Management and the Sustainability Paradox is about how humans became disconnected from their ecological environment throughout evolutionary history. Begining with the premise that people have competing innate, natural drives linked to survival. Survival can be thought of in the context of long-term genetic propagation of a species, but at the same time, it involves overcoming of immediate adversities. Due to a diverse set of survival challenges facing our ancestors, natural selection often favored short-term solutions, which by consequence, muted the motivations associated with longer-range sustainability values. Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation. At the heart of it lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing ethical solutions to the paradox. Management and the Sustainability Paradox examines the issue that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses view as "a need for progress" and " a concern for sustainability". In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability which shapes corporate actions, and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these "progressive" actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources. It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being and a dualism that needs to be overcome. This book is intended for a broad appeal to an academic and policy maker audience in the sustainability and management fields. The book will be of vital reading for managers seeking to reconnect our human chain with the natural environment in the cause of sustainable business.

This book focuses on the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) in Africa and examines the role of the private sector in the fight against poverty. The BOP concept, which is a market-based approach to poverty eradication, presents a great avenue for businesses to develop opportunities and new business models that enable and empower those in the BOP population in Africa to raise their socio-economic welfare and well-being. The BOP market and the business interest in the BOP in Africa is rising. This book furthers our understanding of the characteristics of BOP markets in Africa, and the challenges and opportunities to address poverty and development in a sustainable manner. The book covers various themes of BOP markets and their embeddedness in social-cultural settings in Africa. The different chapters employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to advance research and practice of BOP in Africa. The book chapters reflect multiple diversities that characterise sub-Saharan Africa based on studies in 13 country contexts and from five industry sectors. This book is recommended reading for managers and policy makers, as well as students and academics interested in Base of the Pyramid markets.

This book sets new trajectories for language-sensitive business and management research and pedagogy. The existence of language plurality characterises these. Empirical studies have been established as important and relevant for contemporary research. It has shifted language-sensitive research from the periphery to the centre of international management research. However, this field is rapidly changing, and new thematic approaches have begun to emerge. By addressing this, the book offers genuine and more nuanced insights into existing themes and comes with applications of emergent conceptual developments in different settings. The second part of the book covers methodologies and gives examples and cutting-edge insights into the role of translation in the execution of empirical research and theorising arising from it. Finally, the book draws together innovative ways of how to address the challenges of a multilingual teaching classroom and how to innovate in order to incorporate such diversity through pedagogic practice. This book provides a source that unites insights from multilingual empirical research, methodological considerations and pedagogic practice in order to advance knowledge and debate. It will be a 'handy source' of information that offers direct access to the latest guidance on language-sensitive management challenges. It will, therefore, appeal to an internationally-minded and mobile audience, including scholars, students and decision-makers.

This book gathers a diverse range of novel research on modeling innovation policies for sustainable economic development, based on a selection of papers from a conference on modeling innovation systems and technologies (MIST). It aims at encouraging interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, bringing together researchers and professionals interested in sustainable economic, technological development and open innovation, as well as their dissemination and practical application. The respective contributions explore a variety of topics and cases, including regional innovation policy, the effects of open innovation on firms, innovation and sustainability in tourism, and the use of information and communication technologies. All chapters share a strong focus on new research and innovation methodologies, in keeping with the Experimentation and Application Research (EAR) and Open Innovation 2.0 principles.

The Quadruple Innovation Helix concept is the synthesis of top-down policies and practices from Government, University and Industry balanced and shaped by bottom-up initiatives and actions by Civil Society. In addition, of significance is the complementary expansion and completion of the Quadruple Innovation Helix by the concept of the Quintuple Innovation Helix, to which an all-encompassing fifth dimension was added, namely, the Environment. This book expertly defines the impact of public policies and productive public expenditures on innovation and economic growth in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Economic growth is managed by the creation of differentiated productive units that interact with each other and complement each other in the production of continuous innovation. This book provides a theoretical model of economic growth to demonstrate the importance of governments in promoting innovation. It is a seminal read which scholars, governments, and NGOs will find greatly beneficial.

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.

