This book investigates the real process of unleashing the power of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) through Open Innovation and strategic choices. It covers the most important aspects of ICT in a nutshell and details the road to the future through business innovation. ICT, of which telecom and IT constitute the core, is currently permeating and transforming every sphere of life, ranging from commerce, manufacturing, education and healthcare, to agriculture, banking, governance, media and entertainment. Today, telecommunication and ICT, in general, are essential to a country's economic development and competitiveness as recognized both by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Due to the powerful, disruptive and rapid forces unleashed by ICT tsunami, organisations not only struggle to harness the potential of ICT but can also be overwhelmed by the changes, complexity, competition and regulatory environment it brings up. This book provides a clue to organisations on how to sustain and succeed by leveraging ICT in absence of extensive in-house expertise across the breadth and depth of these areas. The driving theme of the book is about opening up organizational and business models, by presenting an integrated roadmap to a future with ICT, by co-opting, cooperating and competing with other organisations. Constructing the right strategy and building the necessary social capital for open innovation through collaboration with partners, government, academia and users (Quadruple Helix Model) are essential steps in such a process.

This book collects essential research on the practical application of executable business process modeling in real-world projects, i.e., model-driven solutions for the support and automation of digital business processes that are created using languages such as BPEL or BPMN. It mainly focuses on empirical research, but also includes an up-to-date cross-section of case studies in order to assess examples of BPM's practical impact in the industry. On the one hand, executable models are formally and precisely defined so that computers can interpret and execute them; on the other, they are visualized so that humans can describe, document and optimize business processes at a higher level of abstraction than with traditional textual programming languages. While these important research areas have long been separated from one another, this book is an attempt at cross-fertilization, driven by the insight that business processes are the software behind today's digital organizations, and that achieving a precise representation of such processes is key to their reliable execution. Consequently, the book presents various case studies and experiments that investigate questions of interest to both academia (e.g., identifying challenges for which no solution exists; sharing new insights into how existing approaches are actually used) and industry (e.g., guidelines on using certain technologies and on modeling comprehensible and executable processes). Both researchers and practitioners will benefit from the presentation of how concepts are transformed into working solutions. The studies are presented in a structured manner and with sufficient rigor to be considered empirical research, further enhancing the book's value for the research community, while practitioners will find concrete guidance on making the right decisions for their projects.

The cultural sector plays an important role in sustainable economic development and creates economic activities, opportunities for entrepreneurship and jobs, adding to the attractiveness of cities and contributing to the development of tourism. The Cultural Sector and Sustainable Economic Development: Innovation and the Creative Economy in European Cities offers both a theoretical and practical analysis of the contemporary approach to culture and innovation, with special emphasis on the relationships among culture, innovation and the economy. Sustainable development, itself, balances environmental protection, culture, social progress, the economy and stability today and for the future. The book's key theme is the role and possibility of culture as a laboratory, with a strong supporting subtext on innovative practice. The text provides an eclectic mix of possibilities that reinforce and underscore the full innovative and complex potentials of culture. It is a cross-disciplinary volume presenting case studies that cover the main theme of cultural ecosystem in a very broad sense, highlighting the relationships that could lead to a sustainable system where economy and culture are the main players. It proposes and maps the European perspective of urban cultural development and suggests that the successes and challenges of European cities under consideration may offer guidance on best practices for urban development in other distant cultural contexts. This book is written in such a way that it can be used as a summary for a cultural professional, a reference text for an academic or for actors in local development and cultural policy at European, national and local levels.

This book offers a unique view of how innovation and competitiveness improve when organizations establish alliances with partners who have strong capabilities and broad social capital, allowing them to create value and growth as well as technological knowledge and legitimacy through new knowledge resources. Organizational intelligence integrates the technology variable into production and business systems, establishing a basis to advance decision-making processes. When strategically integrated, these factors have the power to promote enterprise resilience, robustness, and sustainability. This book provides a unique perspective on how knowledge, information, and data analytics create opportunities and challenges for sustainable enterprise excellence. It also shows how the value of digital technology at both personal and industrial levels leads to new opportunities for creating experiences, processes, and organizational forms that fundamentally reshape organizations.

