What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

This book documents the distinctive experiences and challenges of Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia. By assessing succession and innovation in SMEs as the two sides of a coin, this book explains how innovations are essential to SMEs in succession. With detailed case examples, the book provides generalized solutions for SMEs to answer the question of how to make succession and innovation simultaneously successful. The authors discuss the potential solutions to solve the challenges of SMEs on succession and innovation by considering the utilization of the capital market, the electronic commerce strategy, the international strategy, and angel investment to pursue portfolio entrepreneurship, and compare these Asia solutions to the experiences from Europe. The book is recommended for family business and SME owners, professionals serving these firms, and the consulting firms that work on continuity issues of SMEs in Asia.

Arts and Business aims at bringing arts and business scholars together in a dialogue about a number of key topics that today form different understandings in the two disciplines. Arts and business are, many times, positioned as opposites. Where one is providing symbolic and aesthetic immersion, the other is creating goods for a market and markets for a good. They often deal and struggle with the same issues, framing it differently and finding different solutions. This book has the potential of offering both critical theoretical and empirical understanding of these subjects and guiding further exploration and research into this field. Although this dichotomy has a well-documented existence, it is reconstructed through the writing-out of business in art and vice versa. This edited volume distinguishes itself from other writings aimed at closing the gap between art and business, as it does not have a firm standpoint in one of these fields, but treating them as symmetrical and equal. The belief that by giving art and business an equal weight, the editors also create the opportunity to communicate to a wider audience and construct a path forward for art and business to coexist.

Global Strategy: Competing in the Connected Economy details how firms enter, compete and grow in foreign markets. Jain moves away from the traditional focus on developed countries and their multinational enterprises, instead focusing on both developed and emerging economies, as well as their interaction in an increasingly connected world. As the current global business environment is increasingly shaped-and connected-by faster technological developments, geopolitical forces, emerging economies, and new multinationals from those economies, this highly charged dynamic provides rich opportunity to revisit mainstream paradigms in globalization, innovation, and global strategy. The book rises to the challenge, exploring new competitive phenomena, new business models, and new strategies. Rich illustrations, real-world examples, and case data, provide students and executives with the insights necessary to connect, compete, and grow in a globalized business environment. This bold book succinctly covers strategy models and implementation for a range of global players, providing students of strategy and international business with a rich understanding of the contemporary business environment. For access to additional materials, including Powerpoint slides, a list of suggested cases, and sample syllabus, please contact Vinod Jain ([email protected]).

Analysing the trends that are emerging in sport enterprises such as advancements in technology and social media, the authors of this illuminating book tackle the issue of how to create new opportunities in such a changing industry. Providing valuable reading for sports business scholars, this book draws on examples from inventive companies as well as inspirational sports leaders and illustrates the various drivers behind innovation. Addressing the need for a culture of innovation within sports enterprises, the authors reveal sustainable ways for companies to stay ahead of the game in an increasingly competitive global sport market.

As retail businesses migrate to the digital realm, internal information theft incidents continue to threaten on-line and off-line retail operations. The evolving propagation of internal information theft has surpassed the traditional techniques of crime prevention practices. Many business organizations search for internal information theft prevention guides that fit into their retail business operation, only to be inundated with generic and theoretical models. This book examines applicable methods for retail businesses to effectively prevent internal information theft. Information Theft Prevention offers readers a comprehensive understanding of the current status of the retail sector information theft prevention models in relation to the internationally recognized benchmark of information security. It presents simple and effective management processes for ensuring better information system security, fostering a proactive approach to internal information theft prevention. Furthermore, it builds on well-defined retail business cases to identify applicable solutions for businesses today. Integrating the retail business operations and information system security practices, the book identifies ways to coordinate efforts across a business in order to achieve the best results. IT security managers and professionals, financial frauds consultants, cyber security professionals and crime prevention professionals will find this book a valuable resource for identifying and creating tools to prevent internal information theft.

Research on patent valuation has become increasingly important in academic and policy circles in the last few decades. In part, this is the outcome of the wide consensus that innovation is a crucial ingredient for growth at various levels. On the other hand, there has also been an overcoming of growth models unilaterally focused on technological-oriented approaches. This book presents novel and original research on patent value determinants, which are intrinsic or extrinsic to the innovator's business model. Grid Thoma has undertaken a long study on the strategic factors affecting patent valuation, bringing extensive quantitative evidences across various geographical and institutional contexts. Beforehand, the valuation of the patent real options is appraised when the innovator can postpone the additional investment required for the patent's successful exploitation. Then, he analyses what other complemental IP strategies are combined with patenting that in turn directly affect the value of patents. Moreover, the book scrutinizes the so-called 'strategic patenting' hypothesis according to which innovators obtain patents for other reasons beyond gaining IP protection. A second order of strategic factors affecting the value of patents resides at the outset of the invention process. These are constituted by knowledge spillovers, which are typically mediated by the local geographical context where the invention process takes place. The analysis shows that the contribution of knowledge spillovers from business and nonbusiness organizations to the value of the patented R&D constitutes a relevant aspect for an innovator's decision making. This thoughtful, cutting-edge research book is vital reading for researchers, academics, and policy decision makers in the area of in market valuation, management of technology, innovation management, and economic geography.

Technical innovation in industry is regarded by many people as the best way of making industry more profitable. A great deal of energy and time is being expended by businessmen and by governments discussing how best to bring about technical innovation. This book, which was first published in 1987, argues that all concerned with technical innovation should bear in mind the importance of 'networks'. 'Networks' are defined as the web of contacts which exist between suppliers, customers, and producers in industry. Drawing on extensive original research, the book discusses the need for co-ordinating technical research and development with suppliers and customers and examines in detail how this should best be done. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.

The world continues to develop at an astonishing speed - socially and technologically. Human behavior is continually influenced by this ever-changing environment. Is it possible to predict what those new behaviors will be? And what are their implications for our future societies? Thimon de Jong's Future Human Behavior is a unique and accessible examination of our thrilling, challenging and unpredictable world and how we respond, react and shape it. Using insightful and original examples aligned with pertinent analysis, the author takes the reader on a compelling journey through future behavioral dynamics. He engages with a wide variety of topics, from digitalisation to trust, from ethics to mental health. Future Human Behavior is your inspirational guide to a number of possible futures, and the book you need to be ready for them all.

Behind the steady stream of new products, technologies, systems and services in our modern societies there is prolonged and complicated battle around the role of users. How should designers get to know the users' interests and needs? Who should speak for the users? How may designers collaborate with users and in what ways may users take innovation into their own hands? The New Production of Users offers a rare overview of these issues. It traces the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days. Its focus lies in elaborating the currently emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts. It analyses the challenges in the practical collaborations between designers and users, and it investigates a number of cases, where groups of users collectively took charge of innovation. In addition to a number of new case studies, the book provides a thorough account of theories of user involvement as well as and offers further developments to these theories. As a part of this, the book relates to the wide spectrum of fields currently associated with user involvement, such as user-centered design, participatory design, user innovation, open source software, cocreation and peer production. Exploring the nexus between users and designers, between efforts to democratize innovation and to mobilize users for commercial purposes, this multi-disciplinary book will be of great interest to academics, policy makers and practitioners in fields such as Innovation Studies, Innovation Policy, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Studies, Consumption studies, Marketing, e-commerce, Media Studies as well as Design research.

The first book to analyze how new technologies are emerging against a background of continuing globalization of research and development activities. This unique book explores how technological communities and networks shape a broad range of new computer based technologies in regional, national and international contexts. Offering a critique of existing organizational and business models, Assimakopoulos analyzes the structure of a broad range of existing technological communities and networks looking at a range of areas including: Internet security electronic copyright intellectual property rights protection geographic information systems. This text is a key resource for research and development managers, ICT engineers and policy makers, as well as post graduate researchers in knowledge management, technology policy, sociology and economics of innovation or history of science and technology.

This volume is concerned with understanding the factors that determine innovation and its contribution to corporate achievement. It considers the whole range of innovation, consumer and industrial, and both final and intermediate buying behaviour. Although the tenor of the book is towards understanding and evaluation, its ultimate concerns are with the practicalities of marketing and corporate innovation.

Setting the PACE in Product Development describes how to effectively manage the key ingredients of successful product development: time, quality, talent and resources. This revised edition of Product Development provides essential insight as to how to efficiently organize people, resources and processes to dramatically improve financial results, strategic positions, internal morale and customer satisfaction. The PACE techniques integrate vital company-wide functions, engaging the entire company and focusing its collective energy on strategically and financially important goals.

Consumer Product Innovation and Sustainable Design follows the innovation and evolution of consumer products from vacuum cleaners to mobile phones from their original inventions to the present day. It discusses how environmental concerns and legislation have influenced their design and the profound effects these products have had on society and culture. This book also uses the lessons from the successes and failures of examples of these consumer products to draw out practical guidelines for designers, engineers, marketers and managers on how to become more effective at product development, innovation and designing for environmental sustainability.

Innovation manifests itself as a key driver of improved productivity and sustainable growth in today's global economic landscape. This book * brings together perspectives and case studies from across the world; * discusses frameworks and actual conditions required for innovation; and * examines a variety of themes, such as technology innovation, research & development, team and human resource management, product and process creativity and entrepreneurship development to augment strategic and competitive advantage. It will prove essential to those in business and management, entrepreneurship, economics and development studies, particularly those interested in innovation, strategic planning and business leadership.

Addressing the issues unique to managers of creative technical staff, this guide reflects not only Ronald Kay's long experience observing and teaching successful management techniques, but also treats the expanding challenges due to increasingly globally-based projects and staff. As before, Kay's guide helps readers to prepare themselves, graduate students and others to understand and improve their managerial skills and covers such practical, yet sometimes overlooked, steps such as: individual and team behavior of creative technical staff; managing their own and others' R&D projects; hiring, evaluating and compensating technical staff; R&D proposals and administrative functions; and presentations, meetings and organizational culture. New to this edition are a chapter on the global impact of high-tech enterprises and sections on the roles of foundations and government funding and task-force participation. Also tackled are the basics of starting, financing and staffing venture-capital-funded enterprises. What's more, this book also serves to increase the awareness and knowledge base of anyone who needs to meet the challenge of managing people with the creative energies that drive technologically-based economic growth."

In this volume Drucker has collected twelve essays on technology and management and their relationship to, and interaction with, human society. In these essays the reader is able to grasp and savour some of the essential ideas and philosophy that have been expanded into Drucker's various books. In this volume Drucker has collected twelve essays on technology and management and their relationship to, and interaction with, human society. In these essays the reader is able to grasp and savour some of the essential ideas and philosophy that have been expanded into Drucker's various books.

The series, Contemporary Perspectives on Data Mining, is composed of blind refereed scholarly research methods and applications of data mining. This series will be targeted both at the academic community, as well as the business practitioner. Data mining seeks to discover knowledge from vast amounts of data with the use of statistical and mathematical techniques. The knowledge is extracted from this data by examining the patterns of the data, whether they be associations of groups or things, predictions, sequential relationships between time order events or natural groups. Data mining applications are in marketing (customer loyalty, identifying profitable customers, instore promotions, e-commerce populations); in business (teaching data mining, efficiency of the Chinese automobile industry, moderate asset allocation funds); and techniques (veterinary predictive models, data integrity in the cloud, irregular pattern detection in a mobility network and road safety modeling.)

Communication audit is a relatively new field of research, which has so far been investigated from a managerial point of view. Linguists have not yet researched it. This book summarises existing, mainly managerial, approaches to communication audits and brings to the forefront a linguistic perspective on them. It showcases that their essence is to capture and assess the actual communication behaviour of auditees. The proposed communication audit model, communication audit procedures, and linguistic form sheet can be applied and further developed by scientists interested in taking on research into communication and by practitioners who wish to conduct communication audits in practice.

Recent years have seen a growth in strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions and collaborative networks involving knowledge-intensive and hi-tech industries. However, there have been relatively few studies looking at this form of collaboration as a strategy to drive firms' innovative performances. This book specifically focuses on the role of strategic alliances, M&A and innovation networks, providing insights on if and how they contribute to boosting firms' innovation performances. The book has a double purpose. Firstly, it investigates at an industry level the role played by the alliance, M&As and networks in high-tech environments such as biotechnology, pharmaceutical, software and nanotechnology in creating, transforming and reshaping the dynamics inside and between industries. Secondly, it explores the impact at the firm level of factors such as cognitive distance, management capabilities, and relational and social capabilities, on firms' global innovation capacity, measured as innovation quantity, innovation quality and innovation novelty. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the economics of innovation, innovation management studies, strategic management, regional science and evolutionary economics, among other areas.

