Knowledge management presents a new way of understanding organizations and companies, and is especially suited to sophisticated and highly technical firms and operations such as those in the construction industry.

This new book draws on hard data from three separate research programs in Sweden and shows how the concept of knowledge can make sense in the construction industry, an industry which can be viewed in essence as being engaged in the material transformation of "nature into buildings." In particular it explores and examines three different businesses: a medium sized construction firm; Wing rdh Architecture, Sweden s most prestigious architecture firm; and BESAB, a specialist concrete injection firm working on underground construction. An emerging theme is the situational and context-bound nature of knowledge in the construction industry, thus showing "knowledge" to be a remarkably heterogeneous concept.

A range of readers should find the book useful, from students and construction managers through to researchers.

First book to combine financial results with proprietary benchmarking data and in-depth interviews with experienced knowledge practitioners. The resulting framework provides an inside- and outside-the-firm view of the risks and opportunities found in knowledge management and competitive intelligence.

Rapid application of new technologies and highly leveraged innovation processes are key for the success of companies and organizations in dynamic markets. Based on the experiences of one of the industry's most modern innovation centers this book provides an insight into the tools and methods used to align customer requirements, competitive challenges and technological development. Both, scientists and practitioners, will benefit from the lessons learned and presented in this volume.

This book analyzes the specifics of corporate governance of China's State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and their assessment under EU merger control, which is reflected in the EU Commission's screening of the notified economic concentrations. Guided by the going global policy and the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese SOEs have expanded their global presence considerably. Driven by the need to acquire cutting edge technologies and other industrial policy considerations, Chinese SOEs have engaged in a series of corporate acquisitions in Europe. The main objective of this book is to demonstrate the conceptual and regulatory challenges of applying traditional merger assessment tools in cases involving Chinese SOEs due to the specifics in their corporate governance and the regulatory framework under which they operate in China. The book also explores the connection between the challenges experienced by the merger control regimes in the EU and the recent introduction of the EU foreign direct investment screening framework followed by a proposal concerning foreign subsidies. The book will be a useful guide for academics and researchers in the fields of law, international relations, political science, and political economy; legal practitioners dealing with cross-border mergers and acquisitions; national competition authorities and other public bodies carrying out merger control; policy makers, government officials, and diplomats in China and the EU engaged in bilateral economic relations.

This book explores theories and brings empirical evidence of innovations in learning and teaching and practice-driven leadership and governance of higher education institutions across developed and developing countries aiming to recover and sustain during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic. A fresh managerial approach to identifying the critical challenges, opportunities and strategies of higher education services management is the fundamental essence of this book. The book includes unique chapters, and these are carefully designed. This book has original scholarly contributions, including case studies, and explains how higher education institutions can deal with the challenges of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The cross-cultural insights of both public and private sector higher education institutions across the globe are a helpful guide for academics, researchers, advanced students, and practitioners to identify and understand the best practices about what worked well and what did not during the Covid-19 Pandemic. The chapters help formulate a strategic recovery plan for higher education institutions to mitigate the challenges of the post-Covid-19 Pandemic.

This book reports the elements required for implementing Just in Time (JIT) technique in companies. The main reasons for low implementation processes and the main benefits from the successful implementation of them are highlighted in this book. Structural equation models are presented to help identify the essential elements in JIT.

This book provides readers an in-depth understanding of the inner mechanisms and principles of the global supply chain. Authored by the Head of Supply Chain and Transport Industries at the World Economic Forum, it draws on a wealth of operational and managerial expertise in the global supply chain industry that drive the world's economies. The book analyzes the importance and impact of globally networked sourcing, production and distribution, and presents detailed information on the opportunities, limitations and challenges of linear value and supply chain systems. Building on a series of recent industry cases and with a focus on the latest developments in actual business processes and models, it reveals how the transformation toward circular supply chains and regenerative resource management forms the basis for success and sustainability in business. "The book brings together technical, social, political, and geographical trends, suggesting how supply chain management can lead the quest for many of the world's most pressing challenges." Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Engineering, MIT, Head, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics "This book provides an essential roadmap, guiding the reader easily through complex developments and concepts." John Manners-Bell, CEO Transport Intelligence and Honorary Visiting Professor, Guildhall Business School, London "With strategic foresight, Lehmacher develops a vision of a circular economy within which consumer, manufacturer and logistics companies assume collective responsibility for sustainable value creation." Alfred Talke, Group Managing Director ALFRED TALKE Logistic Services "Those who are active in logistics and supply chain management, in practice or academia, will discover a fresh view on the whole field of activity beyond the day-to-day-business." Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Wimmer, Chairman of the Executive Board, BVL International

