Blockchain and other trustless systems have gone from being relatively obscure technologies, which were only known to a small community of computer scientists and cryptologists, to mainstream phenomena that are now considered powerful game changers for many industries. This book explores and assesses real-world use cases and case studies on blockchain and related technologies. The studies describe the respective applications and address how these technologies have been deployed, the rationale behind their application, and finally, their outcomes. The book shares a wealth of experiences and lessons learned regarding financial markets, energy, SCM, healthcare, law and compliance. Given its scope, it is chiefly intended for academics and practitioners who want to learn more about blockchain applications.

The book discusses the opportunities and challenges of managing knowledge in the new reality of Industry 4.0. Addressing paradigmatic changes in value creation due to the development of digital technologies applied to manufacturing (additive manufacturing, IoT, robotics, etc.), it includes theoretical and empirical contributions on how Industry 4.0 technologies allow firms to create and exploit knowledge. The carefully selected expert contributions highlight the potential of these technologies in acquiring knowledge from a larger number of sources and examine approaches to innovation, organization of activities, and stakeholder development in the context of this next industrial revolution.

This book highlights research that contributes to a better understanding of emerging challenges in information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics covered include: how to digitally innovate through IS outsourcing; how to govern outsourced digitalization projects; how to cope with complex multi-vendor and micro-services arrangements; how to manage data sourcing and data partnerships, including issues of cybersecurity; and how to cope with the increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing and robotic process automation. These issues are approached from the client's perspective, vendor's perspective, or both. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to all researchers and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organization, as well as corporate executives and professionals seeking a more profound analysis of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.

There are many definitions of eHealth and no consensus around the underlying idea. Most contributions on eHealth focus on informatic, public health, legal, social and anthropological implications. This book investigates eHealth through community-based private practices such as pharmacies, hearing centres, opticians, and private medical centres from a management perspective. It first presents a systematic review of the theoretical research models that have been developed on eHealth. It then identifies the many innovative managerial implications of eHealth, and finally, it analyses reasons why some eHealth tools are or are not adopted.

Entrepreneurship is a fundamental business discipline and a phenomenon that drives economic growth globally. This short-form textbook focuses on the absolute essential elements of the field, covering theory and practice. Illuminating the development of entrepreneurship, the author also concisely introduces the entrepreneurial personality and some of the additional hurdles faced by female and minority entrepreneurs. The central role of creativity, innovation and culture are also examined as well as entrepreneurial strategies for finance and marketing. This short text provides a unique expert overview for students of entrepreneurship, whilst the practical insights will also be useful in applications for budding entrepreneurs.

This book gathers the best papers presented at the first conference held by the Russian chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). It shares the latest insights into various aspects of the digitalization of the economy and the consequences of transformation in public administration, business and public life. Integrating a broad range of analytical perspectives, including economic, social and, technological, this interdisciplinary book is particularly relevant for scientists, digital technology users, companies and public institutions.

This proceedings volume highlights the latest research presented at the 7th International Conference on Research on National Brand & Private Label Marketing (NB&PL2020, Barcelona, Spain). The topics covered include: retailing, private label portfolio and assortment management, marketing of premium store brands, using national brands to exclude (delist) and include, optimal assortment size, consumer store patronage, etc. Several contributions also focus on private label pricing and promotion, especially on the relative pricing of standard and premium private labels, and with regard to the national brands in the assortment. Further questions addressed here include: Should store brands be promoted? If so, what types of promotion should be used? How can private label penetration, especially premium private labels, best be dealt with? Are dual branding and coupons viable options?

This book provides a concrete guide on how to execute strategic pricing to excel in an increasingly dynamic and digitised business environment, while developing and deepening relations with contract partners. The secret lies in crafting innovative price models that reward joint value creation in accordance with the business model, rather than engaging in confrontative zero-sum pricing reasoning. Strategic and Innovative Pricing: Price Models for a Digital Economy provides hands-on tools that are applied on three interconnected levels of analysis. It illustrates how to explore the business ecology to understand its dynamics and how digitisation enables it to prosper and demonstrates how to construct a viable business model that enables an organisation to navigate in its vibrant ecology. Finally, and most importantly, it shows how to use innovative price models to realize and monetise the business model and its value offering, making the organisation and its partnerships sustainable. Models pertaining to the three levels of analyses are applied in rich case studies and examples from different countries, and the book includes guidelines on how to use them. Special attention is paid to digitisation as an underlying theme, making this book of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of strategic management and technology & innovation management.

