Reframing technical change: Livestock Fodder Scarcity Revisited as Innovation Capacity Scarcity: Part 3. Tools for Diagnosis and Institutional Change in Innovation Systems

The exploration of fodder innovation capacity requires tools to undertake the following tasks: (i) Diagnosis of fodder innovation capacity to identify project starting points, including micro and macro elements (ii) Socio-economic benchmarking, and follow-up studies (iii) Pilot innovation cloud process learning/ process-driven intervention correction (iv) Comparative analysis of institutional change processes (iv) Project team process learning And (iv) Project evaluation. There is a wide range of existing tools available to investigate institutional change. This paper reviews these and recommends that an eclectic approach of mixing and matching tools to the emerging circumstances of the research is the best way forward.Technological Change, Agricultural Technology, Livestock, Poverty Reduction, Evaluation, Benchmarking

Positively Deviant Organizational Performance and the Role of Leadership Values

Cameron cites the infusion of collaborative values and restructuring of relationships as a primary reason for the successful clean up and closure of Rocky Flats, one of U.S.’s most hazardous and controversial toxic dumps. Success was contingent upon mutual trust and respect of and between traditionally adversarial groups by adopting a mutual proactive, sharing orientation and empathetic attitudes. The true leaders in this venture shifted from a profit-first stance to changing organizational culture, ensuring that individuals (especially leaders and influencers) pursued an abundance-based vision

Using patient-reported measures to drive change in healthcare: the experience of the digital, continuous and systematic PREMs observatory in Italy

BACKGROUND: The use of Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) has great potential in healthcare service improvement, but a limited use. This paper presents an empirical case of PREMs innovation in Italy, to foster patient data use up to the ward level, by keeping strengths and addressing weaknesses of previous PREMs survey experiences. The paper reports key lessons learned in this ongoing experience of action research, directly involving practitioners. METHODS: The aim of this paper is to present the results of an ongoing action research, encompassing the innovation of PREMs collection, reporting and use, currently adopted by 21 hospitals of two Italian regions. The continuous and systematic PREMs collection has been implemented between 2017 and 2019 and includes: a continuous web-based administration, using web-services; an augmented and positive questionnaire matching standard closed-ended questions with narrative sections; the inclusion and benchmarking of patient data within a shared performance evaluation system; public disclosure of aggregated anonymized data; a multi-level and real-time web-platform for reporting PREMs to professionals. The action research was carried out with practitioners in a real-life and complex context. The authors used multiple data sources and methods: observations, feedback of practitioners, collected during several workshops and meetings, and analysis of preliminary data on the survey implementation. RESULTS: A continuous and systematic PREMs observatory was developed and adopted in two Italian regions. PREMs participation and response rates tend to increase over time, reaching stable percentages after the first months. Narrative feedback provide a 'positive narration' of episodes and behaviours that made the difference to patients and can inform quality improvement actions. Real-time reporting of quantitative and qualitative data is enabling a gratifying process of service improvement and people management at all the hospitals' levels. CONCLUSIONS: The PREMs presented in this paper has been recognized by healthcare professionals and managers as a strategic and positive tool for improving an actual use of PREMs at system and ward levels, by measuring and highlighting positive deviances, such as compassionate behaviours

Analizando los resultados académicos en la Educación Superior en España

The development of the European Higher Education Area has been a process of modernization in many universities. Teaching methodologies have undergone a process of continuous change to meet the demands for high quality leading to a need for enhancement in the learning assessment methodologies as well. The objective of this study is to analyse student´s academic performance measured through coursework vs. final exam and to ascertain the factors that could explain the difference. Regression and variance analysis are carried out over the grades and responses to a questionnaire on a sample of 298 students of different subjects in a Spanish university. The results show that there are differences between continuous assessment and the final examination marks.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad FFI2013-41235-

Customer evaluations of after-sales service contact modes: An empirical analysis of national culture�s consequences

customer, service, culture, evaluation

Generalized extreme value regression for binary response data: An application to B2B electronic payments system adoption

In the information system research, a question of particular interest is to interpret and to predict the probability of a firm to adopt a new technology such that market promotions are targeted to only those firms that were more likely to adopt the technology. Typically, there exists significant difference between the observed number of ``adopters'' and ``nonadopters,'' which is usually coded as binary response. A critical issue involved in modeling such binary response data is the appropriate choice of link functions in a regression model. In this paper we introduce a new flexible skewed link function for modeling binary response data based on the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. We show how the proposed GEV links provide more flexible and improved skewed link regression models than the existing skewed links, especially when dealing with imbalance between the observed number of 0's and 1's in a data. The flexibility of the proposed model is illustrated through simulated data sets and a billing data set of the electronic payments system adoption from a Fortune 100 company in 2005.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS354 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Analysis of Heuristic Validity, Efficiency and Applicability of the Profile Distance Method for Implementation in Decision Support Systems

This article seeks to enhance acceptance of the profile distance method (PDM) in decision support systems. The PDM is a multiple attributive based decision making as well as a multiple method approach to support complex decision making and uses a heuristic to avoid computationally complex global optimization. We elaborate on the usability of the method and question the heuristic used. We present a bisection algorithm, which efficiently supports the discovery of transition profiles needed in a user-friendly and practical application of the method. Additionally, we provide empirical evidence showing that the proposed heuristic is efficient and delivers results within 5% of the global optimizer for a wide range of data sets