These proceedings focus on selected aspects of the current and upcoming trends in transportation, logistics, supply chain management, and decision sciences. 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 Seventh International Forum on Decision Sciences", which took place in Windsor, Canada.

This book questions our beliefs in the role of the information profession and tells us how to become information workers of the future by providing advice on overcoming the challenges facing the library profession. It develops the idea of the knowledge culture and knowledge work and goes on to expand how information needs to be shared and not hoarded as in the traditional role of libraries as keepers of knowledge. This second edition provides a clear and very accessible practical framework for knowledge work.

"Global Health, Pharmaceutical Industry and BRIC "explores the status and future growth of the global pharmaceutical industry and the changing needs of global health. Brazil, Russia, and China combined will be the largest pharmaceutical producer and has the largest pharmaceutical market potential in the world. This book fulfiles the need for a comprehensive book on the role of the global pharmecutical industry in general, and the participation of BRIC in specific to address global health needs.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry's need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge.

This book describes the latest research developments in modeling and simulation in industrial engineering. Topics such as decision and performance analysis and industrial control systems are described. Case studies in industry and services as well as engineering economy and cost estimation are also covered.

In addition to capital infrastructure and consumers, digital information created by individual and corporate consumers of information technology is quickly being recognised as a key economic resource and an extremely valuable asset to a company. Organizational, Legal, and Technological Dimensions of Information System Administration recognises the importance of information technology by addressing the most crucial issues, challenges, opportunities, and solutions related to the role and responsibility of an information system. Highlighting various aspects of the organizational and legal implications of system administration, this reference work will be useful to managers, IT professionals, and graduate students who seek to gain an understanding in this discipline.

Over the past several decades, as the pace of globalization has accelerated, operational issues of international coordination have often been overlooked. For example, the global financial crisis that began in 2007 is attributed, in part, to a lack of regulatory oversight. As a result, supranational organizations, such as the G-20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, have prioritized strengthening of the international financial architecture and providing opportunities for dialogue on national policies, international co-operation, and international financial institutions.

Prevailing characteristics of the global economic systems, such as the increasing power of financial institutions, changes in the structure of global production, decline in the authority of nation-states over their national economy, and creation of global institutional setting, e.g., global governance have created the conditions for a naturally evolving process towards enabling national epistemic communities to create institutions that comply with global rules and regulations can control crises.

In this context, transfer of technical knowledge from the larger organizations and its global epistemic communities to member communities is becoming a policy tool to "convince" participants in the international system to have similar ideas about which rules will govern their mutual participation. In the realm of finance and banking regulation, the primary focus is on transfer of specialized and procedural knowledge in technical domains (such as accounting procedures, payment systems, and corporate governance principles), thereby promoting institutional learning at national and local levels. In this volume, the authors provide in-depth analysis of initiatives to demonstrate how this type of knowledge generated at the international organization level, is codified into global standards, and disseminated to members, particularly in the developing world, where the legal and regulatory infrastructure is often lacking.
They argue that despite the challenges, when a country intends to join the global system, its institutions and economic structures need to move toward the global norms. In so doing, they shed new light on the dynamics of knowledge transfer, financial regulation, economic development, with particular respect to supporting global standards and avoiding future crises. "

This book is a result of teaching stochastic processes to junior and senior undergr- uates and beginning graduate students over many years. In teaching such a course, we have realized a need to furnish students with material that gives a mathematical presentation while at the same time providing proper foundations to allow students to build an intuitive feel for probabilistic reasoning. We have tried to maintain a b- ance in presenting advanced but understandable material that sparks an interest and challenges students, without the discouragement that often comes as a consequence of not understanding the material. Our intent in this text is to develop stochastic p- cesses in an elementary but mathematically precise style and to provide suf?cient examples and homework exercises that will permit students to understand the range of application areas for stochastic processes. We also practice active learning in the classroom. In other words, we believe that the traditional practice of lecturing continuously for 50 to 75 minutes is not a very effective method for teaching. Students should somehow engage in the subject m- ter during the teaching session. One effective method for active learning is, after at most 20 minutes of lecture, to assign a small example problem for the students to work and one important tool that the instructor can utilize is the computer. So- times we are fortunate to lecture students in a classroom containing computers with a spreadsheet program, usually Microsoft's Excel.

