This book explores how new and small ventures with comparatively fewer financial resources have been able to compete with big banks and financial institutions. It discusses entry, competition, and growth strategies based on new business models enacted by current FinTech ventures. An analysis of strategies for Fintech and of cases from banked as well as non-banked and underbanked customer segments produces a framework based on effectuation, resulting in a final discussion of the broad societal outcomes of FinTech related to financial inclusion, the digital divide, and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. This book, linking theory with practical application, offers scholars a comprehensive strategic view on FinTech from effectual, causal, and entrepreneurial innovation standpoints.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the concept of the Circular Economy (CE), as well as an assessment of the drivers and barriers for circular practices by firms, and its implications for managers in firms and public policy makers. It includes proposals for policy frameworks and instruments that will encourage the uptake of CE practices. The book is presented in three linked parts. The first part of the book provides a broad view of the topic, put into the wider context of sustainability. In the second part, the drivers of and barriers to the uptake of the CE are analysed, with a special focus on the micro-level not seen often in the previous studies on the CE. This book is of interest to researchers, policy makers and post-graduate students in areas such as environmental management and economics.

This book presents the Proceedings of The 6th Brazilian Technology Symposium (BTSym'20). The book discusses the current technological issues on Systems Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, such as the Transmission Line, Protein-Modified Mortars, Electromagnetic Properties, Clock Domains, Chebyshev Polynomials, Satellite Control Systems, Hough Transform, Watershed Transform, Blood Smear Images, Toxoplasma Gondi, Operation System Developments, MIMO Systems, Geothermal-Photovoltaic Energy Systems, Mineral Flotation Application, CMOS Techniques, Frameworks Developments, Physiological Parameters Applications, Brain-Computer Interface, Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Vision, Security Applications, FPGA Applications, IoT, Residential Automation, Data Acquisition, Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems, Digital Image Processing, Patters Recognition, Machine Learning, Photocatalytic Process, Physical-Chemical Analysis, Smoothing Filters, Frequency Synthesizers, Voltage-Controlled Ring Oscillator, Difference Amplifier, Photocatalysis, Photodegradation, current technological issues on Human, Smart and Sustainable Future of Cities, such as the Digital Transformation, Data Science, Hydrothermal Dispatch, Project Knowledge Transfer, Immunization Programs, Efficiency and Predictive Methods, PMBOK Applications, Logistics Process, IoT, Data Acquisition, Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems, Fingerspelling Recognition, Cognitive Ergonomics, Ecosystem Services, Environmental, Ecosystem Services Valuation, Solid Waste and University Extension.

This book explores the social and economic impact of the sharing economy- of taxis, apartments, and other goods and services- in China, and how the sharing economy can allow for supply-side economic reform. The sharing economy is in the ascendant in China, and significant achievements have been made in innovation in leasing, travel and other fields. This book predicts that this economic tide, which has affected hundreds of millions of people, will inject a powerful new momentum into China's economic growth, help China's economy achieve "power conversion" and turn the service industry into the "main engine" of economic growth. This book will interest China watchers, economists, and scholars of the technology sector.

Artificial Intelligence in Accounting: Practical Applications was written with a simple goal: to provide accountants with a foundational understanding of AI and its many business and accounting applications. It is meant to serve as a guide for identifying opportunities to implement AI initiatives to increase productivity and profitability. This book will help you answer questions about what AI is and how it is used in the accounting profession today. Offering practical guidance that you can leverage for your organization, this book provides an overview of essential AI concepts and technologies that accountants should know, such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. It also describes accounting-specific applications of robotic process automation and text mining. Illustrated with case studies and interviews with representatives from global professional services firms, this concise volume makes a significant contribution to examining the intersection of AI and the accounting profession. This innovative book also explores the challenges and ethical considerations of AI. It will be of great interest to accounting practitioners, researchers, educators, and students.

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us - for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book's contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

This book systematically defines and analyses the rise of China's innovation system and Chinese corporate governance model. China's achievement in artificial intelligence and high technology innovation has attracted the global attention. The country's innovation system and Chinese model arose during the period between the mid-1990s and the first decade of 21 century, making it one of the leading countries in those fields. This revised and expanded edition examines the Chinese innovation business model based on the basic concept of firm's governance structure. It builds upon five dimensions: ownership and shareholding structure; interrelation between employer and employee; interrelation between firms; financing pattern and performance criteria; and innovation system and core competitiveness. This book also compares China's innovation system with the American model and with the European model exemplified by Germany.

