Grounded in extensive research and field testing, Design-Centered Entrepreneurship presents a concise problem-solving approach to developing a unique business concept. Step-by-step guidelines provide insight into exploring market problem spaces, uncovering overlooked opportunities, reframing customer problems, creating business solutions, and sustaining success and an entrepreneurial culture. Drawing on methodologies from the world of design, the book helps students of entrepreneurship fill in the missing piece that transforms opportunity recognition into a viable business concept. Plenty of useful diagrams help to organize key concepts, making them easily accessible to readers. This second edition has been updated to include social entrepreneurship, more international examples and enhanced support materials. The digital supplements include a virtual creative problem-solving profile, slides, and an instructor manual. Design-Centered Entrepreneurship is the ideal text for entrepreneurship and new venture creation courses with a focus on design thinking.

Grounded in extensive research and field testing, Design-Centered Entrepreneurship presents a concise problem-solving approach to developing a unique business concept. Step-by-step guidelines provide insight into exploring market problem spaces, uncovering overlooked opportunities, reframing customer problems, creating business solutions, and sustaining success and an entrepreneurial culture. Drawing on methodologies from the world of design, the book helps students of entrepreneurship fill in the missing piece that transforms opportunity recognition into a viable business concept. Plenty of useful diagrams help to organize key concepts, making them easily accessible to readers. This second edition has been updated to include social entrepreneurship, more international examples and enhanced support materials. The digital supplements include a virtual creative problem-solving profile, slides, and an instructor manual. Design-Centered Entrepreneurship is the ideal text for entrepreneurship and new venture creation courses with a focus on design thinking.

This book addresses the usefulness of knowledge discovery through data mining. With this aim, contributors from different fields propose concrete problems and applications showing how data mining and discovering embedded knowledge from raw data can be beneficial to social organizations, domestic spheres, and ICT markets. Data mining or knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) has received increasing interest due to its focus on transforming large amounts of data into novel, valid, useful, and structured knowledge by detecting concealed patterns and relationships. The concept of knowledge is broad and speculative and has promoted epistemological debates in western philosophies. The intensified interest in knowledge management and data mining stems from the difficulty in identifying computational models able to approximate human behaviors and abilities in resolving organizational, social, and physical problems. Current ICT interfaces are not yet adequately advanced to support and simulate the abilities of physicians, teachers, assistants or housekeepers in domestic spheres. And unlike in industrial contexts where abilities are routinely applied, the domestic world is continuously changing and unpredictable. There are challenging questions in this field: Can knowledge locked in conventions, rules of conduct, common sense, ethics, emotions, laws, cultures, and experiences be mined from data? Is it acceptable for automatic systems displaying emotional behaviors to govern complex interactions based solely on the mining of large volumes of data? Discussing multidisciplinary themes, the book proposes computational models able to approximate, to a certain degree, human behaviors and abilities in resolving organizational, social, and physical problems. The innovations presented are of primary importance for: a. The academic research community b. The ICT market c. Ph.D. students and early stage researchers d. Schools, hospitals, rehabilitation and assisted-living centers e. Representatives from multimedia industries and standardization bodies

Cooperation between science and business (S2B cooperation) is a very important issue from the points of view of the domestic economy, companies, and universities. This is mainly because such cooperation is a catalyst for faster and reliable development - not only of enterprises, but also of the entire economy. Thanks to S2B cooperation, enterprises can gain and commercialize new and ground-breaking solutions. Universities in turn can give their research a more practical dimension to increase its economic applicability, which helps universities prepare future staff to work in modern enterprises. The aim of this publication is to indicate how cooperation between universities and business can be implemented in an international dimension. It shows the role of modern universities in supporting the development of enterprise and entire economies as well as the role of modern enterprises that use resources located in universities (including knowledge resources). This unique combination has a positive impact on the results and developmental opportunities for each of them. Any potential obtained in this manner is the basis for creating a competitive advantage on the market. This book is devoted to a specific area of cooperation between enterprises and universities and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of entrepreneurship, knowledge management, international relations, and higher education.