The book addresses several research gaps in the study of organisations and rarely analysed areas such as the non-profit sector (NPOs). It combines approaches from HRM, business studies and organisation research, and incorporates micro- and macro-perspectives on organisations and institutions by using situational and neo-institutionalist frames.

Knowledge management (KM) is about managing the lifecycle of knowledge consisting of creating, storing, sharing and applying knowledge. Two main approaches towards KM are codification and personalization. The first focuses on capturing knowledge using technology and the latter on the process of socializing for sharing and creating knowledge. Social media are becoming very popular as individuals and also organizations learn how to use it. The primary applications of social media in a business context are marketing and recruitment. But there is also a huge potential for knowledge management in these organizations. For example, wikis can be used to collect organizational knowledge and social networking tools, which leads to exchanging new ideas and innovation. The interesting part of social media is that, by using them, one immediately starts to generate content that can be useful for the organization. Hence, they naturally combine the codification and personalisation approaches to KM. This book aims to provide an overview of new and innovative applications of social media and to report challenges that need to be solved. One example is the watering down of knowledge as a result of the use of organizational social media (Von Krogh, 2012).

There has been a significant increase in knowledge-driven industries over the past decade. Despite the importance of knowledge in the innovation process, little research has been conducted into how knowledge management can be applied to make the innovation process more effective. Knowledge Management for Process, Organizational and Marketing Innovation: Tools and Methods outlines different tools and technologies that can be applied depending on the type of innovation an organization desires. It provides concrete advice on the different types of innovation, situations in which innovation may be useful and the role of knowledge and different tools and technologies to support it.

This book describes the journey of developing and implementing a global knowledge sharing strategy at the multinational project development and construction company Skanska. The strategy described is based on a "people-to-people" approach and covers four different strategic business units with more than 50,000 employees. It shows how the introduction of knowledge management has led to improved collaboration on customers and increased sales, as well as quality improvements and higher employee satisfaction. The book introduces a 8-step framework for achieving sustainable organizational learning and provides a theoretical introduction to the field of knowledge management and cognitive pedagogy.

Production engineering and management involve a series of planning and control activities in a production system. A production system can be as small as a shop with only one machine or as big as a global operation including many manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and retail locations in multiple continents. The product of a production system can also vary in complexity based on the material used, technology employed, etc. Every product, whether a pencil or an airplane, is produced in a system which depends on good management to be successful. Production management has been at the center of industrial engineering and management science disciplines since the industrial revolution. The tools and techniques of production management have been so successful that they have been adopted to various service industries, as well. The book is intended to be a valuable resource to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the applications of production management under fuzziness. The chapters represent all areas of production management and are organized to reflect the natural order of production management tasks. In all chapters, special attention is given to applicability and wherever possible, numerical examples are presented. While the reader is expected to have a fairly good understanding of the fuzzy logic, the book provides the necessary notation and preliminary knowledge needed in each chapter.

Chinese state banks, which were considered technically insolvent in the 1990s, are at present among the largest and most important banks in the world. This book, based on the author's research and also on his extensive experience of working in Chinese banks, explores how Chinese banks' technical efficiency and organisational flexibility have been achieved whilst ownership and control by the Chinese Communist Party have continued. The author reveals a distinctly non-Western approach to corporate governance, but one that has nevertheless worked very well.