This book examines intellectual property (IP) as an important value driver for start-ups. Businesses of all sizes are inevitably confronted with intellectual property issues at some point, but start-ups and their collaborators face unique challenges and opportunities in IP management. Identifying, generating, and exploiting intellectual property can lead to sustainable competitive advantages and avoidance of risks. Many start-ups sense the complexity of IP management and therefore place their energy elsewhere. However, the clear conclusion to be drawn from this unique collection of contributions is that putting an IP management strategy in place is critical to the successful development of a business. Prof. Dr. Martin A. Bader and Prof. Dr. Sevim Suzeroglu-Melchiors have years of experience as consultants, entrepreneurs, business owners, and researchers where they saw firsthand the need for a comprehensive yet practical resource for start-ups and their key stakeholders. This book explores different perspectives in dealing with IP from six different angles: the start-up's view, the investor's view, the corporation's view, the university's view, the global IP office's view, and the advisor's view. Each section consists of chapters written by leading experts from around the globe including Silicon Valley, Canada, Israel, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, France, Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Africa. Contributors bring practical experience from a wide range of sectors, such as information and communication technology, software, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, industrial automation, internet of things, life sciences, pharma, crop science, biotech, medtech, mining, sustainability, climate tech, and even quantum technologies. This timely publication serves as a guidebook for entrepreneurs and other key stakeholders in the start-up ecosystem. It empowers founders to develop their own IP management strategy to mitigate risk, create and capture value, and lay the groundwork for sustainable growth. An essential reference for start-ups to achieve business excellence. "This edited book volume offers valuable insights, bringing together perspectives of key stakeholder groups from a wide variety of innovation ecosystems - an invaluable resource." -Carsten Fink, Chief Economist, World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva "A timely book for those wanting a clear overview of the issues the different players encounter in the start-up ecosystem. A useful resource indeed. Congratulations to the editors and team."-Audrey Yap, Managing Partner YUSARN AUDREY LLC, Past President LESI, Chairman Singapore Innovation & Productivity Institute, Singapore "A 'must read' for all innovators in the start-up world. It is truly a fantastic book and one I would recommend being bought and read (in full)!"-Laurence Freeman, Professor (Adjunct), CU Denver Business School, Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship, Denver, Colorado, United States

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.

Bring your company into the digital era without compromising your core business In The Digital Transformer's Dilemma: How to Energize Your Core Business While Building Disruptive Products and Services, the authors show companies how to go digital while also advancing their core business. The book emphasizes how to strike a difficult balance between establishing a new (digital) business and re-vitalizing - and digitizing - the legacy business. The core of the book is focused on the actual implementation of the digital transformation across both businesses, providing concrete tips, tricks, tools and action plans across six key dimensions: Crafting a flexible organization Using technology as a driver Designing the necessary processes Building transformational leaders "Right-skilling" the workforce of the future Galvanizing cultural change The Digital Transformer's Dilemma is a very visual book, filled with dozens of engaging illustrations that bring the contained concepts to life on the page. Based on 100+ interviews with senior executives at leading companies (such as Nestle, Novartis, Volkswagen, BNP Paribas, BASF and Michelin) and smaller hidden champions, numerous illuminating case studies, and the authors' own experience from working in international management consulting and years of academic experience, the book highlights the fundamental principles required for executives and businesspeople to transform legacy organizations into digitally empowered companies.