Understanding experience at work, especially in toxic organizations, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include all senses. The use of applied poetry has its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. Poetry at its best condenses into relatively few words, metaphors, and images what conventional social science narratives would take much longer to articulate. Where poetry often hints and alludes, narrative seeks to spell out, expound, and complete. Where poetry leaves much mental space for the listener or reader to fill in with one's imagination, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories offer a way of accessing workplace experience that is unique and valuable in terms of understanding lives at work. The use of complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, is a way of trying to account for what we have found and experienced and in particular why it happened. "Why," the authors suggest, is critical in terms of understanding the sensing, images, and metaphors evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers for reasons that are unconscious and are rooted in the past. These transferences that come forward from life experience into the present are the critical data we work with. These are the data of psychoanalysis. This book both widens and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other researchers, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience and stories behind the poetry, and the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, is a new and distinct contribution to organizational research, leadership, and consulting efforts to help organization members solve real, underlying problems and not offer simplistic, formulaic solutions based solely on a study of the organization's surface. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, and management.

" Whether by design, accident or merely synchronicity, Checkland appears to have developed a habit of writing seminal publications near the start of each decade which establish the basis and framework for systems methodology research for that decade." Hamish Rennie, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1992 Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, highly successful in technical problems, could be used by managers coping with the unfolding complexities of organizational life. The straightforward transfer of SE to the broader situations of management was not possible, but by insisting on a combination of systems thinking strongly linked to real-world practice Checkland and his collaborators developed an alternative approach - Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) - which enables managers of all kinds and at any level to deal with the subtleties and confusions of the situations they face. This work established the now accepted distinction between ‘ hard’ systems thinking, in which parts of the world are taken to be ‘ systems’ which can be ‘ engineered’ , and ‘ soft’ systems thinking in which the focus is on making sure the process of inquiry into real-world complexity is itself a system for learning. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) and Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1990) together with an earlier paper Towards a Systems-based Methodology for Real-World Problem Solving (1972) have long been recognized as classics in the field. Now-Peter Checkland has looked back over the three decades of SSM development, brought the account of it up to date, and reflected on the whole evolutionary process which has produced a mature SSM. SSM: A 30-Year Retrospective, here included with Soft Systems Methodology in Action closes a chapter on what is undoubtedly the most significant single research programme on the use of systems ideas in problem solving. Now retired from full-time university work, Peter Checkland continues his research as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.

This book introduces the reader to the latest innovations in fields such as artificial intelligence, systems biology or surgery, and gives advice on what new technologies to consider for becoming a market leader of tomorrow. Companies generally acquire information on these fields from various sources such as market reports, scientific literature or conference events, but find it difficult to distinguish between mere hype and truly valuable innovations. This book offers essential guidance in the form of structured and authoritative contributions by experts in innovative technologies spanning from biology and medicine to augmented reality and smart power grids. The authors identify high-potential fields and demonstrate the impact of their technologies to create economic value in real-world applications. They also offer business leaders advice on whether and how to implement these new technologies and innovations in their companies or businesses. Chapter 13 Analytic Philosophy for Biomedical Research: The Imperative of Applying Yesterday's Timeless Messages to Today's Impasses by Sepehr Ehsani is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The impacts of the digital transformation on society in general, and particularly on people's lives, are the subject of increasing debate among policymakers, researchers and industry. This book explores the challenges of this new revolution, identifies solutions, and demonstrates how knowledge management can enable the transition process associated with the digital transformation, guided by the principles of sustainability. Featuring contributions by experts from diverse areas of science and business - on topics ranging from the digital transformation of knowledge management in the public sector, to the creation of sustainable smart cities, regions and countries, and from using AI for business models to food security - it provides a comprehensive discourse on the digital transformation's impacts on employment, education, governance, social life, sustainability, values, the economy and democracy.