Generating huge interest and backed by the global WorldWideWeb consortium the semantic web is the key initiative driving the future of the World Wide Web. Towards the Semantic Web focuses on the application of Semantic Web technology and ontologies in particular to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal structures supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to represent explicitly the semantics of structured and semi-structured information which enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Covering the key technologies for the next generation of the WWW, this book is an excellent mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research.

• Aims to support more efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources.

• Covers highly significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a coherent methodology for the application of the tools for business advantage.

• Provides guidelines for introducing knowledge management concepts and tools into businesses.

• Introduces an intelligent search tool that supports users in accessing information and a tool environment for maintenance, conversion and acquisition of information sources. Also describes information visualisation and knowledge sharing tools.

• Describes a state-of-the-art system for storage and retrieval of metadata expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. Also discusses a system for automatic metadata extraction.

• Examines three significant case studies providing examples of the real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in "real world" situations.

This book provides several inventory models for making the right decision in inventory management under different environments. Basically, the optimal ordering policies are determined for situations with and without shortages in production-inventory systems. The chapters in the book include various features of inventory modeling i.e., inflation, deterioration, supply chain, learning, credit financing, carbon emission policy, stock-dependent demand, among others. The book is a useful resource for academicians, researchers, students, practitioners, and managers who can be benefited with the policies provided in the chapters of the book.

Current models of corporate citizenship largely consider business as one coherent entity. This view of business as a corporate force overlooks the growing evidence that most businesses are run by families. Family businesses are the most common form of business in existence - across countries, continents and geopolitical divides - and yet we know remarkably little about their approach to corporate citizenship. Where families run businesses, they create a concentration of family values that - for good or ill - influence the way business practices and behaviours develop. The role of the family in business has, therefore, an influence on the development of society that is partially mediated through corporate citizenship. This book pulls together current thinking from several diverse research fields that intersect with family business research to offer insight into current research and examples of practice for those studying and researching in the fields of family business, business values and corporate practice. The book will also explore the fact that family businesses tend to take a longer-term approach to business and that this is reflected in their behaviour towards the environment, community engagement, employee development and innovation. Bringing together contributions from researchers in the diverse fields of family business, philanthropy, community engagement, corporate social responsibility, innovation and policy, this book explores the many ways in which family businesses contribute to the corporate citizenship agenda.

In this book, Edosa explores common challenges which limit the value that organisations can get from data. What makes his book unique is that he also tackles one of the unspoken barriers to data adoption-fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the intangible, fear of the investment needed and, yes, fear of losing your job to a machine. With his talent for distilling clarity from complexity, Edosa tackles this and many other challenges. -Tim Carmichael, Chief Data Officer, Chalhoub Group This book offers fresh insight about how to solve the interactional frictions that hamper the flow of data, information and knowledge across organisations. Yet, rather than being stuck with endless polarising debates such as breaking down silos, it shifts focus back towards the ultimate "to what end." -Jacky Wright, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Microsoft US If you care about AI transformation, empowering people or advancing organisational success in an increasingly digital world, then you should read this book. -Yomi Ibosiola, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Union Bank A retail giant already struggling due to the Covid-19 pandemic was faced with a disastrous situation when-at the end of a critical investment in an artificial intelligence project that had been meant to save money-it suddenly discovered that its implementation was likely to leave it worse off. An entire critical service stream within an insurer's production system crashed. This critical failure resulted in the detentions of fully insured motorists for allegedly not carrying required insurance. Making Data Work details these two scenarios as well as others illustrating the consequences that arise when organizations do not know how to make data work properly. It is a journey to determine what to do to "make data work" for ourselves and for our organisations. It is a journey to discover how to bring it all together so organisations can enable digital transformation, empower people, and advance organisational success. It is the journey to a world where data and technology finally live up to the hype and deliver better human outcomes, where artificial intelligence can move us from reacting to situations to predicting future occurrences and enabling desirable possibilities.