This book explores conceptualizations of CSR and sustainability in the digital economy, focusing upon points of intersection between CSR and online communities. Reflecting on new areas of responsibility that organisations must face in a globalised economy, the contributions explore the ways CSR is being communicated, challenged and reshaped in a rapidly evolving online context. Up-to-date research from around the world shows how diverse communities, citizens and stakeholders are engaging with, and making demands on, organisations in novel ways that pay little respect to international borders. With online communities increasingly influencing the way in which business is carried out and perceived, the case studies explored here offer a useful indication of the variety of new developments and controversies that have emerged in the field of CSR. This book will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers of CSR and CSR communications, as well as communication, public relation and corporate responsibility practitioners.

This book addresses the challenges facing information management (IM) and presents practical solution propositions. The first section describes six current trends and challenges to IM. The second section introduces a comprehensive model of integrated information management (IIM). The third section, using six practical examples, describes how selected concepts of IIM can be implemented. This book is built upon the fundamental premise of transferring successful management concepts from industrial production to IT management.

This book is a result of ISD2000-The Ninth International Conference on Infor mation Systems Development: Methods and Tools, Theory and Practice, held August 14-16, in Kristiansand, Norway. The ISD conference has its roots in the first Polish Scandinavian Seminar on Current Trends in Information Systems Development Method ologies, held in Gdansk, Poland in 1988. This year, as the conference carries into the new millennium this fine tradition, it was fitting that it returned to Scandinavia. Velkommen tilbake Next year, ISD crosses the North Sea and in the traditions of the Vikings, invades England. Like every ISD conference, ISD2000 gave participants an opportunity to express ideas on the current state of the art in information systems development, and to discuss and exchange views about new methods, tools and applications. This is particularly important now, since the field of ISD has seen rapid, and often bewildering, changes. To quote a Chinese proverb, we are indeed cursed, or blessed, depending on how we choose to look at it, to be "living in interesting times.""

This book presents a rich compilation of real-world cases on digitalization, the goal being to share first-hand insights from respected organizations and to make digitalization more tangible. As virtually every economic and societal sector is now being challenged by emerging technologies, the digital economy is a highly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous place - and one that holds substantial challenges and opportunities for established organizations. Against this backdrop, this book reports on best practices and lessons learned from organizations that have succeeded in overcoming the challenges and seizing the opportunities of the digital economy. It illustrates how twenty-one organizations have leveraged their capabilities to create disruptive innovations, to develop digital business models, and to digitally transform themselves. These cases stem from various industries (e.g. automotive, insurance, consulting, and public services) and countries, reflecting the many facets of digitalization. As all case descriptions follow a uniform schema, they are easily accessible, and provide insightful examples for practitioners as well as interesting cases for researchers, teachers and students. Digitalization is reshaping business on a global scale, and it is evident that organizations must transform to thrive in the digital economy. Digitalization Cases provides first-hand insights into the efforts of renowned companies. The presented actions, results, and lessons learned are a great inspiration for managers, students, and academics. Anna Kopp, Head of IT Germany, Microsoft Understanding digitalization in all its facets requires knowledge about its opportunities and challenges in different contexts. Providing 21 cases from different companies all around the world, Digitalization Cases makes an important contribution toward the comprehensibility of digitalization - from a practical and a scientific point of view. Dorothy Leidner, Ferguson Professor of Information Systems, Baylor University This book is a great source of inspiration and insight on how to drive digitalization. It shows easy to understand good practice examples which illustrate opportunities, and at the same time helps to learn what needs to be done to realize them. I consider this book a must-read for every practitioner who cares about digitalization. Martin Petry, Chief Information Officer and Head of Business Excellence, Hilti

This is the first book to seriously address the disconnection between nimble Agile teams and other groups in the enterprise, including enterprise architecture, the program management office (PMO), human resources, and even business executives. When an enterprise experiments with practice improvements, software development teams often jump on board with excitement, while other groups are left to wonder how they will fit in. We address how these groups can adapt to Agile teams. More importantly, we show how many Agile teams cause their own problems, damaging scalability and sustainability, by requiring special treatment, and by failing to bridge the gaps between themselves and other groups. We call this phenomenon "Agile illth." Adopting a set of "best practices" is not enough. All of us, Agile teams and the corporate groups, must change our intentions and worldviews to be more compatible with the success of the enterprise. Join us on the journey to enterprise agility. It is a crooked path, fraught with danger, confusion and complexity. It is the only way to reach the pinnacles we hope to experience in the form of better business value delivered faster for less cost.