This book discusses the role of human computer interaction (HCI) design in fostering digital literacy and promoting socio-cultural acceptance and usage of the latest ICT innovations in developing countries. The book presents techniques, theories, case studies, and methodologies in HCI design approaches that have been used to foster digital literacy, break the socio-cultural barriers to ICT adoption, and promote the widespread usage of the latest innovations in the health, agriculture, economic, education and social sectors in developing countries. The authors provide insights on how crossing disciplines in HCI such as usability design, user centered design, user experience, anticipated user experience, technology acceptance design, persuasive design, philosophical designs, motivational design, social-cultural oriented designs, and other HCI design approaches have promoted digital literacy and stimulated socio-cultural acceptance and the usage of the latest ICT innovations. The book is relevant in academic, industry and government. Presents theoretical, practical, and socio-cultural approaches to digital literacy challenges in developing countries; Discusses recent ICT and HCI innovations used to transform the health, agriculture, economic, education and social sectors in developing countries; Provides insights on design opportunities and challenges presented in countries where digital literacy is very low and with complex socio-cultural dynamics.

Innovation is a source of building long-term sustainability. If implemented successfully it can lead to superior organizational performance. To be competitive, companies and their leaders continuously strive to engage in new market spaces by developing and engaging in an innovative culture so as to differentiate themselves from their rivals. With contributions from scholars and practitioners, this Handbook provides evidence-based case studies to identify workplace innovation practices in developed and developing countries. Chapters are based on an organizational innovation framework and focuses on two major areas: the determinants of innovation and the process and outcome elements. It covers in-depth, cutting edge specialised topics such as frugal innovation, innovation associated with leadership as well as numerous organisational contexts such as for-profit and not for profit sectors and small, medium and large organisations. Essential reading for any student or scholar of innovation studies, this handbook provides novel coverage of innovation practices linked to organizational variables such as culture, ethics, leadership and performance.

This book discusses several product development strategies and tools employed by organizations around the world to implement frugal innovations. Over the past decade, frugal innovations have caught the attention of countless management scholars. This book comes at the right time for academics and practitioners alike, as it explores how the concept of frugal innovation has evolved over the past several years and is shifting its focus from merely featuring 'cost' driven innovations to being more 'resourceful' and 'sustainable' at its core. Furthermore, in light of the ongoing digital revolution and emergence of new business models such as sharing economy and circular economy, the book highlights recent and upcoming trends and their impacts on frugal innovation strategies.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles to non-game contexts, and has been used to solve problems by applying characteristics of games. Though it has principally been applied in the areas of business and education, this book seeks to expand focus beyond this, looking at how gamification can be used for social change, the development of organizations and the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development goals. Including contributors from across the glove, it draws on a rich array of case studies, from inclusivity in the workplace to ecosystems in the Amazon. A timely contribution to an exciting, growing field, this book engages with the theoretical framework and lays out the foundations for a rigorous theory-based stream of research. It will be valuable reading to scholars and practitioners interested in social change, sustainability, gamification and organizational studies. Agnessa Spanellis (PhD, MEng) is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland and a member of the Research Centre for Logistics and Sustainability at Edinburgh Business School, leading research on gamification for sustainable development and exploring how gamification can improve social and environmental sustainability, especially in more deprived and impoverished communities in low-income counties. J. Tuomas Harviainen (PhD, MBA) works as Associate Professor of information Practices at Tampere University, Finland. Harviainen's work ranges from information sharing in creative organizations to games and gamification. He firmly believes that good research can also be a form of societal activism.

This book is a compilation of the recent technologies and innovations in the field of automotive embedded systems with a special mention to the role of Internet of Things in automotive systems. The book provides easy interpretable explanations for the key technologies involved in automotive embedded systems. The authors illustrate various diagnostics over internet protocol and over-the-air update process, present advanced driver assistance systems, discuss various cyber security issues involved in connected cars, and provide necessary information about Autosar and Misra coding standards. The book is relevant to academics, professionals, and researchers.