In this book, Edosa explores common challenges which limit the value that organisations can get from data. What makes his book unique is that he also tackles one of the unspoken barriers to data adoption-fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the intangible, fear of the investment needed and, yes, fear of losing your job to a machine. With his talent for distilling clarity from complexity, Edosa tackles this and many other challenges. -Tim Carmichael, Chief Data Officer, Chalhoub Group This book offers fresh insight about how to solve the interactional frictions that hamper the flow of data, information and knowledge across organisations. Yet, rather than being stuck with endless polarising debates such as breaking down silos, it shifts focus back towards the ultimate "to what end." -Jacky Wright, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Microsoft US If you care about AI transformation, empowering people or advancing organisational success in an increasingly digital world, then you should read this book. -Yomi Ibosiola, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Union Bank A retail giant already struggling due to the Covid-19 pandemic was faced with a disastrous situation when-at the end of a critical investment in an artificial intelligence project that had been meant to save money-it suddenly discovered that its implementation was likely to leave it worse off. An entire critical service stream within an insurer's production system crashed. This critical failure resulted in the detentions of fully insured motorists for allegedly not carrying required insurance. Making Data Work details these two scenarios as well as others illustrating the consequences that arise when organizations do not know how to make data work properly. It is a journey to determine what to do to "make data work" for ourselves and for our organisations. It is a journey to discover how to bring it all together so organisations can enable digital transformation, empower people, and advance organisational success. It is the journey to a world where data and technology finally live up to the hype and deliver better human outcomes, where artificial intelligence can move us from reacting to situations to predicting future occurrences and enabling desirable possibilities.

This book reflects the tremendous changes in the telecommunications industry in the course of the past few decades - shorter innovation cycles, stiffer competition and new communication products. It analyzes the transformation of processes, applications and network technologies that are now expected to take place under enormous time pressure. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the TM Forum have provided reference solutions that are broadly recognized and used throughout the value chain of the telecommunications industry, and which can be considered the de facto standard. The book describes how these reference solutions can be used in a practical context: it presents the latest insights into their development, highlights lessons learned from numerous international projects and combines them with well-founded research results in enterprise architecture management and reference modeling. The complete architectural transformation is explained, from the planning and set-up stage to the implementation. Featuring a wealth of examples and illustrations, the book offers a valuable resource for telecommunication professionals, enterprise architects and project managers alike.

E-Business Strategy, Sourcing and Governance is based on the premise that it is difficult, if not impossible, to manage a modern business or public organization without at least some knowledge of the planning, use, control and benefits of information technology. Managers need to have an understanding of strategy development for IS/IT that covers e-business strategy, sourcing of service, and governance of IS/IT decision rights. ""E-Business Strategy, Sourcing and Governance"" presents emerging perspectives that influence IS/IT strategy work, such as new e-business models, the growing number of sourcing options and revised models for governance of IS/IT.

The aim of this book is to investigate the discursive power of two original, theoretical lenses when applied to real outsourcing arrangements and phenomena. The Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and Foucauldian perspectives are brought to bear on five outsourcing relationships in order to test the application of these discourses to rich qualitative data over the outsourcing contractual life-cycle. This will be the first study illustrating the relevance of Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, discourse and power relations to the study of outsourcing arrangements, and will also incorporate the perspectives of both client and supplier organizations. Using discourse analysis, the objective is to critically deconstruct and provide fresh insight into the normative 'outsourcing' discourse that has grown up around global sourcing practices over the last 30 years.