This book is a collection of the best research papers presented at the First World Conference on Internet of Things: Applications & Future (ITAF 2019), Sponsored by GR Foundation and French University in Egypt, held at Triumph Luxury Hotel, Cairo, Egypt, on 14-15 October 2019. It includes innovative works from leading researchers, innovators, business executives, and industry professionals that cover the latest advances in and applications for commercial and industrial end users across sectors within the emerging Internet of Things ecosphere. It addresses both current and emerging topics related to the Internet of Things such as big data research, new services and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) fundamentals, electronic computation and analysis, big data for multi-discipline services, security, privacy and trust, IoT technologies, and open and cloud technologies.

This monograph discusses software reuse and how it can be applied at different stages of the software development process, on different types of data and at different levels of granularity. Several challenging hypotheses are analyzed and confronted using novel data-driven methodologies, in order to solve problems in requirements elicitation and specification extraction, software design and implementation, as well as software quality assurance. The book is accompanied by a number of tools, libraries and working prototypes in order to practically illustrate how the phases of the software engineering life cycle can benefit from unlocking the potential of data. Software engineering researchers, experts, and practitioners can benefit from the various methodologies presented and can better understand how knowledge extracted from software data residing in various repositories can be combined and used to enable effective decision making and save considerable time and effort through software reuse. Mining Software Engineering Data for Software Reuse can also prove handy for graduate-level students in software engineering.

This book features high-quality, peer-reviewed research papers presented at the International Conference on Smart Technologies in Data Science and Communication (Smart-DSC 2019), held at Vignan's Institute of Information Technology (Autonomous), Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India on 13-14 December 2019. It includes innovative and novel contributions in the areas of data analytics, communication and soft computing.

This book focuses on new and original research ideas and findings in three broad areas: computing, analytics, and networking and their potential applications in the various domains of engineering - an emerging, interdisciplinary area in which a wide range of theories and methodologies are being investigated and developed to tackle complex and challenging real-world problems. The book also features keynote presentations and papers from the International Conference on Computing Analytics and Networking (ICCAN 2019), which offers an open forum for scientists, researchers and technocrats in academia and industry from around the globe to present and share state-of-the-art concepts, prototypes, and innovative research ideas in diverse fields. Providing inspiration for postgraduate students and young researchers working in the field of computer science & engineering, the book also discusses hardware technologies and future communication technologies, making it useful for those in the field of electronics.

We are living in the middle of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, with new technology leading to dramatic shifts in everything from manufacturing to supply chain logistics. In a lively, developing field of academic, procurement is often neglected. Despite this, procurement plays a vital role, connecting the organization with its ecosystem. At a time of change and economic crisis, a new business model is called for, which this book aims to define. Based on the applications of Industry 4.0 concepts to procurement, this book describes Procurement 4.0 as a method and a set of tools, helping businesses to improve the value of their products, reduce waste, become more flexible, and address the business needs of the future. It will appeal to academics in the area, as well as practitioners.

This book features the latest research in the area of immersive technologies, presented at the 5th International Augmented and Virtual Reality Conference, held in Munich, Germany in 2019. Bridging the gap between academia and industry, it presents the state of the art in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies and their applications in various industries such as marketing, education, healthcare, tourism, events, fashion, entertainment, retail and the gaming industry. The volume is a collection of research papers by prominent AR and VR scholars from around the globe. Covering the most significant topics in the field of augmented and virtual reality and providing the latest findings, it is of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

Originally published in 1996 The Social Role of Higher Education is an anthology of nine papers, it presents cases studies showing how culture influences the social role of higher education in various nations. It examines how environments get defined and how they shape universities, and how knowledge and academic work interact in national contexts. This book focuses on how both developed and developing countries' systems of higher education are affected by their own culture and their place within the larger global context.

