The growing complexity, fluidity and instability of the environment as well as changing needs are challenges that both enterprises and higher education institutions must face. Higher education institutions understand that their key product, i.e. knowledge, is a value that can and should be offered to enterprises in a desirable form as a key to innovation and development as well as the basis of the necessary internal transformation to respond to requirements of our times. Attempts to explain the process of collaboration between higher education institutions and businesses based on an institutional perspective fail to capture the complexity of this process. The purpose of this book is to develop a model approach to managerial competencies that affect the innovativeness of enterprises and to identify internal and external key factors strengthening or limiting the impact of managerial competencies on the innovativeness of an enterprise including organisational structure, strategy, organisational culture and more. It will be of value to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation, management, strategy, and will be particularly useful to organisations that are aware of their operating conditions in the knowledge-based economy and of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemics on the acceleration of the digital transformation of the contemporary world.

This book presents a new conceptualisation of the idea of legacy in a family business setting as an educational experience of teaching and learning between generations. Using the lived experience of the author, it combines autoethnography with a discussion on the influence of Chinese culture on family business and expectations placed on the eldest son, as well as Bill Pinar's model of Currere, to investigate the processes around intergenerational learning. The author argues that legacy is the process of journeying to full personhood and the results of connected and collective aspirations, shifting the focus from succession that is often marked by silence and power control. The author's approach to business as a field has transformed its strong instrumental approach into an existential orientation with self-discovery and self-creation as an ongoing process Providing the new and innovative beginnings of a theoretical curriculum that could foster legacy processes and taking a unique and interdisciplinary approach to looking at family business and legacy, this book will be relevant to scholars and researcher of both education and business studies.

Combining conceptual, pragmatic and operational approaches, this edited collection addresses the demand for knowledge and understanding of IT in the healthcare sector. With new technology outbreaks, our vision of healthcare has been drastically changed, switching from a 'traditional' path to a digitalized one. Providing an overview of the role of IT in the healthcare sector, The Digitization of Healthcare illustrates the potential benefits and challenges for all those involved in delivering care to the patient. The incursion of IT has disrupted the value chain and changed business models for companies working in the health sector, and also raised ethical issues and new paradigms about delivering care. This book illustrates the rise of patient empowerment through the development of patient communities such as PatientLikeMe, and medical collaborate platforms such as DockCheck, thus providing a necessary tool to patients, caregivers and academics alike.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, corporate collapses, accounting scandals and concerns around competition and auditor choice, the European Commission (EC) promoted the preparation of various reports on audit policy to support a harmonisation process of European auditing regulation. Consequently, the European Union Audit Regulation and Directive was implemented from 2016. This book provides a timely picture of the audit sector and how it responds to regulatory and technological challenges. It analyses the impact of EU reforms on audit practices by comparing the U.K. and Italy, which, representing two very different regulatory and cultural contexts, will offer insight into how the efforts at standardising audit regulation may lead to very different organisational firm responses within Europe. It addresses issues relating to public policy work and the concerns faced by the market for audit and assurance services, in promoting audit quality, better communication about the role of the auditor, capital market stability and confidence, and auditor independence. Moreover, it highlights what the future of auditing might look like in the EU particularly after the U.K. has left, and how meeting public expectations will continue to be a struggle for the accounting profession given the many problems ahead. The book encourages a deeper awareness of the challenges faced by those that monitor and certify the financial statements of the world's largest public companies and contributes to the general understanding of this controversial industry. It will serve as a useful guide to the recent EU audit reforms, not only for academics, and research students but also to regulators, policymakers, standard setters, industry professionals, and business executives worldwide.

This book is intended to guide researchers interested in the world of innovation in real estate finance linked to technology and provide new evidence on classifying and evaluating the performance of PropTech companies. Chapters will deal with the evolution of PropTech, possible business models, negotiation and property management tools, new property financing tools (p2p lending and crowdfunding), the market and the balance sheet analysis of PropTech companies in Europe.A valuable resource for researchers studying the real estate industry, this book is also relevant to those studying FinTech and the impact of technology on industry more broadly. It can also be of use to professionals in the real estate industry, looking for a cutting edge research-based study on PropTech.

Anyone with an interest in learning about the mathematical modeling of prices of financial derivatives such as bonds, futures, and options can start with this book, whereby the only mathematical prerequisite is multivariable calculus. The necessary theory of interest, statistical, stochastic, and differential equations are developed in their respective chapters, with the goal of making this introductory text as self-contained as possible.In this edition, the chapters on hedging portfolios and extensions of the Black-Scholes model have been expanded. The chapter on optimizing portfolios has been completely re-written to focus on the development of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The binomial model due to Cox-Ross-Rubinstein has been enlarged into a standalone chapter illustrating the wide-ranging utility of the binomial model for numerically estimating option prices. There is a completely new chapter on the pricing of exotic options. The appendix now features linear algebra with sufficient background material to support a more rigorous development of the Arbitrage Theorem.The new edition has more than doubled the number of exercises compared to the previous edition and now contains over 700 exercises. Thus, students completing the book will gain a deeper understanding of the development of modern financial mathematics.

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.

The Media Convergence Handbook sheds new light on the complexity of media convergence and the related business challenges. Approaching the topic from a managerial, technological as well as end-consumer perspective, it acts as a reference book and educational resource in the field. Media convergence at business level may imply transforming business models and using multiplatform content production and distribution tools. However, it is shown that the implementation of convergence strategies can only succeed when expectations and aspirations of every actor involved are taken into account. Media consumers, content producers and managers face different challenges in the process of media convergence. Volume I of the Media Convergence Handbook encourages an active discourse on media convergence by introducing the concept through general perspective articles and addressing the real-world challenges of conversion in the publishing, broadcasting and social media sectors.

* Provides actionable recommendations on successfully doing business in Kenya * Covers cultural, social, technological, and economic dimensions * Illuminates the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Africa more generally

Owing to the convergence of multiple cultures coupled with the unprecedented rapid development in the decades since the late 1990s, the value creation and innovation logic of Asia Pacific business models (BMs) has been constantly altered by cultural heterogeneity. As a result, a more complex and diverse landscape relative to Western developed economy BMs evolved. Moreover, the digitalization has fundamentally changed the way people do business, which has promoted a new wave of BM evolution. Unlike a typical linear mode of innovation driven by market demands in many Western cultures, a large number of entrepreneurial enterprises from the Asia Pacific with eastern religions and philosophies have tended to adopt unconventional, culturally grounded strategies of value creation and innovation in their BMs. However, it is difficult to find a Western equivalent to the value-creating route that embodies the humanitarian spirit of Confucianism accommodating simultaneously social and economic values to accelerate innovation during internationalization in existing literatures. This book offers a more holistic picture and contemporary interpretation for identifying and characterizing the unorthodox innovation patterns and the perplexing value-creating logic of Asia Pacific BMs at the crossroads of diverse cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review. This book is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72272136; 71988101).

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.

Sustainable development is based on the idea that societies should advance without compromising their future development requirements. This book explores how the application of data analytics and digital technologies can ensure that development changes are executed on the basis of factual data and information. It addresses how innovations that rely on digital technologies can support sustainable development across all sectors and all social, economic, and environmental aspects and help us achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book also highlights techniques, processes, models, tools, and practices used to achieve sustainable development through data analysis. The various topics covered in this book are critically evaluated, not only theoretically, but also from an application perspective. It will be of interest to researchers and students, especially those in the fields of applied data analytics, business intelligence and knowledge management.

The book focuses on the real-world case-based crisis management in digital product development. This includes forecasting, responding, and agile engineering/management methods, patterns, and practices for sustainable development. This book introduces a set of case studies for sustainability in management as a blend, the components of which have been carefully selected from a few domains adjacent to digital production such as IT-intensive operation, human resource management, and knowledge engineering, to name a few. The key ingredients of this crisis management framework include information management, tradeoff optimization, agile product development, and knowledge transfer. The case studies this book features will help the stakeholders in understanding and identifying the key technology, business, and human factors that may likely result in a digital production crisis, i.e., critically affect the organization outcomes in terms of successful digitalization and sustainable development. These factors are particularly important for the large-scale applications, typically considered very complex in managerial and technological aspects, and, therefore, specifically addressed by the discipline of IT crisisology.

The second volume of this edited collection offers a number of contributions from leading scholars investigating Blockchain and its implications for business. Focusing on the transformation of the overall value chain, the sections cover the foundations of Blockchain and its sustainability, social and legal applications. It features a variety of use cases, from tourism to healthcare. Using a number of theoretical and methodological approaches, this innovative publication aims to further the cause of this ground-breaking technology and its use within information technology, supply chain and wider business management research.

Concerns computer-based information systems that can affect the decision making behavior of their users. It tells the reader how to describe these systems and how to differentiate one from the other. Its main features are: a broad definition of Decision Support Systems (DSS), a process view of decision making, which leads to viewing DSS as interventions into the processes through which decisions are made, and a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach.

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Offering readers a closer look at design thinking, its innovation processes and methods, it covers topics ranging from how to design ideas, methods and technologies, to creativity experiments and creative collaboration in the real world, and the interplay between designers and engineers. But the topics go beyond this in their detailed exploration of design thinking and its use in IT systems engineering fields, and even from a management perspective. The authors show how these methods and strategies actually work in companies, and introduce new technologies and their functions. Furthermore, readers learn how special-purpose design thinking can be used to solve thorny problems in complex fields. Thinking and devising innovations are fundamentally and inherently human activities - so is design thinking. Accordingly, design thinking is not merely the result of special courses nor of being gifted or trained: it's a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life. This edition offers a historic perspective on the theoretical foundations of design thinking. Within the four topic areas, various frameworks, methodologies, mindsets, systems and tools are explored and further developed. The first topic area focuses on team interaction, while the second part addresses tools and techniques for productive collaboration. The third section explores new approaches to teaching and enabling creative skills and lastly the book examines how design thinking is put into practice. All in all, the contributions shed light and provide deeper insights into how to support the collaboration of design teams in order to systematically and successfully develop innovations and design progressive solutions for tomorrow.