Business competencies are very complex, and entrepreneurs' beliefs, actions, and aspirations for their businesses are widely influenced by their sense of values and beliefs. This influences the actions they take, especially in challenging situations. Successful entrepreneurs can accept challenges, learn to make responsible choices, and make sure to weigh all possible outcomes. Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies for Start-Ups and Small Business is an assortment of innovative research on the methods and applications of strategic models for entrepreneurship competency. While highlighting topics including intellectual capital, risk management, and entrepreneurship education, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business executives, industry professionals, academicians, students, and researchers seeking to reduce the level of failure of entrepreneurial activity within the global business community.

Supply Chain Management Under Fuzziness presents recently developed fuzzy models and techniques for supply chain management. These include: fuzzy PROMETHEE, fuzzy AHP, fuzzy ANP, fuzzy VIKOR, fuzzy DEMATEL, fuzzy clustering, fuzzy linear programming, and fuzzy inference systems. The book covers both practical applications and new developments concerning these methods. This book offers an excellent resource for researchers and practitioners in supply chain management and logistics, and will provide them with new suggestions and directions for future research. Moreover, it will support graduate students in their university courses, such as specialized courses on supply chains and logistics, as well as related courses in the fields of industrial engineering, engineering management and business administration.

This book presents strategies and practices to allow everyday companies to cope with the fundamentally changing landscape of business models and to take advantage of the huge business opportunities arising from the advent of big data. It develops several case studies from companies in traditional industries like LEGO, Yamato and Mediq, but also examines small start-ups like Space Tango, which is partnering with major multinationals to develop new business models using big data. The book argues that businesses need to adapt and embark on their big data journey, helps them take the first step, and guides them along their way. It presents successful examples and deducts essential takeaway lessons from them, equipping executives to capitalize on big data and enabling them to make intelligent decisions in the big data transformation, giving their companies an essential competitive edge.

Dynamic Learning Networks: Models and Cases In Action represents an attempt to provide a network perspective of organizational learning to drive dynamic competition through extended firm learning processes. This edited volume contributed by worldwide experts in this field, provide academics and company managers with an extended view of organizational learning networks from real cases and different perspectives.

Dynamic Learning Networks: Models and Cases In Action is based on the workshop, Managing Uncertainty and Competition through Dynamic Learning Networks. It was organized by the E-Business Management Section of Scuola Superiore ISUFI University of Salento (Italy) and held in Ostuni (Italy) 3rd - 5th July 2008.

Dynamic Learning Networks: Models and Cases In Action is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners working in corporate learning. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

Continuous technological innovation amidst the increasing complexity of organizational structures and operations has created the need to achieve a new level of skillful performance and innovative procedures within the information resources management sector. ""Best Practices and Conceptual Innovations in Information Resources Management: Utilizing Technologies to Enable Global Progressions"" provides authoritative insight into emerging developments in information resources management and how these technologies are shaping the way the world does business, creates policies, and advances organizational practices. With chapters delving into pertinent aspects of such disciplines as knowledge management, open source software, systems engineering, project management, and IT governance, this book offers audiences solutions for improved organizational functioning.

strategy, but we also focus on execution. We talk about organizational design, and also refect on leadership practices. Our assumption is that in a dynamic world, leaders at all levels, have to constantly switch gears, wear different hats, and na- gate at different altitudes. They have to think about the "total" enterprise, not in terms of compartmentalized silos or felds of functional expertise. Much like a g- eral contractor, they have to draw on specialized expertise, as and when needed, yet keep the big picture in mind. Our hope is that our diagnostic tools can help teams develop a shared frame of reference and generate cross-functional dialogue. The third driving force behind this second edition is the gradual convergence between the worlds of entrepreneurial start-ups and challenges facing established corporations. Innovation, agility, and initiative are no longer the exclusive preserve of start-ups. Established companies are looking for ways to re-invent themselves, to innovate, to think creatively, and to make their enterprises more fexible, agile and entrepreneurial. We have had the good fortune to sit at the intersection of these two worlds. We hope our ideas can beneft both groups. We set out to provide a "buffet table," a menu of options that can be helpful for the two ends of the spectrum.

