approaches. The individual chapters reveal the different elements of a knowledge management solution designed to extract, organize and preserve the knowledge embedded in business processes so as to: enrich organizational knowledge bases in a systematic and controlled way, support employees in acquiring job role-specific knowledge, promote organizational learning, and steer human capital investment. All of these topics are analyzed on the basis of real-world cases from the domains of insurance, food safety, innovation, and funding.

This book applies a new analytical framework to the study of the evolution of large Internet companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung. It sheds light on the dynamics of business groups, which are approached as 'business ecosystems,' and introduces the concept of Epigenetic Economic Dynamics (EED), which is defined as the study of the epigenetic dynamics generated as a result of the adaptation of organizations to major changes in their respective environments. The book augments the existing literature on evolutionary economic thinking with findings from epigenetics, which are proving increasingly useful in analyzing the workings of large organizations. It also details the theoretical and conceptual nature of recent work based on evolutionary economics, mainly from the perspective of generalized Darwinism, resilience and related variety, and complements the work conducted on evolutionary economics by applying the analytical framework of EED. It makes it easier to forecast future dynamics on the Internet by proving that a sizable number of big business groups are veering from their initial paths to take unprecedented new directions as a result of competition pressure, and as such is a valuable resource for postgraduates and researchers as well as those involved in economics and innovation studies.

There are two different, interdependent components of IT that are important to a CIO: strategy, which is long-term; and tactical and operational concerns, which are short-term. Based on this distinction and its repercussions, this book clearly separates strategy from day-to-day operations and projects from operations - the two most important functions of a CIO. It starts by discussing the ideal organization of an IT department and the rationale behind it, and then goes on to debate the most pressing need - managing operations. It also explains some best industry standards and their practical implementation, and discusses project management, again highlighting the differences between the methodologies used in projects and those used in operations. A special chapter is devoted to the cutover of projects into operations, a critical aspect seldom discussed in detail. Other chapters touch on the management of IT portfolios, project governance, as well as agile project methodology, how it differs from the waterfall methodology, and when it is convenient to apply each. Taking the fundamental principles of IT service management and best practices in project management, the book offers a single, seamless reference for IT managers and professionals. It is highly practical, explaining how to apply these principles based on the author's extensive experience in industry.

This book presents different use cases in big data applications and related practical experiences. Many businesses today are increasingly interested in utilizing big data technologies for supporting their business intelligence so that it is becoming more and more important to understand the various practical issues from different practical use cases. This book provides clear proof that big data technologies are playing an ever increasing important and critical role in a new cross-discipline research between computer science and business.