This book explores nonparametric statistical process control. It provides an up-to-date overview of nonparametric Shewhart-type univariate control charts, and reviews the recent literature on nonparametric charts, particularly multivariate schemes. Further, it discusses observations tied to the monitored population quantile, focusing on the Shewhart Sign chart. The book also addresses the issue of practically assuming the normality and the independence when a process is statistically monitored, and examines in detail change-point analysis-based distribution-free control charts designed for Phase I applications. Moreover, it introduces six distribution-free EWMA schemes for simultaneously monitoring the location and scale parameters of a univariate continuous process, and establishes two nonparametric Shewhart-type control charts based on order statistics with signaling runs-type rules. Lastly, the book proposes novel and effective method for early disease detection.

This book covers a very broad range of topics in marketing, communication, and tourism, focusing especially on new perspectives and technologies that promise to influence the future direction of marketing research and practice in a digital and innovational era. Among the areas covered are product and brand management, strategic marketing, B2B marketing and sales management, international marketing, business communication and advertising, digital and social marketing, tourism and hospitality marketing and management, destination branding and cultural management, and event marketing. The book comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing and Tourism (ICSIMAT) 2019, where researchers, academics, and government and industry practitioners from around the world came together to discuss best practices, the latest research, new paradigms, and advances in theory. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including members of the academic community, MSc and PhD students, and marketing and tourism professionals.

This book presents the theory and practice of product lifecycle management, chiefly focusing on modern approaches suitable for digitalized enterprises. In addition to describing adaptive methods for advanced product creation using big data analytics, it presents economic and mathematical models for managing product lifecycles based on the application of recent methods (e.g. digital design and automated intelligent systems) to control pre-production and production processes. Given its scope, the book appeals to researchers, economic analysts and entrepreneurs alike.

The definitive guide to the game theoretic and probabilistic underpinning for Bitcoin's security model. Discusses, how Bitcoin works, includes an overview of probability and game theory and provides a quantitative analysis for Bitcoin security under attack modes. Explains, possible attacks on Bitcoin as its influence grows and includes breakdown of how the how the block reward schedule and adoption will affect the vulnerability of the network.

This book guides readers through the broad field of generic and industry-specific management system standards, as well as through the arsenal of tools that are needed to effectively implement them. It covers a wide spectrum, from the classic standard ISO 9001 for quality management to standards for environmental safety, information security, energy efficiency, business continuity, laboratory management, etc. A dedicated chapter addresses international management standards for compliance, anti-bribery and social responsibility management. In turn, a major portion of the book focuses on relevant tools that students and practitioners need to be familiar with: 8D reports, acceptance sampling, failure tree analysis, FMEA, control charts, correlation analysis, designing experiments, estimating parameters and confidence intervals, event tree analysis, HAZOP, Ishikawa diagrams, Monte Carlo simulation, regression analysis, reliability theory, data sampling and surveys, testing hypotheses, and much more. An overview of the necessary mathematical concepts is also provided to help readers understand the technicalities of the tools discussed. A down-to-earth yet thorough approach is employed throughout the book to help practitioners and management students alike easily grasp the various topics.

The Beatles are considered the most influential popular music act of the twentieth century, widely recognized for their influence on popular culture. The inability of other bands and artists to imitate their fame has prompted questions such as: How did the Beatles become so successful? What factors contributed to their success? Why did they break up? The Beatles and Economics: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Making of a Cultural Revolution answers these questions using the lens of economic analysis. Economics provides the prism for explaining why their success-while legendary in scale-is not mythic. This book explores how the band's commercial achievements were intimately tied to the larger context of economic globalization and rebuilding post-World War II. It examines how the Beatles' time in Hamburg is best understood as an investment in human capital, and why the entrepreneurial growth mindset was critical to establishing a scalable market niche and sustaining the Beatles' ability to lead and shape emerging markets in entertainment and popular music. Later chapters consider how the economics of decision making and organizational theory helps us to understand the band's break-up at its economic peak. This essential text is of interest to anyone interested in the economic dynamics and social forces that shape cultural change.