Innovation offers potential: to cure diseases, to better connect people, and to make the way we live and work more efficient and enjoyable. At the same time, innovation can fuel inequality, decimate livelihoods, and harm mental health. This book contends that inclusive innovation - innovation motivated by environmental and social aims - is able to uplift the benefits of innovation while reducing its harms. The book provides accessible engagement with inclusive innovation happening at the grassroots level through to policy arenas, with a focus on the South-East Asian region. Focusing on fundamental questions underpinning innovation, in terms of how, what and where, it argues that inclusive innovation has social processes and low-tech solutions as essential means of driving innovation, and that environmental concerns must be considered alongside societal aims. The book's understanding of inclusive innovation posits that marginalized or underrepresented innovators are empowered to include themselves by solving a problem that they are experiencing. The first in-depth exploration of efforts underway to assuage inequality from policy, private sector, and grassroots perspectives, this book will interest researchers in the areas of innovation studies, political economy, and development studies. Chapters 1 and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Currently, businesses are forced to be more innovative than ever before. Organizations must be sensitive to global trends -- such as digitization, globalization, and automation -- and at the same time build resilience and flexibility to combat unexpected changes in customer demand. The coronavirus pandemic is just the most recent and pronounced example of this new-normal business necessity. Amidst the disruption, many businesses are caught not knowing how to proceed. How ought one pursue or achieve innovation for the company? Are there different innovation strategies? Why might a business leader choose one over the other? The Lean Innovation Cycle addresses these concerns by introducing a new multidisciplinary framework for both thinking about and pursing innovation. By taking key concepts from the quality management practices of Lean and Six Sigma, the framework augments these tools and disciplines by incorporating other problem-solving and design techniques, including Human-Centered Design. The result is a view of innovation that many business leaders will find fits nicely into their existing paradigm of strategy and operational discipline. After the introduction of the framework, the book turns to understanding the differences, advantages, and tradeoffs in pursuing Lean Innovation in lieu of traditional, technologically driven innovation approaches. To this end, the book considers issues of sustainability, organizational strategy, and competitive advantage. The result is a thought-provoking dialogue that informs the reader about the key considerations of how best to pursue innovation within their business and the business environment, as well as the circumstances that might make one innovation strategy more congruent to an organization's culture, goals, and objectives than the other.

Unpredictable and unforeseen, or black swan, events are occurring increasingly often, one such recent example is the coronavirus crisis of 2020. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, with its growing use of artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, intelligent informats and intelligent algorithms, may help us to confront these incidents but only if we can avoid the sector optimization logic of some forms of economic thinking. This book offers a multi-faceted presentation of the application of systemic thinking in non-standard situations, especially those created by the fourth industrial revolution. It develops models and mini theories to promote systemic thinking at a time when cascades of innovations are entering the economy, while at the same time black swan events are occurring and disrupting social systems. It takes a critical look at how organizations and social systems have chosen to organize themselves to develop systems that prioritize high performance, by focusing on cost-cutting and maximizing profits, instead of on preparedness elasticity and resource slack. The consequences of this kind of organizational streamlining becomes evident only when the 'black swans' loom. The author discusses how individuals and society can develop the resilience needed to deal with these incidents. He asserts that there are three central social mechanisms that can help us understand how social systems work and how they are interconnected: time-lag, threshold value, and feedback. These three concepts can help us to understand how changes occur in non-linear systems; for instance, how small changes at the micro level can lead to large changes at the macro level. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of economics, finance, business and industry.

This volume collects selected papers of the 5th CESA Automotive Electronics Congress, Paris, 2018. CESA is the most important automotive electronics conference in France. The topical focus lies on state-of-the-art automotive electronics with respect to energy consumption and autonomous driving. The target audience primarily comprises industry leaders and research experts in the automotive industry.

Robust university-industry partnerships are vital to achieve the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and create a better world for everyone. Developing the theory and practice of the '5th Generation University', this book shows how cross-sector collaboration and innovation are crucial to maximising the societal benefits of research, education and knowledge exchange, while also driving economic growth and productivity. The authors bring extensive experience in working at the interface between academia, industry and government to demonstrate how universities can effectively combine transdisciplinary programmatic activities and strategic corporate philanthropy. They explain how long-term alliances can be forged to have a transformational impact on the greatest challenges facing our world such as climate change.

This book analyzes the possibilities for effective global governance of science in Europe, India and China. Authors from the three regions join forces to explore how ethical concerns over new technologies can be incorporated into global science and technology policies. The first chapter introduces the topic, offering a global perspective on embedding ethics in science and technology policy. Chapter Two compares the institutionalization of ethical debates in science, technology and innovation policy in three important regions: Europe, India and China. The third chapter explores public perceptions of science and technology in these same three regions. Chapter Four discusses public engagement in the governance of science and technology, and Chapter Five reviews science and technology governance and European values. The sixth chapter describes and analyzes values demonstrated in the constitution of the People's Republic of China. Chapter Seven describes emerging evidence from India on the uses of science and technology for socio-economic development, and the quest for inclusive growth. In Chapter Eight, the authors propose a comparative framework for studying global ethics in science and technology. The following three chapters offer case studies and analysis of three emerging industries in India, China and Europe: new food technologies, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Chapter 12 gathers all these threads for a comprehensive discussion on incorporating ethics into science and technology policy. The analysis is undertaken against the backdrop of different value systems and varying levels of public perception of risks and benefits. The book introduces a common analytical framework for the comparative discussion of ethics at the international level. The authors offer policy recommendations for effective collaboration among the three regions, to promote responsible governance in science and technology and a common analytical perspective in ethics.

