Re-conceptualising strategy in design management education

The aim of this paper is to explain the current place of ‘strategy’ in design management education in the UK. The research questions concern the extent to which design management education meets the needs of future strategic roles in management and secondly the ways in which design management education is keeping abreast with current theory and practice of management strategy. The paper draws on research from a UK research council project, The Metamorphosis of Design Management Network (MDMN).The methodology uses a qualitative approach to analyse the transcripts and activities undertaken in symposia over a five year period from 2007-2012, with a focus on four events held from 2010-12. The findings on education and strategic designer development were matched against the content analysis of strategy in conference papers presented at British Academy of Management from 2009-13. The findings demonstrate the exposure of students to organisations and different design contexts. However other strategic management developments in strategy-as-practice, dynamic capabilities and scenario building provide new opportunities to extend design management education. The conclusion summarises the opportunities for design education and the development of students as strategic designers through new interdisciplinary approaches

An infrastructure service recommendation system for cloud applications with real-time QoS requirement constraints

The proliferation of cloud computing has revolutionized the hosting and delivery of Internet-based application services. However, with the constant launch of new cloud services and capabilities almost every month by both big (e.g., Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure) and small companies (e.g., Rackspace and Ninefold), decision makers (e.g., application developers and chief information officers) are likely to be overwhelmed by choices available. The decision-making problem is further complicated due to heterogeneous service configurations and application provisioning QoS constraints. To address this hard challenge, in our previous work, we developed a semiautomated, extensible, and ontology-based approach to infrastructure service discovery and selection only based on design-time constraints (e.g., the renting cost, the data center location, the service feature, etc.). In this paper, we extend our approach to include the real-time (run-time) QoS (the end-to-end message latency and the end-to-end message throughput) in the decision-making process. The hosting of next-generation applications in the domain of online interactive gaming, large-scale sensor analytics, and real-time mobile applications on cloud services necessitates the optimization of such real-time QoS constraints for meeting service-level agreements. To this end, we present a real-time QoS-aware multicriteria decision-making technique that builds over the well-known analytic hierarchy process method. The proposed technique is applicable to selecting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offers, and it allows users to define multiple design-time and real-time QoS constraints or requirements. These requirements are then matched against our knowledge base to compute the possible best fit combinations of cloud services at the IaaS layer. We conducted extensive experiments to prove the feasibility of our approach

The Opportunity of Sovereign Blue Sukuk Issuance in Maritime Sectors: Case Study of Indonesia

The sea potential in Indonesia is very abundant, but the water governance is still poor and still raises concern for the community regarding the threat of damage. This is due to the limited financing of the maritime sector in Indonesia. This research tries to give alternative financing by using Sovereign Blue Sukuk, which further analyses the factors of benefit and opportunity if implemented. The method used is ANP with Benefit, Opportunity, Cost, and Risk (BOCR) network approach. The biggest weight in the benefit is improving people's welfare. As for the opportunity, the biggest weight is adding Sharia investment instruments. The greatest weight on load is the cost of coordination between institutions. From the risk, side is operational risk. In general, the cost rate is greater than the benefit, opportunity, and also risk. Furthermore, the alternative strategy that can be done to minimize the cost and risk are (1) institutional coordination; (2) the empowerment of fishermen; (3) Identification of marine projects

"Last-Mile" preparation for a potential disaster

Extreme natural events, like e.g. tsunamis or earthquakes, regularly lead to catastrophes with dramatic consequences. In recent years natural disasters caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, destruction of infrastructure, disruption of economic activity and loss of billions of dollars worth of property and thus revealed considerable deficits hindering their effective management: Needs for stakeholders, decision-makers as well as for persons concerned include systematic risk identification and evaluation, a way to assess countermeasures, awareness raising and decision support systems to be employed before, during and after crisis situations. The overall goal of this study focuses on interdisciplinary integration of various scientific disciplines to contribute to a tsunami early warning information system. In comparison to most studies our focus is on high-end geometric and thematic analysis to meet the requirements of small-scale, heterogeneous and complex coastal urban systems. Data, methods and results from engineering, remote sensing and social sciences are interlinked and provide comprehensive information for disaster risk assessment, management and reduction. In detail, we combine inundation modeling, urban morphology analysis, population assessment, socio-economic analysis of the population and evacuation modeling. The interdisciplinary results eventually lead to recommendations for mitigation strategies in the fields of spatial planning or coping capacity

Balancing the Tradeoff between Personal Fulfillment and Competitiveness in Venture Creation

The fascination of venture creation is associated with an entrepreneur’s opportunity of achieving personal fulfillment. In reality, however, many nascent entrepreneurs discover that much of their original vision is sacrificed in the process of creating a startup. In this paper we address the conflict between the entrepreneur’s fulfillment and the startup’s competitiveness from a negotiationanalytic perspective. We show how the nature of this conflict is transformed in the process of business planning, and we demonstrate how a purely marketoriented focus on expansion serves to enhance personal fulfillment. Our analytical approach has practical implications for business development and entrepreneurial education.Venture Creation, Business Development, Negotiation Analysis

METHODS OF STRATEGIC ANALYSIS SUPPORTING THE ELABORATION OF COMPANY’S INNOVATION STRATEGY

Both theory and practical experience in the scope of company management prove that formulation and selection of innovation strategy should be preceded and accompanied by analyses of numerous internal and external factors which may strongly influence the functioning and future development of an organization. Thus the implementation of strategic analysis methods in course of the said formulation and selection process should constitute the basis for preparation of every innovation strategy stemming from the innovation process ongoing within a given organisation

The making of a global blue economy 'governmentality': understanding space and power in the Western Indian Ocean

I interrogate the nature of the blue economy, a recent ocean development paradigm, through the lens of environmental governance. I deploy analytical techniques based on the work of Michel Foucault (governmentalities and dispositif) and a complementary spatialised analytical framework. I base my analysis on empirical data collected in the Western Indian Ocean Region, with fieldwork in Kenya and Seychelles. Through this analysis I: 1) note the potential for BE initiatives to lead to territorialisation and enclosure of ocean space, and argue for more recognition of the importance of ‘place' in blue economy policy making; 2) analyse the rationality underpinning the blue economy as a sustainable development approach, and how it is enacted in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) to effect the governmentalisation of a shared ocean space; 3) demonstrate how practices of inscription and subjectification are used to (re)territorialise the oceans as blue economy spaces; and 4) characterise the blue economy as a security dispositif, and call for more attention to be paid to the emergent space-time relations of the dispositif ‘in place’. I call for a blue œconomy, recalling earlier conceptions of economy than that of today, which privileges place-based co-management of natural resources at community scale in ways that are adaptive, prudent, and equitable. In conclusion, I consider further research priorities and policy-relevant recommendations