Uses practical business cases in regional Australia to illustrate opportunities and challenges confronting businesses in non metropolitan regions

Uses practical business cases in regional Australia to illustrate opportunities and challenges confronting businesses in non metropolitan regions

This book is based on the review of literature on different themes related to business and management in the Asia Pacific context. All seven chapters included in this book explore the past, present and future of business and research. They cover diverse topics in the Asia Pacific context ranging from different ways of thinking to innovation implementation and efficiency, responsible tourism, internal marketing to leadership. This book will be useful for researchers, practitioners and policy makers. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

This book presents the concept of a fuzzy-based recommender system for user account privacy settings that can be used for citizen participation on online political platforms. The elaborated components are exemplarily based on the needs of a political platform implemented during the presidential election in Ecuador. The book readdresses the issue of privacy paradox demonstrating that, indeed, users' actual decisions of being private in most cases diverge with their initial privacy intentions. The two concepts presented in the book - the citizen privacy profile framework and the prototype fuzzy-based privacy settings recommender system - can be adapted by different organizations such as government institutions, NGOs, or private online service providers to meet their specific needs. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the areas of usage modeling, privacy, system design, and for service providers in eDemocracy.

Modern Actuarial Risk Theory contains what every actuary needs to know about non-life insurance mathematics. It starts with the standard material like utility theory, individual and collective model and basic ruin theory. Other topics are risk measures and premium principles, bonus-malus systems, ordering of risks and credibility theory. It also contains some chapters about Generalized Linear Models, applied to rating and IBNR problems. As to the level of the mathematics, the book would fit in a bachelors or masters program in quantitative economics or mathematical statistics. This second and much expanded edition emphasizes the implementation of these techniques through the use of R. This free but incredibly powerful software is rapidly developing into the de facto standard for statistical computation, not just in academic circles but also in practice. With R, one can do simulations, find maximum likelihood estimators, compute distributions by inverting transforms, and much more.

Within entrepreneurship education, Team Academy is seen by some as an innovative pedagogical model that enhances social connectivity, as well as experiential, student-centred, and team-based learning. It also creates spaces for transformative learning to occur. This second book of the Routledge Focus on Team Academy book series includes chapters from contributors working with the TA methodology in academic institutions around the world that discuss the challenges, benefits, and approaches to embedding the TA methodology in practice (around coaching, assessment, transformative learning, partnerships, programme evolution, etc.). This book is aimed at academics, practitioners, and learners engaged in the Team Academy methodology, pedagogy, and model, as well as those interested in the area of entrepreneurial team learning. Readers will be inspired to innovate in their delivery methodologies and to explore learning-by-doing approaches to creating value. The book also aims to challenge the discourse around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, offering insights, research, stories, and experiences from those learning and working in the Team Academy approach.

Software and systems quality is playing an increasingly important role in the growth of almost all profit and non-profit organisations. Quality is vital to the success of enterprises in their markets. Most small trade and repair businesses use software systems in their administration and marketing processes. Every doctor's surgery is managing its patients using software. Banking is no longer conceivable without software. Aircraft, trucks and cars use more and more software to handle their increasingly complex technical systems. Innovation, competition and cost pressure are always present in on-going business decisions. The question facing all these organisations is how to achieve the right quality of their software-based systems and products; how to get the required level of quality, a level that the market will reward, a level that mitigates the organisation's risks and a level that the organisation is willing to pay for. Although a number of good practices are in place, there is still room for huge improvements. Thus, let us take a look into the two worlds of "Embedded systems" and "ICT systems" and let us learn from both worlds, from overlaps and individual solutions. The next step for industrialisation in the software industry is required now. Hence, three pillars will be focused in this book: (1) a fundamental notion of right software and systems quality (RiSSQ); (2) portfolio management, quality governance, quality management, and quality engineering as holistic approach over the three layers of an enterprise, i.e. strategic, tactical, and operational layer; and (3) an industrialisation framework for implementing our approach.