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.

This book provides some new ideas on the conceptualization of a shift in technological paradigm, and it explores in depth the relevance of this concept for research on innovation systems. It examines text-mining software and analyzes patent data as well as academic and business journals to illustrate the paradigm shift of newly emerging technologies, such as the all-solid-state battery and automatic driving for electric vehicles, and surgical robots. It also explores the critical role of emerging software technologies by examining US, EU, and Japanese patent statistics. Highlighting the paradigm shift of technologies since the 1990s and the geographical dispersion of innovative capabilities, it identifies essential trends toward new innovation systems as well as the concentration and dispersion of national and corporate R&D capabilities that have taken place as a result. In this new paradigm, the competitiveness of a company is decisively determined by other innovations in systems and management. Since the 1990s, when a network economy began to be established and technological know-how came to be easily transferred across borders, the changing structure of technological activities has required organizations with traditional integral and closed architecture models to move toward open innovation or modular architectures. These changes involve wider technological areas and cognitive diversity among international inter-firm and intra-firm R&D networks. This book is highly recommended not only to academicians but also to business people seeking an in-depth and up-to-date overview of the paradigm shift of technologies and new innovation systems.

When a $145 million IT project failure pushes Los Angeles to the edge of financial meltdown, the County CEO asks Max McLellan, a harried IT project manager, aka The Integrator, for help. The County Board gives Max 30 days to identify the problem and find a solution. At first Max finds the usual missteps, but something bigger and darker beckons, an explosive source of project failure. He must do something different, rattling ghosts of previous County IT failures, uncloaking crookedness, and exposing truths that shatter careers. With some people rooting for his failure, Max battles to fit all the pieces together with the County team, applying his proven framework to define the problem, plan a solution and execute it successfully. It's common knowledge that barely 50% of IT projects succeed, per a 2017 Project Management Institute report. Equally well-known, approximately 70% of large-scale change management initiatives fail according to a 2017 McKinsey & Co. report. Given the challenge to overcome these low success rates, The Integrator offers a proven narrative on the organizational change framework for achieving Agile IT project management success based on the author's 45+ year client experiences and published research. The Integrator defines change management as the single overarching methodology integrating Agile IT and project management. It does this because all projects are about change - significant organizational and personal change. The people involved - their participation in and understanding and support of these changes - ultimately determine IT projects success or failure. In fact, while all IT projects are about change, successful projects change human behavior. The methodologies included in the framework, described in The Integrator, include: * Change management as defined by AIM (Accelerating Implementation Methodology). * Project management as defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI) Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) standard. * IT management as derived from the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) standard. * Agile as defined by the Agile Alliance's Agile Manifesto. Written by a certified Project Management Professional and accredited change management practitioner, The Integrator chronicles the challenges involved in applying this framework in a real-world setting to achieve successful project implementation.

What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled "The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition." This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition.

ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently.

The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of "The Manifesto," and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily.

"The Manifesto" launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.

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Being in the business of generation and dissemination of knowledge, R&D organizations have to attain a balance between revenue generation and creation of knowledge advantage for clients. Based on a global study, this book argues that R&D organizations must not become market driven but must internalize the market in the organizational processes through developing partnerships with clients. The book uses the benchmarking technique to evaluate organizational best practices for enhancing the effectiveness of R&D organizations.

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

The authors offer readers a closer look at Design Thinking with its processes of innovations and methods. The contents of the articles range from how to design ideas, methods, and technologies via creativity experiments and wicked problem solutions, to creative collaboration in the real world and the connectivity of 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 work in companies, introduce new technologies and their functions and demonstrate how Design Thinking can influence as diverse a topic area as marriage. Furthermore, we see how special design thinking use functions in solving wicked problems in complex fields.

Thinking and creating innovations are basically and inherently human - so is Design Thinking. Due to this, Design Thinking is not only a factual matter or a 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.

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

* The concepts of Swarm Facilitation and Swarm Leadership are gaining strong interest in the professional arena. This book is the first to provide a useful action-oriented overview for busy professionals. * Both concise and thorough, the book provides an ideal overview of the approaches and tools for the different stages of implementation. * Written by a leading practitioner in the field, no other title in this area combines expertise and depth with practical help.