The first volume of this handbook explores different aspects of sustainable luxury textiles and fashion, broadly based on the following topics: Sustainability and business management, Value chain management, Use of materials and Sustainable production processes.

Along with the increasing deregulation of European utility markets the dynamics of and the competitive pressure in the utility industries have steadily increased over the last years. These changes in the regulatory framework towards an integrated market environment have resulted in new challenges for the management of power and gas companies and in a substantial need for strategic reorientation. In the context of these developments the Handbook Utility Management reflects current challenges in the utility industries and provides solutions from a managerial perspective. The inclusion of latest insights from top managers, renowned researchers, professionals in utility-related investment banking and consulting, and professionals in public and supranational organizations on all value chain activities within the industry makes the Handbook an indispensable asset for both professionals and researchers.

Ontologies form an indispensable part of the Semantic Web standard stack. While the Semantic Web is still our vision into the future, ontologies have already found a myriad of applications such as document retrieval, image retrieval, agent interoperability and document annotation. Ontology Learning and Knowledge Discovery Using the Web: Challenges and Recent Advances provides relevant theoretical foundations, and disseminates new research findings and expert views on the remaining challenges in ontology learning. This book is invaluable resource as a library or personal reference for graduate students, researchers, and industrial practitioners. Readers who are in the process of looking for future research directions, and carving out their own niche area will find this book particularly useful due to the detailed scope and wide coverage of the book, which informs any discussion of artificial intelligence, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and reasoning, text mining, information extraction, and ontology learning.

The increasing globalization, the battle for talents, and global trends are changing the work patterns in organisations around the globe. Enterprises are working across country and cultural borders alongside complex supply and demand networks. Global incidents such as the financial crisis in 2008 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have forced global organizations to find innovative ways to continue to connect globally and maintain a competitive advantage. Therefore, innovative enterprises have established global and virtual organisations including members of the value chain on supply and demand side. This book outlines these new work and leadership styles, and agile organisations, which are necessary to work virtually and globally. It provides case studies and experiences from different global organizations in different industries and sectors with a focus on value-adding processes and services.

A decade ago, a writer from Fortune magazine wrote in the preface to Kim Woo Chong's book, Every Street is Paved with Gold, that Kim, the Daewoo empire's founder, "personifies the drive and imagination that makes East Asia a dynamic center of economic growth." Kim fled South Korea in late 1999, shortly after his empire crashed. From his initial exile post in Frankfurt, he submitted his resignation from all the Daewoo group's companies. He has left no clue about his whereabouts since then.Kim Woo Chong's meteoric rise as one of Asia's most powerful tycoons, and his equally spectacular fall, symbolize the Asian miracle and the prolonged crisis that threatended to destroy it in 1997 and that still hangs over the economic landscape. The system's flaws became apparent in mid-1999, when Kim acknowledged that his companies, which had acquired a global reach in a debt-fueled expansion binge, could not pay their creditors. By the time the banks that took over the Daewoo group had calculated $80 billion in liabilities, Kim was changing addresses in Europe. For Asia, lessons from the crisis indicate that traditional methods of operation through debt financing and over-investing will fail. This lesson and others are explored in Asian Post-Crisis Management.

Contributers: Usha C.V. Haley • Masaaki Kotabe & Shruti Gupta • Yasuhiro Arikawa & Hideaki Miyajima • George T. Haley • Brij N. Kumar, Yunshi Mao & Susanne Birgit Ensslinger • Nancy E. Landrum & David M. Boje • Xue Li, John Kidd, & Frank-Jürgen Richter • Malcolm Cooper • Yi Feng & Baizhu Chen • Howard V. Perlmutter • Sek Hong Ng & Malcolm Warner • Thomas Clarke • Keun Lee • Caroline Benton & Yoshiya Teramoto • Fred Robins • Michael A. Santoro & Chang-su Kim • Beverly Kitching • Hock-Beng Cheah & Melanie Cheah