Technological innovation is a core aspect of corporate and national competitiveness and it is not only complex-requiring cooperation and coordination among many stakeholders-but it also involves high risk due to uncertainty. Financial markets are a key to successful technological innovation. This book looks at how traditional financing and non-traditional ones transform corporate innovation strategy. This book reviews Korean companies to illustrate the impact of financialization on technological innovation through the relationships among financialization, managerial myopia and short-termism of innovation strategy. It does so by conducting an empirical study using Korean firm and USPTO data from the period of 1980 to 2017. By analyzing the innovation capabilities of Korean companies and presenting indicators of technological competitiveness, it offers insights into how financialization has influenced organizational behaviour, causing them to shift strategy formulation, decision making for production, investment and technological innovation away from a long-term perspective to short-term one. This concise book will be of interest to those interested in strategy and entrepreneurship innovation, especially policy makers focusing on financialization or national level innovation strategies.

This book examines the managerial dimensions of business intelligence (BI) systems. It develops a set of guidelines for value creation by implementing business intelligence systems and technologies. In particular the book looks at BI as a process - driven by a mix of human and technological capabilities - to serve complex information needs in building insights and providing aid in decision making. After an introduction to the key concepts of BI and neighboring areas of information processing, the book looks at the complexity and multidimensionality of BI. It tackles both data integration and information integration issues. Bodies of knowledge and other widely accepted collections of experience are presented and turned into lessons learned. Following a straightforward introduction to the processes and technologies of BI the book embarks on BI maturity and agility, the components, drivers and inhibitors of BI culture and soft BI factors like attention, sense and trust. Eventually the book attempts to provide a holistic view on business intelligence, possible structures and tradeoffs and embarks to provide an outlook on possible developments in BI and analytics.

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.

This book provides an understanding of innovation models and why they are important in the business context, and considers sources of innovation and how to apply business frameworks using real-world examples of innovation-led businesses. After providing a solid background to the key concepts related to innovation models, the book looks at why innovation takes place and where the sources of innovation lie, from corporate research to crowd-sourced and government-funded initiatives. Innovation models across manufacturing, services and government are explored, as well as measuring innovation, and the impact of design thinking and lean enterprise principles on innovation and sustainability-driven imperatives. Offering a truly comprehensive and global approach, Business Innovation should be core or recommended reading for advanced undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA and Executive Education students studying Innovation Management, Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship.

This book provides specialists and executives with a clear, yet practical set of recommendations to meet the challenges of digital transformation and ensure long-term success as a leader in a primarily digital business world. The authors describe the fundamental principles of digitization and its economic opportunities and risks, integrating them into a framework of classic and new management methods. The book also explores how increasing digitization - not only of communication, but of complete value chains - has led to a need to establish a digital business leadership. Digitization is changing people and markets: it causes the upheaval of entire industries, creates new digital-centric companies, and forces established companies to cope with the transformation activities associated with these digitization processes. New approaches and methods have to be learned, tried and tested patterns of thinking have to be explored, and last but not least, innovation activities have to be understood as continuous necessities. At the same time, digital business offers considerable opportunities for renewing competitive advantages, improving existing process structures and realigning products, services and business models.

Within Entrepreneurship Education, Team Academy (TA) is seen by some as an innovative pedagogical model that enhances social connectivity, as well as experiential, student-centred, and team-based learning. It also creates spaces for transformative learning to occur. This fourth book of the Routledge Focus on Team Academy book series the TA model is examined outside of the traditional TA-based settings (industry, schools, communities of practice, etc.) in different countries (Brazil, Japan, UK, Finland, Argentina, Tanzania, Spain, etc.). The legacy that this has left in learners and practitioners who have engaged with the model is also explored. This book is aimed at academics, practitioners, and learners engaged in the Team Academy methodology, pedagogy and model, as well as those interested in the area of entrepreneurial team learning. Readers will be inspired to innovate in their delivery methodologies and to explore learning-by-doing approaches to creating value. The book also aims to challenge the discourse around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, offering insights, research, stories, and experiences from those learning and working in the Team Academy approach.