How Can SMEs Contribute to Net Zero?: An Evidence Review.

In 2019, the UK Government and the devolved administrations committed to achieving the target of Net Zero by 2050, based on the recommendations of the UK’s formal advisory body (Committee on Climate Change, 2020). It is now widely recognised that this will require major reductions in the carbon emissions of the general SME population. There are more than 5.9 million small and medium-sized enterprises in the four nations, which employ 16.8 million people and account for an estimated £2.3 trillion in turnover (approximately 52% of the total for UK private sector businesses) (BEIS, 2020). While the environmental footprints of individual firms may appear relatively insignificant, it is not possible to ignore the aggregate impact of such a large component of our economic landscape. SMEs can also have an important indirect influence on climate mitigation through their influence on other actors, including suppliers, customers, and other organisations (Parag and Janda, 2014). There has been a step-change in public and private sector involvement in this area in the last few years, signalled by the launch of many new local, regional, and sectoral initiatives. However, it is not clear whether the current policy mix will be sufficient to meet the sheer scale and complexity of the challenge. While this report focuses on Net Zero, much of evidence presented is equally applicable to other important environmental issues, such as waste management and air quality. We begin with a brief review of recent policy developments. This is followed by an overview of the more promising types of tools andapproaches, with practical examples and indicative sources. We examine explanations for the failure or under-performance of these interventions, which are often analysed in terms of discrete ‘barriers’ and ‘drivers’, and indicate why it has become necessary to move beyond this conventional framing. We then map out six key evidence gaps in relation to: data; support; intermediaries; values; COVID-19; and networks, along with two cross-cutting research priorities, which need to be addressed in order to ensure more effective policy design and implementation in this field. This review addresses environmental improvement in the general SME population. A companion review will focus on the closely related challenge of promoting ‘green’ start-up ventures and other forms of eco-innovation in sectors that seek to address specific environmental challenges

Collaborative Development of Open Educational Resources for Open and Distance Learning

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses

The European digital information landscape: how can LIBER contribute?

This paper looks at a snapshot of the current state of digitisation in the information landscape. It then looks at what LIBER can contribute to that landscape through portal development, funding, identifying and documenting best practice, lobbying at a European level, and managing the transition from paper to digital delivery, including the issue of digital preservation. The paper ends by trying to identify how the user will use the digitised resources which are increasingly being made available by libraries

Can Organizational Spirituality Contribute to Knowledge Management?

Society demands more sustainable business. Increasing organizational spirituality can be one manner of accomplishing this humanized strategy, and knowledge management is an efficient method to diffuse high-level values through the company. Spirituality has a vital role in organizational theory and practice. Nevertheless, this also places a heavy burden on practitioners. To address this association, we conducted a systematic literature review, systematizing and categorizing the results to answer the research question, “can organizational spirituality contribute to knowledge management?”, and propose a future investigation research agenda. We utilized the Web of Science and Scopus database. We submitted the articles to VOSviewer software version 1.6.16 for building, displaying, and exploring a bibliometric map supported by network data. The beginning was about wisdom, followed by a major focus on knowledge fields after increasing attention to spirituality. VOSviewer provided a network with two clusters, namely, spirituality dynamics and knowledge dynamics. Spirituality and knowledge labels have connections in both clusters. Wisdom and organizational wisdom are isolated from the other terms. Based on the articles analyzed, organizational spirituality can indeed assist knowledge management. One should ponder, however, that there are still few empirical studies with non-generalizable results. Considering the mysticism and excess of non-scientific articles (and scarcity of scientific ones), we recommend a change in approaching it. Traditional and positivist methodologies are not the most suitable; consequently, innovative and mixed methods ought to be used, providing the research’s scientific nature. It is crucial to look at the insertion of spirituality in management with a scientific and critical eye

Creativity: can artistic perspectives contribute to management?

Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mirrors the artistic and managerial conceptions of creativity. Although there are shared points in both applications, however deep-seated and radically opposed traits account for the divergence between the two fields. This exploratory analysis opens up new research questions and insights into practices

Undead Pedagogy: How a Zombie Simulation Can Contribute to Teaching International Relations

A global zombie outbreak constitutes a hypothetical event in world politics that could likely lead to the collapse of civilization. At the same time, the very threat of such a global catastrophe offers a unique experimental terrain on which to investigate various possible changes and developments in human interaction in social, economic, and political processes. In this article, we discuss our experience with using a global zombie outbreak-based simulation in International Relations teaching and our attempt at measuring the learning outcomes, taking our point of departure in the existing literature on active learning. Following an outline of the objectives, setup, and parameters of the simulation, we evaluate the results of the survey we conducted of the student participants and discuss the learning outcomes discerned