The Remote Work Handbook: The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy is for readers seeking to leverage the business benefits of a flexible, remote workforce. It is a practical guide for building and implementing remote work at any size organization. C-suite executives, operation leaders, business owners, or entrepreneurs who recognize the workplace is changing can use it to re-tool their operations for a strategic business advantage. Mari Anne Snow, the author, is a recognized remote work expert with over 20 years of experience leading remote teams and has re-written the rules of leadership to unlock the potential in remote and distributed teams. In this book, she shares all her secrets. The book explores the untapped potential of remote teams and lays out the business case for adopting a new, flexible workplace model to build organizational resilience and a competitive edge. It takes the reader through the step-by-step process of constructing a remote work operating model, staging an implementation, then institutionalizing and sustaining the change. It includes down-to-earth professional and personal stories that alert the reader to the top priorities and operational realities they will face as they craft their own implementation plan for operationalizing remote work at their company.

Founders and Organizational Development: The Etiology and Theory of Founder's Syndrome is designed to help today's researchers, faculty, students and practitioners become familiar with the etiology and dynamics of Founder's Syndrome as an organizational condition challenging nonprofit/nongovernmental, social enterprise, and for-profit and publicly traded organizations. The book uses applied social and psychological theories and concepts to peel away the layers of an organizational enigma, revealing three causes of Founder's Syndrome and insight into the power and privileges assumed by founders who engage in undesirable and self-destructive behaviors leading to their termination; going from hero status to antihero. Researchers, instructors, students, and practitioners will find thought-provoking case studies from the real world of organization development practice. Segments from interviews during interventions reveal the type of emotional turmoil experienced in organizations where founder's syndrome is present. Insight is provided into accounts of well-known founders who were terminated or forced to resign. The unique features of this book include: integrating theory into practice, describing a new theory about the psychological reaction of founder's syndrome victims, prevention ideas when designing new organizations, strategies for intervention, using content based on research and organization development consultation experiences, and, integrating feedback from students who have launched organizations.

This book explores the relationship between families, firms, and regions and the extent to which these relationships contribute to regional economic and social development. Although family business participation in economic activities has been a common phenomenon since pre-industrial societies, and its importance has evolved throughout time and across spatial contexts, the book suggests that these factors have often been neglected in family business and regional studies. Taking this research gap into account, the book aims to deepen our understanding of the role family firms play in the regional economy. In particular, it explores two seldom studied questions. Firstly, what role do family firms play in regional development? Secondly, how do different spatial regional contexts shape family firm operations and performance? Family Business and Regional Development presents a model of "spatial familiness" and uses themes such as productivity, networks and competitiveness to shed new light on family businesses. Moreover, it approaches the juxtaposition between family business and regional studies to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas, theories, and research methods between the two fields. Bringing together leading experts in entrepreneurship, regional economics, and economic geography, this book will be a valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers interested in family firms, regional studies and economic geography.

There has been growing interest on business models among academics and practitioners in recent years, as business model describes how an organization creates, distributes and captures value and, therefore, can be considered the DNA of the organization. Recently, factors related to digital transformation, the vital role of sustainability and social aspects, along with an increasing globalization, have pushed towards radical transformations in business models. This book aims to further our knowledge on business model innovation in new contexts of analysis and with new perspectives of investigation. Insights from business model innovation are presented from studies focusing on start-ups, small businesses and large businesses to provide a bigger picture on new dynamics connected to digital transformation, sustainability, new global relationships. As such, the scope is on new ways to create value, new components and dynamics (such as digitalization and sustainability) concerning the key elements of the business model (value creation, value configuration and value capture), and new relationships between actors that may foster business model innovation. It represents a valuable resource for practitioners willing to innovate business models, academics aiming at finding new research lines, and students keen to learn more about business models.

This book addresses major challenges faced by farmers and the technological solutions based on Internet of Things (IoT). A major challenge in agriculture is cultivating and supplying high-quality produce at the best. Currently, around 50% of global farm produce never reaches the end consumer due to wastage and suboptimal prices. The book presents solutions that reduce the transport costs, improve the predictability of prices based on data analytics and the current market conditions, and reduce the number of middle steps and agents between the farmer and the end consumer. It discusses the design of an IoT-based monitoring system to analyze crop environments and a method to improve the efficiency of decision-making by analyzing harvest statistics. Further, it explores climate-smart methods, known as smart agriculture, that have been adopted by a number of Indian farmers.

This book brings together contributions from consultants, academics and executives with experience in large and small companies. They describe existing IT practice and show how an IT strategy can be developed. Common problems are discussed, and methods of avoiding them or solving them are explained.

Is Your Company Getting the Most from Its Investment in Change?

Many companies have already invested heavily in infrastructure change, some are making that investment now, and all are contemplating the costs of becoming or evolving as an e-business. Is your company a "greenfield" organization with no back-end systems, or one whose infrastructure support systems are integrated across the enterprise? Are you just beginning to think about e-business capabilities, or are you on the leading edge of convergence? Whatever your company’s position on the ERP/E-Business Matrix, E-Business and ERP: Transforming the Enterprise provides the proven techniques you need to know to meld enterprise resource planning capabilities with the communications power of the Internet.

Is Your Company Positioned for E-Business Success?

The Internet has revolutionized twenty-first century business. Organizations today can communicate with customers, suppliers, and sellers at e-speed with the click of a mouse. Yet, with all of the excitement about the external possibilities of the Internet, companies still need efficient internal processes to make and move products, manage finances, recruit and motivate employees, and excel.

E-Business and ERP: Transforming the Enterprise covers the skills and tools you will need to combine existing ERP software and capabilities with emerging Web-based technologies. In this forward-thinking outline for a new business structure, executives and managers will discover:

• Strategies for established companies to penetrate the Internet marketplace
• Procedures that lower costs across the supply and demand chain
• Techniques that help you meet–and master–the dot.com challenge

The companies best positioned to succeed in the near future are those that can balance existing ERP-based infrastructures and capabilities with exciting new e-business innovations. E-Business and ERP: Transforming the Enterprise examines the changing but essential role of ERP, places it in the context of the Web-based technologies defining today’s e-business environment, and reveals how to blend the best aspects of both to create a strong and flexible twenty-first century business enterprise.

Addressing the issues that will be central to Africa's various attempts to effectively manage knowledge and innovation for sustainable business management, this edited book makes a timely contribution to research on business in Africa. Coinciding with the recently launched Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024) by the African Union (AU), which emphasises the critical role of science, technology and innovation for Africa's socio-economic development and growth, the book echoes these themes with a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to knowledge and innovation management in Africa. Also containing case studies relating to various growing collaborations between education and research institutions, private and public entities as well as commercialisation of research and innovation outputs, Managing Knowledge and Innovation for Business Sustainability in Africa covers the key themes to provide an enabling environment for STI development in the African content.

This book is an outcome of the 33rd International Conference EnviroInfo 2019, held at the University of Kassel, Germany. It presents a selection of papers that describe innovative scientific approaches and ongoing research in environmental informatics and the emerging field of computational sustainability. The respective articles cover a broad range of scientific aspects including advances in core technologies such as earth observation, environmental modelling, big data and machine learning, as well as applications of ICT solutions intended to support societal transformation processes toward the more sustainable management of resource use, transportation and the energy supply. Given its scope, the book is essential reading for scientists, experts and students in these fields of research.

This book takes a fresh look at understanding how financial markets behave. Using recent ideas from the highly-topical science of complexity and complex systems, the book provides the basis for a unified theoretical description of how today's markets really work. Since financial markets are an excellent example of a complex system, the book also doubles as a science textbook.