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 tackles issues associated with inconsistency in pairwise comparisons from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Human judgments are seldom absolutely consistent, or absolutely precise, therefore problems of measuring and handling inconsistency belong among hot topics of the current research, especially in the theoretical framework of multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA). The book presents and discusses the state-of-the-art of this field including both cardinal and ordinal inconsistency, the problems of different scales for comparisons and inconsistency reduction, and the alternative approaches to inconsistency detection and measurement. This book is a unique one-stop guide for readers who are interested in inconsistency in pairwise comparisons. Researchers and practitioners in the area of multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) will find this informative book particularly valuable.  

Drawing upon the timeless wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical-spiritual world classic, this professional book highlights the spiritual and moral dimensions of management using an inside-out leadership development approach. It interprets the Bhagavad Gita's teachings on the personality types and psychological makeup of managers and employees; self-knowledge and self-mastery; and the leadership concepts of vision, motivation, and empowerment. This book covers topics such as training of the mind, ethical leadership, communication, stress management, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Collectively, the enclosed contributions provide managers with an enhanced outlook on management functions such as leading, planning, organizing, and controlling in today's organizations, particularly those run by knowledge workers. Management research in the 20th century has mainly focused on the industrial paradigm characterized by a hierarchical structure of authority and responsibility with an individualistic focus on the personality of the manager. However, this traditional paradigm cannot solve many of the problems that confront leaders and mangers today. Recent studies have shown that values traditionally associated with spirituality-such as integrity, honesty, trust, kindness, caring, fairness, and humility-have a demonstrable effect on managerial effectiveness and success. Although traditionally interpreted as a religious-spiritual text, the Bhagavad Gita teaches these values which can be extrapolated and applied to practical management lessons in today's corporate boardrooms. Applying the text of the Bhagavad Gita to the context of management, this book views the manager as an "enlightened sage" who operates from higher stance, guided by self-knowledge and self-mastery. It demonstrates how character is the key ingredient for effective management and leadership. This book is therefore applicable to all managers, from first-line to CEOs, in their management and leadership roles in organizations.

IT Performance Management addresses the way organizations should balance the demand and the supply of information technology, optimizing the cost and maximizing the business value of IT.
In this book several aspects of IT performance management are described. The way this management is executed and the techniques, which should be used, depend on the maturity of the relationship between the IT function and the lines of business of an organization. The foundation of the authors' approach is based on the flow of money and related management objectives. However, performance management is primarily based on perceptions. Therefore, this book introduces the IT value perception model. This model describes four separate levels of perception for the business value of IT. If the demand and the supply of IT do not share the same perception level, the balance is lost, which will lead to friction and inefficiency within an organization.
This book is not about what is good or what is bad, but rather is about the 'what', the 'why' and to a limited extent the 'how' of managing the performance of IT. Therefore, the book finishes with a 'back-to-business' section in which a self-assessment checklist, a potential growth path and ten next steps are provided. This enables the reader to start applying this book in his every day working environment immediately.
IT Performance Management:
* Provides an overview of best practices and available thinking on the subject of IT cost and value
* Describes the subject of IT cost and value related to management issues on IT strategy, portfolio management, service management, architecture and sourcing
* Addresses differing degrees of maturitybetween IT and the business, illustrated by case studies
Practical and easy to integrate into day to day decision making immediately
Deals with multiple perceptions on the role of the IT organisation in the business
Discusses the topics currently on the CIO's agenda

Whilst there are many books on knowledge management there are few aimed directly at HR practitioners and the critical role that they can play in building a knowledge-centric culture. This practical book draws on the author's own experience, as well as that of leading-edge Human Resource and Knowledge Management practitioners (including Linda Holbeche, Elizabeth Lank, and David Snowden), each of whom recognise that building a knowledge-centric culture cannot be achieved through technology alone. It covers areas such as: Defining the key ingredients of a knowledge-centric culture The changing structures, roles and responsibilities needed to create a knowledge-centric culture HR's unique contribution to building a knowledge-centric culture, together with practical steps for getting started on the KM journey and for keeping the momentum going Tools and techniques for: opening up a dialogue about why knowledge management is crucial for business and personal success; knowledge mapping; encouraging and facilitating knowledge sharing, as well as ways of identifying key knowledge players How to help your organisation reframe its assumptions about learning in the knowledge economy How to ensure that your HR practices are knowledge aligned Contents Defining the characteristics of a knowledge-creating culture; The strategic context for HR's involvement in the knowledge management arena; Planning the cultural shift; Communicating the cultural shift; Knowledge and business process mapping; Understanding the motivation for learning; New approaches to learning; Interweaving people, processes and technology to create and support a knowledge creating culture; Retaining knowledge; Conclusions; References. Readership: Human resource professionals; learning and development practitioners; internal consultants and practitioners working within an organizational development role; Undergraduate and graduate students. Outline the strategic