Product commercialization is a critical stage of the innovation process. Whereas previous innovation launch research has mainly targeted strategic and tactical questions such as what, where, when and why, the who of successful commercialization of innovations has not received adequate attention.The study shows that various commercialization barriers are tied to specific internal and external stakeholder groups and analyzes whether direct and indirect interaction with them can overcome these impediments in the consumer goods industry and positively influence innovation performance.

Collaboration among industry, universities and research institutes plays a vital role in stimulating open innovation, which in turn leads to new products, processes, services and business models. This book brings together a number of real-life examples of how to govern and manage open innovation collaboration projects more effectively, and provides timely insights that project consortia, governance boards and funding agencies can directly apply to implement and monitor projects and achieve greater impacts. All papers were written by recognized leading authorities with extensive experience in governance and management, and reveal how to capitalize on the potential of open innovation. This book shares multidisciplinary research perspectives on the potential benefits and challenges of collaboration, project management, and open innovation, as well as the management of complex organizational cultures and governance models.

During the last five years, clinical research and development costs have risen exponentially without a proportionate increase in the number of new medications. While patient recruitment for clinical studies is only one component in the development of a new medicine or treatment, it is one of the most significant bottlenecks in the overall drug development process. Now, it is imperative that industry leaders see beyond reactive measures and recognize that advancing their approach to patient recruitment is absolutely essential to advancing medicine and continuing the stability of their corporate brand across the globe. Reinventing Patient Recruitment: Revolutionary Ideas for Clinical Trial Success is a definitive guide to planning, implementing, and evaluating recruitment strategies and campaigns globally. The combined experience of the authors provides a depth of perspective and boldness of innovative leadership to set the standards for future patient recruitment programs and practices.This book is a must-have for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industry professionals concerned with enrolling for domestic and multinational clinical studies and remaining on time and on budget.

This volume focuses on new ways of working, and explores implications of these new practices with a particular emphasis on the place occupied by technology, materiality and bodies within contemporary working configurations. It draws together an international range of scholars to examine diverse subjects such as: the gig economy, social media as a work space, the role of materiality in living labs, managerial techniques and organizational legitimacy. Drawing on global perspectives, from France to Nigeria, this book presents a fascinating examination of the many new ways people are working, and relating to their work. Part of the esteemed Technology, Work and Globalization series, this book is valuable reading for scholars working on organizational studies, ethnography, technology management, and management more generally.

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.

This book explains the strategic behaviors of platform firms on the global market, drawing on extensive research on the mobile communication systems, semiconductor equipment, personal computer, and automobile electronics industries. The book focuses on Ericsson, Applied Materials, Intel, and Bosch as representative global platform companies. The book's introductory section reports on the rise of platform business and addresses the theoretical basis of their competitive edge, based on a review of prior studies on the network effect of open standards and the economic theory of strategic behavior. The platform business obviously secures a competitive advantage on the global market. Yet this theory alone does not provide sufficient explanation for why the platform business achieves competitiveness on the market. The book proposes a theoretical framework and provides rigorous supporting evidence by using case studies and empirical analysis on the global business of platform firms. This evidence reflects the variety of global ecosystems: the mobile communications system in China, the semiconductor equipment industry in East Asia, personal computers in Taiwan, and automobile electronics in China. In conclusion, the book reviews these studies and identifies the key factors of platform strategy on the global market. Given its breadth of coverage, the book will benefit all academic researchers and undergraduate students in management and economics with an interest in global competition and collaboration in the open economy.

This book features research presented and discussed during the Research & Innovation Forum (Rii Forum) 2020. As such, this book offers a unique insight into emerging topics, issues and developments pertinent to the fields of technology, innovation and education and their social impact. Papers included in this book apply inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches to query such issues as technology-enhanced teaching and learning, smart cities, information systems, cognitive computing and social networking. What brings these threads of the discussion together is the question of how advances in computer science - which are otherwise largely incomprehensible to researchers from other fields - can be effectively translated and capitalized on so as to make them beneficial for society as a whole. In this context, Rii Forum and Rii Forum proceedings offer an essential venue where diverse stakeholders, including academics, the think tank sector and decision-makers, can engage in a meaningful dialogue with a view to improving the applicability of advances in computer science.