In this book, leading CEOs, CIOs and experts from international corporations explore the role of digitalization and cloud-based processes as the main business drivers of the 21st century. Focusing on how to get started with digitalization and how to handle the technologies involved, they employ analyses and practical case studies to demonstrate how to unleash the potential offered by the cloud, and how to achieve the most critical success factors - quality and security - through the right partnerships. Readers will discover why the cloud will soon take over the driver's seat in cars, and why Heineken CIO Anne Teague claims that innovation is impossible without high-quality IT. The book reveals what IT managers can learn from Silicon Valley and China today, and why Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hoettges believes Europe's future depends on successful digitalization. In a closing strategic assessment, the editor Ferri Abolhassan presents the cloud as the essential backbone of digitalization. In short, the book provides readers the first comprehensive, high-level assessment of cloud-based digital transformation in the era of Industry 4.0.

For courses in human relations. Show Students How Personal and Career Success Stems from the Development of Improved Human Relations Skills By linking career and personal success to the development of human relations skills, the Eleventh Edition of Human Relations for Career and Personal Success stresses the importance of learning to deal more effectively with others. Applicable to a wide range of courses and professions, the text emphasizes teamwork, influencing others, and motivation as key components of success in work and life. Picking up where the previous edition left off, Dubrin continues to use new and powerful examples and exercises as part of a proven approach to help readers develop better their interpersonal skills.

How do development and use of new technology relate? How can users contribute to innovation? This volume is the first to study these questions by following particular technologies over several product launches in detail. It examines the emergence of inventive ideas about future technology and uses, how these are developed into products and embedded in health care practices, and how the form and impact of these technologies then evolves through several rounds of design and deployment across different types of organizations. Examining these processes through three case studies of health care innovations, these studies reveal a blind spot in extant research on development-use relations. The majority of studies have examined shorter 'episodes': moments within particular design projects, implementation processes, usability evaluations, and human-machine interactions. Studies with longer time-frames have resorted to a relatively coarse 'grain-size' of analysis and hence lost sight of how the interchange is actually done. As a result there are no social science, information systems, or management texts which comprehensively or adequately address: * how different moments, sites and modes of shaping new technology determine the evolution of new technology; * the detailed mechanisms of learning, interaction, and domination between different actors and technology during these drawn out processes; and * the relationship of technology projects and the professional practices and social imaginations that are associated in technology development, evaluation, and usage. The "biographies of technologies and practices" approach to new technology advanced in this volume offers us urgent new insight to core empirical and theoretical questions about how and where development projects gain their representations of future use and users, how usage is actually designed, how users' requests and modifications affect designs, and what kind of learning takes place between developers and users in different phases of innovation-all crucial to our understanding and ability to advance new health technology, and innovation more generally.

The series, Contemporary Perspectives on Data Mining, is composed of blind refereed scholarly research methods and applications of data mining. This series will be targeted both at the academic community, as well as the business practitioner. Data mining seeks to discover knowledge from vast amounts of data with the use of statistical and mathematical techniques. The knowledge is extracted from this data by examining the patterns of the data, whether they be associations of groups or things, predictions, sequential relationships between time order events or natural groups. Data mining applications are in marketing (customer loyalty, identifying profitable customers, instore promotions, e-commerce populations); in business (teaching data mining, efficiency of the Chinese automobile industry, moderate asset allocation funds); and techniques (veterinary predictive models, data integrity in the cloud, irregular pattern detection in a mobility network and road safety modeling.)

This book introduces cutting-edge issues and thought-provoking concepts on innovation management. It illustrates how robotic developments allow new powerful support functionalities for harnessing workplace innovations and new types of work in enterprises. In particular, low status jobs-heavy, repetitive and dangerous jobs-are disappearing and increasingly replaced by creative and meaningful work. It situates the research within theoretical developments and academic literature in business and management studies on innovation networks and partnerships. The book then introduces the notion of "friction management," which invites us to re-examine creative tensions and explore how contradictions may spur or restrain change and innovation in this landscape. Innovation and change challenge established patterns, cultures, value systems, interests and network configurations-which creates a variety of frictions. Therefore, a theory of friction management is crucial, particularly in innovation-intensive industries, and can help professionals to understand change and the dynamics of innovation so that they can orchestrate events and learn to distinguish between the creative and negative frictions that can arise and that are important for change and the innovation process. Thus, the goal of friction management is to orchestrate, mobilize and (re)combine key organizational resources to strategically increase innovation capacity and promote dynamic renewal and creativity. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of innovation management, sociology and business administration.