In recent decades an extensive array of changes and innovations have taken place in and across work organizations and networks of organizations and workers, facilitated by new technologies and technological forms. This has initiated an interest in technological change as one of the conditions for organizational action and researchers have begun to draw inspiration from a wider spectrum of conceptual issues, perspectives and theoretical traditions.
This book is interested in the level of praxis and how this might be understood and theorized. It brings together a comprehensive collection of empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed research projects from studies of organizational practice which explore a number of technological changes in a variety of contexts. These are informed by contemporary debates within and across theoretical approaches including the sociology of technology, work and organizations, actor network theory, technology as text and metaphor, processual and political perspectives, social and business network-based approaches to the analysis of technology and innovation, and the social construction and shaping of technology.
This book will be essential reading for researchers and advanced students within the field of technology, work and organizations and also organization studies and management studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203380541

In Principles of Marketology, Volume 1: Theory , Aghazadeh explores the definition, origins and framework of a new methodology for helping organizations better understand their market and competition.

As entrepreneurs seek to gain an advantage against their competitors, understanding how to share information throughout their organization will be vital in their success. Accordingly, it is critical for researchers, managers, and consultants to strengthen their own systems to facilitate knowledge management and implement strategies that will launch them into the future. Global Practices in Knowledge Management for Societal and Organizational Development is an integral reference volume featuring leading academic research on the management and creation of knowledge and organizational development theories and models. Including coverage on a variety of related perspectives and subjects, such as infrastructure and services for knowledge organizations, ethics and the impact on knowledge management, and the future of knowledge workers, this book is an ideal reference source for organizational development specialists, consultants, policy makers, researchers, and graduate business students looking for advanced research on cultural aspects of knowledge management and creativity, innovation, and technology in learning communities.

The world changes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope: trends expand, contract, break up, melt, disintegrate and disappear, while others are formed. Change - as opposed to stasis - is our normal condition, the only certainty in our lives, hence the need to create tools that provide organizations with the means to tackle change and navigate complexity. We must accept the reality of constant change and be prepared for a heavy shift in perspective: interconnection versus separation, acceleration versus linearity and discontinuity versus continuity. Anticipating the future requires more than the traditional predictive models (forecasting) based on the forward projection of past experiences. Advanced methods use anticipation logic (foresight) and build probable scenarios taking into account weak signals, emerging trends, coexisting presents and potential paths of evolution. Corporate foresight is fundamental to interpret and lead change. The two cornerstones of foresight are organization and management. As concerns organization, the authors advocate the separation of research (oriented to the market of tomorrow) from development (oriented to the market of today), the establishment of a foresight unit and the concentration of research activities mainly on the acquisition and recombination of external know-how. As regards management, after an overview of state-of-the-art literature on forecasting methods, the authors propose the implementation of a "future coverage" methodology, which enables companies to measure and verify the consistency between trends, strategic vision and offered products. These organizational and managing tools are then tested in a case study: the Italian company Eurotech SpA, a leader in the ICT sector.

With a focus on cargo transportation, this book addresses the development of approaches intended to secure an infrastructure of smart services to support the adaptive implementation of online multi-modal freight transport management processes. It discusses the development of multi-criteria decision-making components and their integration into the multi-layered computer-based information management of intelligent systems. Through detailed descriptions of various components of intelligent transport management systems, the book demonstrates how to develop the services needed in the right place and at the right time, and how to properly adapt to user needs, making necessary interventions to ensure the safety of the transportation process. Further, it describes the main ways to increase the autonomy and efficiency of user-vehicle interaction and shows how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) structural support for current and past situations in AI-based systems can help to anticipate future developments in freight transportation.