This book investigates the relationship between the firm and the territory, emphasizing the micro-organizational dimension and the interactions between actors at territorial levels. First, the book examines the particular features of the firm considering three key factors - structural design, power configuration and organizational culture - and the characteristics of the surrounding territory as a specific spatial ecosystem with its own institutions, agents, history and objectives. Second, it analyses organizational tenets at the micro- and meso levels with a view to explaining various relational models and their implications at the level of the firm and the territory. Although previous studies have focused on the territory as a geographical space in which firms procure resources and promote development, this book presents an innovative approach and makes a key contribution to the literature by dealing with the firm and the territory from an organizational perspective. The relationship is analysed as bidirectional: a key question concerns how the territory can impact the organizational dimension of the firm, and how the firm can characterize the territory. This will be considered in connection with various effects. The positive effects of the relationship with the territory are investigated in terms of territorial identity, territorial resilience and territorial sustainability. The negative effects include the role of criminal networks rooted in the territory, with firms acting as key agents.

The cultural sector plays an important role in sustainable economic development and creates economic activities, opportunities for entrepreneurship and jobs, adding to the attractiveness of cities and contributing to the development of tourism. The Cultural Sector and Sustainable Economic Development: Innovation and the Creative Economy in European Cities offers both a theoretical and practical analysis of the contemporary approach to culture and innovation, with special emphasis on the relationships among culture, innovation and the economy. Sustainable development, itself, balances environmental protection, culture, social progress, the economy and stability today and for the future. The book's key theme is the role and possibility of culture as a laboratory, with a strong supporting subtext on innovative practice. The text provides an eclectic mix of possibilities that reinforce and underscore the full innovative and complex potentials of culture. It is a cross-disciplinary volume presenting case studies that cover the main theme of cultural ecosystem in a very broad sense, highlighting the relationships that could lead to a sustainable system where economy and culture are the main players. It proposes and maps the European perspective of urban cultural development and suggests that the successes and challenges of European cities under consideration may offer guidance on best practices for urban development in other distant cultural contexts. This book is written in such a way that it can be used as a summary for a cultural professional, a reference text for an academic or for actors in local development and cultural policy at European, national and local levels.

Trail-blazing social entrepreneurs are tackling the world's most pressing problems that government, business, or charity have failed to solve. They are creating businesses with a primary mission of social change. Scott Boyer is one such social entrepreneur. This 28-year veteran of Big Pharma left a six-figure salary to start OWP Pharmaceuticals and the ROW Foundation. This commercial business and non-profit organization exist in a symbiotic relationship we call a "tandem hybrid social enterprise." This model combines a multimillion dollar business with a foundation that's on track to become the largest funder of projects serving people with epilepsy and associated psychiatric disorders in the world. The tandem hybrid incorporates the principles learned by Scott and others for building a truly unique social enterprise from the ground up; one that is: Driven by a compelling social mission Financed by commercial success Structured to retain control Scalable and sustainable for the long haul Powering Social Enterprises With Profit And Purpose offers a detailed blueprint that has proven commercially and philanthropically successful and that can be replicated in most business sectors.

This book focuses on virtual teams, which are fraught with cooperation problems. It offers novel insights into how team members experience and overcome these problems by empirically studying hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. It firstly enhances the reader's understanding of contextual challenges relating to cooperation and shows how members of such teams experience faultlines through distance, disconnection through reliance on communication technology and discontinuity through temporality of team composition. Secondly, it explores how they use 22 practices to overcome the cooperation problem, which can be categorized as strategies of identity constructing, trusting and virtual peer monitoring. Lastly, the study analyzes the role of technology, demonstrating that state-of-the-art media can facilitate, but not ensure the use of these strategies and practices. As such, the book has implications for both researchers and practitioners.

*Addresses a shift in thinking about entrepreneurial education, away from business and toward school education internationally. *Supports learning about and through entrepreneurial thinking within the context of school teaching. *Encourages teachers to develop their own entrepreneurial thinking skills.

*Addresses a shift in thinking about entrepreneurial education, away from business and toward school education internationally. *Supports learning about and through entrepreneurial thinking within the context of school teaching. *Encourages teachers to develop their own entrepreneurial thinking skills.