This book represents a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of entrepreneurship and small business management issues in the Balkans region. It provides major theoretical and empirical evidence that offers a brighter view of these fields and aims to open up opportunities for greater dialogue in public policy. The readers would be able to enhance their knowledge on small businesses and innovation issues in the Balkans. An outcome of a long lasting endeavour, this book includes contributions of highly reputed authors and experts from the Balkans' countries. Features forewords by two well-known personalities of this field, Leo Paul Dana and Alain Fayolle.

In recent years, social innovation has experienced a steep career. Numerous national governments and large organisations like the OECD, the European Commission and UNESCO have adopted the term. Social innovation basically means that people adopt new social practices in order to meet social needs in a different or more effective way. Prominent examples of the past are the Red Cross and the social welfare state or, at present, the internet 2.0 transforming our communication and cooperation schemes, requiring new management concepts, even empowering social revolutions. The traditional concept of innovation as successful new technological products needs fundamental rethinking in a society marked by knowledge and services, leading to a new and enriched paradigm of innovation. There is multiple evidence that social innovation will become of growing importance not only concerning social integration, equal opportunities and dealing with the greenhouse effects but also with regard to preserving and expanding the innovative capacity of companies and societies. While political authorities stress the social facets of social innovation, this book also encompasses its societal and systemic dimensions, collecting the scientific expertise of renowned experts and scholars from all over the world. Based on the contributions of the first world-wide science convention on social innovation from September 2011 in Vienna, the book provides an overview of scientific approaches to this still relatively new field. Forewords by Agnes HUBERT (Member of theBureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA) of the European Commission) and Antonella Noya (Senior Policy Analyst at OECD, manager of the OECD LEED Forum on Social Innovations)

"Changing Female Identities" explores the influence of parental figures, the roles that women use as their models, the diverse feelings that arise as a result of family mandates and emotions in relation to cooperation or competition among siblings.

As digitization continues to bring rapid changes to businesses, companies must remain agile in order to comply with changing regulations and maintain governance and compliance while achieving its business objectives. To achieve this agility, IT staff within these companies must be able to respond quickly to changing business needs while maintaining existing and efficient infrastructure. Strategic IT Governance and Performance Frameworks in Large Organizations is an essential reference source that provides emerging frameworks and models that implement an efficient strategic IT governance in organizations and discusses the effects these policies have on the business as a whole. Featuring six international case studies from large organizations, this title covers topics such as IT management, security policy, and organizational governance, and is ideally designed for IT specialists, academicians, researchers, policymakers, and managers.

The ability to harness Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) is increasingly at the heart of competitiveness and sustainable growth. As countries engage in an increasingly competitive global economy, they are trying to weave ICT into their development strategies, in the same way enterprises have learned to use ICT to transform their business models and strategies. This integration offers a new path to development that is responsive to the challenges of our times.

In National Strategies to Harness Information Technology, Nagy Hanna and Peter Knight provide a framework for assessing the opportunities, challenges, and prospects for "e-transformation"and for analyzing the options and innovations adopted to manage the e-transformation process. They ask hard questions: what does it take to harness ICT to transform an economy? Why some countries accelerate their development journey with ICT while others fail? How did successful countries balance the need for strategic leadership with bottom up innovation? Can countries reduce the risks of digital divide? What have been the roles of government and private sectors? What lessons can be learned for countries at different levels of development?

Featuring contributions from country experts, the editors and authors provide in-depth case studies of ICT deployment in Singapore, Finland, the Philippines, and South Africa, and asses the progress of such efforts. The result is an essential resource for academic researchers, policy analysts, policymakers, and industry leaders interested in the role of ICT in national development, innovation, and economic growth.In National Strategies to Harness Information Technology, Nagy Hanna and Peter Knight provide a framework for assessing the opportunities, challenges, and prospects for "e-transformation"and for analyzing the options and innovations adopted to manage the e-transformation process. They ask hard questions: what does it take to harness ICT to transform an economy? Why some countries accelerate their development journey with ICT while others fail? How did successful countries balance the need for strategic leadership with bottom up innovation? Can countries reduce the risks of digital divide? What have been the roles of government and private sectors? What lessons can be learned for countries at different levels of development?

Featuring contributions from country experts, the editors and authors provide in-depth case studies of ICT deployment in Singapore, Finland, the Philippines, and South Africa, and asses the progress of such efforts. The result is an essential resource for academic researchers, policy analysts, policymakers, and industry leaders interested in the role of ICT in national development, innovation, and economic growth."

This book examines how and why collaborative quality assurance techniques, particularly pair programming and peer code review, affect group cognition and software quality in agile software development teams. Prior research on these extremely popular but also costly techniques has focused on isolated pairs of developers and ignored the fact that they are typically applied in larger, enduring teams. This book is one of the first studies to investigate how these techniques depend on and influence the joint cognitive accomplishments of entire development teams rather than individuals. It employs theories on transactive memory systems and functional affordances to provide answers based on empirical research. The mixed-methods research presented includes several in-depth case studies and survey results from more than 500 software developers, team leaders, and product managers in 81 software development teams. The book's findings will advance IS research and have explicit implications for developers of code review tools, information systems development teams, and software development managers.

The current crisis has rocked the financial system worldwide and has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the existing regulatory regime. Thousands of firms have gone bankrupt and many financial institutions were bailed out by governments. The effects of the crisis have shaken emerging and developing markets alike and have not spared neither small nor large businesses.

Many scholars and practitioners attribute the roots of the crisis to failures and weaknesses in the way corporate governance has been practiced since the mid-1990s. Lax board oversight of top management, short-termism and self-interested behavior have been fingered as the culprits behind recent financial turmoil.

This book highlights the recent developments and new trends in corporate governance. The eighteen chapters, written by leading academics and experts, can assist corporate executives, governance bodies, investors, market regulators, and policymakers in having a global picture of major corporate governance issues.

This book highlights the recent developments and new trends in corporate governance. The eighteen chapters, written by leading academics and experts, can assist corporate executives, governance bodies, investors, market regulators, and policymakers in having a global picture of major corporate governance issues.

Lifelong learning can occur both in and out of the classroom, but the most valuable instruction takes place on the job. Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies investigates methods, techniques, and systems used in employee training programs. The tools and technologies surveyed within these pages will help employers take their workers beyond the transient skill sets offered by university degrees and into a constant state of learning and practice that will enhance both their productivity and technical abilities on a regular basis. In particular, the knowledge offered by this reference book will be of use to educators and students as well as managers, leaders, administrators, and personnel.

In the past, services had a strong local and national focus. Professional services were very likely to be independently and autonomously organized from country to country in order to cater to local needs and local legal requirements. This has since changed radically, and highly integrated business and delivery models around the globe have become the status quo in clients' businesses and strategies. Serving clients on a global level requires professional services firms to adopt a structural change from local to distributed global sales and delivery.

This book brings together many years of experience, current perspectives and future ideas of international business practitioners, academics, and market researchers. Along those lines it is structured into four parts. Part I "Winning Strategies and Innovative Ideas" lays the book's foundation: it discusses core strategies behind the globalization movement and introduces the major paradigms and ideas. Part II "Successful Processes for Realization" provides solutions for how to establish successful processes for delivering global professional services. Part III "Inspired Talent Management" goes to the core of the professional services industry: attracting, developing, and keeping the right talent in the right locations. Finally, Part IV offers "Experiences and Case Studies" on all aspects related to successfully building a globalized professional services firm.

In short, this handbook provides professional services firms and their clients alike with a sound foundation for responding strategically to fundamental global changes and turning them into business advantages. It offers a comprehensive perspective of why and how to successfully globalize a professional services firm.

Across industries, firms vary broadly on how they operate with respect to their Research & Development (R&D) activities. This volume presents a holistic approach to evaluating the critical elements of R&D management, including planning, organization, portfolio management, project management, and knowledge transfer-by assessing R&D management from different sectors. Featuring empirical research and in-depth case studies from industries as diverse as medical imaging, electric vehicles, and cyber security, the authors identify common features of successful R&D management, despite fundamental differences, such as company size, number of employees, industry sector, and the R&D budget. In particular, they consider the implications for decision making with respect to resource allocation and investments, such as site selection, purchasing, and cross-departmental communication.

The contributors to this volume address current issues and problems in the field of stress management and provide guidance toward the development, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of stress management programs in work settings. The authors' aim is to shift the present mind set of brief stress workshops toward more comprehensive actions which target both the organization and the individual worker as intervention points for stress reduction. Collectively labeled as stress management, methods such as muscle relaxation, meditation, biofeedback, and cognitive strategies have been taught to workers as a means of reducing psycho-physiological and subjective distress. These preventative strategies have focused exclusively on the healthy individual worker. As presently defined, stress management has a negligible role in reducing organizational stress. The authors suggest that a more appropriate application would be a complement to job redesign or organizational change intervention. They also argue that conceptual issues are as important as logistical ones in determining program success.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with organizational stress and its assessment. Part II describes aspects of stress management as applied in work settings, and the third part is a collection of resources for training materials, products, and equipment. "Stress Management in Work SettingS" is a professional book aimed at the users who will ultimately make the decision to offer a stress reduction program, decide what type of action will be taken, and actually implement the action.

This monograph addresses several critical problems to the operations of shipping lines and ports, and provides algorithms and mathematical models for use by shipping lines and port authorities for decision support. One of these problems is the repositioning of container ships in a liner shipping network in order to adjust the network to seasonal shifts in demand or changes in the world economy. We provide the first problem description and mathematical model of repositioning and define the liner shipping fleet repositioning problem (LSFRP). The LSFRP is characterized by chains of interacting activities with a multi-commodity flow over paths defined by the activities chosen. We first model the problem without cargo flows with a variety of well-known optimization techniques, as well as using a novel method called linear temporal optimization planning that combines linear programming with partial-order planning in a branch-and-bound framework. We then model the LSFRP with cargo flows, using several different mathematical models as well as two heuristic approaches. We evaluate our techniques on a real-world dataset that includes a scenario from our industrial collaborator. We show that our approaches scale to the size of problems faced by industry, and are also able to improve the profit on the reference scenario by over US$14 million.

This book comprises refereed papers from the 10th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM 2015), held in Tampere, Finland in September 2015. These proceedings include a compilation of state-of-the-art papers covering a comprehensive range of subjects equally relevant to business managers and engineering professionals alike. With a focus on various aspects of engineering asset management ranging from strategic level issues to detail-level machine health issues, these papers address both industry and public sector concerns and issues, as well as advanced academic research. Proceedings of the WCEAM 2015 is an excellent reference and resource for asset management practitioners, researchers and academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students at tertiary institutions or in the industry.

Written by the world's leading academics in the outsourcing field, this books gives the most recent overview of developments in research and practice. It focuses on new practices in innovation, offshoring, onshoring, capabilities, project management and cloud services, offering a distinctive theory of outsourcing.

The book introduces the concept of 'smart technologies', especially 'Internet of Things' (IoT), and elaborates upon various constituent technologies, their evolution and their applications to various challenging problems in society. It then presents research papers and case studies based upon inception, application and implementation of IoT-based smart technologies for various application areas from some of the most technologically conservative domains like agriculture and farming to the most advanced areas such as automobiles, financial transactions and industrial applications. The book contents is thus applicable not only to academic researcher, but also to interested readers from industries and corporates, and those involved in policy making. Excerpt from the Foreword (read the complete text on Springerlink): "This book contains besides the two introductory chapters, written by the project leaders from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, and TU Clausthal (TUC), Germany, the different areas of research work done within the INGPAR (Indo-German Partnership in Advanced Research, founded by DAAD in Germany and UGC in India) project so far by the Indian and German young researchers. It offers new perspectives and documents important progress in smart technologies. I can say without reservation that this book and, more specifically, the method it espouses will change fundamental ideas for cutting-edge innovation and disruption in the smart technology area." - Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanschke, President, TU Clausthal, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

Quality is becoming the most important competitive issue. The customer demands quality making it imperative to businesses to take it in serious consideration. It has become a matter of survival to provide a quality product. The concern with quality demands a) a better definition of the quality concept for each firm; b) a constant monitoring and planning of the quality standards and actions; and c) a continuous control of operations towards a quality objective. This is essentially the message and the content of this book: That quality needs to be defined contingent on the specific activities of the firm; that quality needs to be constantly monitored through a specific planning and recording system and finally, that quality is essentially the result of strong control activities. Belkaoui reviews the various approaches to the specification of the quality concept, the type of recording systems appropriate for its monitoring and the detailed control procedures needed to achieve it.

The book should be very helpful to executives involved in a total quality control program, management accountants involved in the control of quality and accounting students in managerial accounting courses.

Production development is about improving existing production systems and developing new ones. The production system should be developed in integration with the product, as a part of the overall product realization process, and not in sequence after the product has already been designed. Production Development: Design and Operation of Production Systems takes a holistic viewpoint on the production system and its design process during the whole system life cycle. A working procedure demonstrating how to design and realize the production system is presented, together with a number of related production development aspects.

Production Development: Design and Operation of Production Systems is illustrated with a large number of figures and industrial examples. The book can be used as a reference for teachers and students, or as a manual for professionals within the field of production.

This book provides strategic practices for Leaders in the Facility, Real Estate & Property Management Profession. Whether you manage facilities directly, use a service provider or have a landlord, these strategies help you deliver results for your organization and support their core business. Managing Facilities and Real Estate has become increasingly complex. Success requires a broad technical understanding of facilities combined with solid strategic, management and leadership skills to deliver services for your organization and advance your career. This book includes tools to leverage your existing knowledge and skills to improve efficiency, enhance services and reduce costs while demonstrating your value to your organization. The 50 techniques and approaches are grouped in the following strategic areas: Management & Leadership Outsourcing FM Functions Strategic Management Getting Performance Communicating to Influence Customer Service FM Systems Cost and Productivity Procuring Services References & Resources

Although fossil fuels remain the primary global energy source, developing and expanding economies are creating an ever-widening gap between supply and demand. Efficient energy management offers a cost-effective opportunity for both industrialized and developing nations to limit the enormous financial and environmental costs associated with burning fossil fuels. The implication of photovoltaic systems in particular presents the potential for clean and sustainable electrical energy to be generated from an unrestricted source. "Energy Management in Buildings Using Photovoltaics "demonstrates how adopting 'best practices' for energy management and harvesting can reduce the need to construct new generating facilities.

Illustrated with figures, tables and photos, "Energy Management in Buildings Using Photovoltaics" provides an introduction and step by step instructions on designing and planning photovoltaic systems and energy policies for both residential and industrial buildings. With particular focus on the example of provided by European industry, the creation of energy efficient systems is explored including chapters on:

Zero Energy Buildings,

Photovoltaics Technology, and

Connection of the Network

By presenting this topic from basic introduction to highly technical analysis, "Energy Management in Buildings Using Photovoltaics "acts a study guide for postgraduate students as well as a key point of reference for researchers and technical consultants in the field of photovoltaic systems.

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Through key research papers from Palgrave's Journal of Operational Research, this book showcases how Operational Research can be applied to sports in a variety of ways, including: timetabling fixtures; scheduling officials; forecasting outcomes; optimizing tactics and strategy; analyzing the effects of rules and laws; planning issues, and performance measurement. The introductory chapter provides a broad overview with an examination of how this area has developed over time, and a look at its wide ranging applications to sports including football, tennis and cricket etc.

Much has been written about equal opportunity issues but little has been published about how organisations might provide more structure and support to ensure women's progress to the most senior business levels. This book looks at the career experiences of a group of women managers and consider what helps, and what still hinders their progress.

The successful evaluation of capital projects requires not only a thorough understanding of traditional techniques of capital budgeting but advanced techniques as well. Riahi-Belkaoui examines the multidimensionality of capital budgeting in its various facets and in ways that executives with no special facility in the subject can follow. He covers replacement decisions, capital rationing, capital budgeting under inflation uncertainty, capital budgeting in a multinational setting with attention to political risks, social project evaluation, and concepts of wealth measurement and distribution. The result is a wide ranging treatment for executive decision makers in finance, banking, investment, and general management, and for their colleagues with similar interests in the academic community.

Riahi-Belkaoui begins by examining the principles underlying the time value of money. In Chapter Two he introduces capital budgeting and in Chapter Three moves to advanced capital budgeting. There he discusses such advanced topics as replacement decisions, capital rationing, and capital budgeting under uncertainty and inflation. In Chapter Four he takes up the same issues associated with capital budgeting but in a global context, and in Chapter Five, the determination of political risk and its use in capital budgeting internationally. Chapter Six compares the techniques of leasing versus purchasing and their reliance on capital budgeting techniques. In Chapter Seven he turns to the techniques of capital budgeting applied to social projects, and ends the book with an examination of the behavior and cognitive implications of wealth measurement and distribution. This is a useful survey and examination of the traditional and advanced techniques of capital budgeting and their applications in domestic and international contexts.