This book treats intellectual capital, smart technologies, and digitalization processes as levers of corporate competitiveness and global value creation. This book is based on theoretical and practical research output from the STEDIC SIDREA Group. It uses several methodologies to discover features and pillars on intellectual capital such as human capital, relational capital, and structural capital as well as smart technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, and digitalization.

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.

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.

In Unmasking Project Management, Moraveck explores approaches to help managers implement successful information systems projects. Moraveck goes beyond traditional approaches to management of information systems (MIS) by introducing several types of principles, concepts, and research models that can be used for project management, and by presenting information about organizations in a new way.
Written from the perspective of an insider, Unmasking Project Management helps professionals in information technology (IT) and business identify successful approaches to MIS for their organizations and projects. Since IT managers and project managers face unique challenges, this book provides the knowledge to overcome these challenges by exploring business initiatives that drive changes, highlighting important project management essentials, examining the organization environment and real-world experiences of IT and project managers, reviewing MIS options and choices, and demonstrating how to get the emotional and peer support that managers need in order to complete their projects successfully.
In addition to being useful for IT and project managers, Unmasking Project Management is ideal for students and practitioners who need help making decisions about managing information systems.

In recent years, there has been a growing debate, particularly in the UK and Europe, over the merits of using discrete-event simulation (DES) and system dynamics (SD); there are now instances where both methodologies were employed on the same problem. This book details each method, comparing each in terms of both theory and their application to various problem situations. It also provides a seamless treatment of various topics--theory, philosophy, detailed mechanics, practical implementation--providing a systematic treatment of the methodologies of DES and SD, which previously have been treated separately.

This book systematically examines and quantifies industrial problems by assessing the complexity and safety of large systems. It includes chapters on system performance management, software reliability assessment, testing, quality management, analysis using soft computing techniques, management analytics, and business analytics, with a clear focus on exploring real-world business issues. Through contributions from researchers working in the area of performance, management, and business analytics, it explores the development of new methods and approaches to improve business by gaining knowledge from bulk data. With system performance analytics, companies are now able to drive performance and provide actionable insights for each level and for every role using key indicators, generate mobile-enabled scorecards, time series-based analysis using charts, and dashboards. In the current dynamic environment, a viable tool known as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is increasingly being adopted to deal with complex business decisions. MCDA is an important decision support tool for analyzing goals and providing optimal solutions and alternatives. It comprises several distinct techniques, which are implemented by specialized decision-making packages. This book addresses a number of important MCDA methods, such as DEMATEL, TOPSIS, AHP, MAUT, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy MCDM, which make it possible to derive maximum utility in the area of analytics. As such, it is a valuable resource for researchers and academicians, as well as practitioners and business experts.

This book approaches big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence through the lens of Data Science. We have grown accustomed to seeing these terms mentioned time and time again in the mainstream media. However, our understanding of what they actually mean often remains limited. This book provides a general overview of the terms and approaches used broadly in data science, and provides detailed information on the underlying theories, models, and application scenarios. Divided into three main parts, it addresses what data science is; how and where it is used; and how it can be implemented using modern open source software. The book offers an essential guide to modern data science for all students, practitioners, developers and managers seeking a deeper understanding of how various aspects of data science work, and of how they can be employed to gain a competitive advantage.

The exponential growth of disruptive technology is changing our world. The development of cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and other related autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles, have triggered the emergence of new products and services. These significant technological breakthroughs have opened the door to new economic models such as the sharing and platform-based economy. As a result, companies are becoming increasingly data- and algorithm-driven, coming to be more like "decentralized platforms". New transaction or payment methods such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, based on trust-building systems using Blockchain, smart contracts, and other distributed ledger technology, also constitute an essential part of this new economic model. The sharing economy and digital platforms also include the everyday exchange of goods allowing individuals to commodify their surplus resources. Information and innovation technologies are used in order to then match these resources with existing demand in the market. Online platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon reduce information asymmetry, increase the value of unused resources, and create new opportunities for collaboration and innovation. Moreover, the sharing economy is playing a major role in the transition from exclusive ownership of personal assets toward access-based exploitation of resources. The success of online matching platforms depends not only on the reduction of search costs but also on the trustworthiness of platform operators. From a legal perspective, the uncertainties triggered by the emergence of a new digital reality are particularly urgent. How should these tendencies be reflected in legal systems in each jurisdiction? This book collects a series of contributions by leading scholars in the newly emerging fields of sharing economy and Legal Tech. The aim of the book is to enrich legal debates on the social, economic, and political meaning of these cutting-edge technologies. The chapters presented in this edition attempt to answer some of these lingering questions from the perspective of diverse legal backgrounds.

Service chain management enables service organisations to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs. In this book, Christos Voudouris and his BT colleagues together with experts from industry and academia present the latest innovations and technologies used to manage the operations of a service company. The viewpoints presented are based on the BT experience and on associated research and development. Service chain management is looked at both from the enterprise perspective and from the standpoints of the service professional and customer. The focus is on real-world challenges.