* The concepts of Swarm Facilitation and Swarm Leadership are gaining strong interest in the professional arena. This book is the first to provide a useful action-oriented overview for busy professionals. * Both concise and thorough, the book provides an ideal overview of the approaches and tools for the different stages of implementation. * Written by a leading practitioner in the field, no other title in this area combines expertise and depth with practical help.

This open access, interdisciplinary book presents innovative strategies in the use of civil drones in the cultural and creative industry. Specially aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the book offers valuable insights from the fields of marketing, engineering, arts and management. With contributions from experts representing varied interests throughout the creative industry, including academic researchers, software developers and engineers, it analyzes the needs of the creative industry when using civil drones both outdoors and indoors. The book also provides timely recommendations to the industry, as well as guidance for academics and policymakers.

This book examines the problem of the innovation divide in the world economy, and convergence in innovation performance between leaders and followers, analysed through the prism of Chinese experiences, and explored from an European Union (EU) perspective. The rationale for research conducted in this book is an observation of a significant change in the geography of world innovation, reflected in the emergence of innovation hubs in developing countries and in the shift of manufacturing activity, including high and medium-high technology industries, to emerging economies, mainly China. The book analyses the factors of Chinese innovation success in recent decades, such as: China's science, technology and innovation policy, increased R&D expenditures, human capital development and the development of clusters and highly specialized industries. It also focuses on the challenges for developed European economies, which are being at risk of losing their knowledge-related sources of competitive advantage. It also offers recommendations for future policy actions. The book's analysis goes beyond a cross-country comparison, taking into account a regional perspective. The reason for this regional dimension is the increasingly recognized importance of proximity in stimulating innovation processes, and an observed strong geographical polarization of innovation activity at specific regions seen in the emergence of clusters, particularly visible in China. The monograph will provide an up-to-date reference for academics and students across a variety of disciplines. It will be of particular interest to researchers in the area of innovation and practitioners doing business in China, as well as policymakers at international, national and regional levels involved in designing and implementing innovation policy.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the biggest event of worldwide proportion was the 2008 global financial crisis, which was caused primarily by ineffective governance, failed surveillance systems and implementation flaws. While fiscal and monetary policies succeeded in pulling many countries out of a financial freefall, most economies have performed beneath pre-recession levels as governments continued to struggle with their finances.

Examining the financial crisis from the viewpoint of intangible assets provides a different perspective from traditional economic approaches. National Intellectual Capital (NIC), comprised mainly of human capital, market capital, process capital, renewal capital and financial capital, is a valuable intangible asset and a key source of national competitive advantage in today s knowledge economy. The authors pioneers in the field present extensive data and a rigorous conceptual framework to analyze the connections between the global financial crisis and NIC development. Covering the period from 2005 to 2010 across 48 countries, the authors establish a positive correlation between NIC and GDP per capita and consider the impact of NIC investment for short-term recovery and long-term risk control and strategy formulation.This book summarizes and synthesizes the data presented in a series of eleven SpringerBriefs volumes on National Intellectual Capital and the Financial Crisis, concerning the co-developments between NIC and GDP growth and describes the internal and external factors that influenced the relative success or failure of national strategies in weathering the crisis. The authors go on to explore the impacts of various policy reforms, including stimulus packages and consolidations employed around the world, with particular respect to the factors enhancing or impeding short-term recovery versus long-term growth. Finally, they propose a new model of sustainable national intellectual capital and challenge readers to consider how to pass on a healthy globe and harmonious society to the next generation."

This introductory book describes the initial (first) level of studying the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) from the series "TRIZ from A to Z," and presents the most general methods for solving inventive problems and generating new ideas. Chapter 1 examines traditional technologies for problem solving, based on trial and error. Chapter 2 describes the general concept of TRIZ, while Chapter 3 explains the main notions of "system" approaches, like system thinking, system and its hierarchy, system effect, emergency, synergetic effect and systematicity. In turn, Chapter 4 describes the notion of "ideality" and Chapter 5 addresses the notion of resources, their types, and methods for using them. Chapter 6 acquaints readers with one of the most important aspects of TRIZ: contradiction. Chapter 7 describes the inventive principles, while Chapter 8 includes descriptions of the systems of trends proposed by G. Altshuller and the author. In closing, the author makes recommendations on how to most effectively use TRIZ tools, on how readers can improve their knowledge, skills and habits concerning the use of TRIZ, and on how they can hone their inventive thinking skills. The book also features Appendices that include analyses of selected problems, a list of the main websites related to TRIZ, and lists of examples, problems, illustrations, tables and formulae.