This book brings together the latest research in smart sensors technology and exposes the reader to myriad industrial applications that this technology has enabled. The book emphasizes several topics in the area of smart sensors in industrial real-world applications. The contributions in this book give a broader view on the usage of smart sensor devices covering a wide range of interdisciplinary areas like Intelligent Transport Systems, Healthcare, Agriculture, Drone communications and Security. By presenting an insight into Smart Sensors for Industrial IoT, this book directs the readers to explore the utility and advancement in smart sensors and their applications into numerous research fields. Lastly, the book aims to reach through a mass number of industry experts, researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners and help them guide and evolve to advance research practices.

This book presents the characteristics and benefits industrial organizations can reap from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These characteristics and benefits include enhanced competitiveness, increased proactive decision-making, improved creativity and innovation, augmented job creation, heightened agility to respond to continuously changing challenges, and intensified data-driven decision making. In a straightforward fashion, the book also helps readers understand complex concepts that are core to IIoT enterprises, such as Big Data, analytic architecture platforms, machine learning (ML) and data science algorithms, and the power of visualization to enrich the domains experts' decision making. The book also guides the reader on how to think about ways to define new business paradigms that the IIoT facilitates, as well how to increase the probability of success in managing analytic projects that are the core engine of decision-making in the IIoT enterprise. The book starts by defining an IIoT enterprise and the framework used to efficiently operate. A description of the concepts of industrial analytics, which is a major engine for decision making in the IIoT enterprise, is provided. It then discusses how data and machine learning (ML) play an important role in increasing the competitiveness of industrial enterprises that operate using the IIoT technology and business concepts. Real world examples of data driven IIoT enterprises and various business models are presented and a discussion on how the use of ML and data science help address complex decision-making problems and generate new job opportunities. The book presents in an easy-to-understand manner how ML algorithms work and operate on data generated in the IIoT enterprise. Useful for any industry professional interested in advanced industrial software applications, including business managers and professionals interested in how data analytics can help industries and to develop innovative business solutions, as well as data and computer scientists who wish to bridge the analytics and computer science fields with the industrial world, and project managers interested in managing advanced analytic projects.

This book introduces concepts of business incubation and suggests a learning process. This process begins with prior knowledge at the opportunity identification phase, progresses through the acquisition of new skills and knowledge necessary to develop an opportunity and concludes with a transformation phase where new knowledge is acted upon. The book draws on extensive qualitative data and documentary evidence from a range of stakeholders associated with a University Business Incubator known as Innospace. The process of opportunity development within the business incubator is explored by combining experiential and social learning theories as heuristic tools. Presented implications for policy-makers and incubator managers are that attention and scarce resources should be focused on providing relevant information and encouraging an atmosphere of learning and mutual support. Recruitment practices should be revised to include a more holistic appreciation of potential incubatees contribution to the Business Incubation learning community as well as an assessment of their business plans. For policy makers the book suggests that successful business incubators do not necessarily require a large financial investment in state-of-the-art premises and technology. Appropriate management training together with carefully selected incubatees can create an effective learning community where opportunities are developed and transformed into enterprises and individuals into entrepreneurs.

This edited book presents research results that are relevant for scientists, practitioners and policymakers who engage in knowledge and technology transfer from different perspectives. Empirical and conceptual chapters present original approaches regarding the current practice and policies behind technology transfer. By providing analyses at the macro, meso and micro-level, the respective chapters demonstrate how technology is moving from various organizational contexts into new institutions and becoming a critical aspect for competitiveness.

This book points out that "Internet" is the means, and the digital economy is the result. Therefore, the development of digital economy will inevitably have a profound impact on traditional enterprises and Internet enterprises and become the main way and new driving force for China's innovation and growth. The book starts with the concept of digital economy and reveals the current development of digital economy, how to improve the foundation of digital construction, and the strategies for accelerating digital transformation of various industries, the problems that need to be solved in the development of digital economy and the huge role it will play in promoting society. The book provides a clear blueprint for the government and enterprises to understand and formulate policies and development strategies in the era of digital economy.

In today's lightning-fast technology world, good product management is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it's rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don't? This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource. In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore: Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristics Best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company's evolution Strategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders