103,909 research outputs found
"We are always after that balance":managing innovation in the new digital media industry
The pressure to innovate is growing as technology cycles change more rapidly. Organisations need to balance exploration and exploitation effectively if they are to heed the innovation imperative. Organisational ambidexterity is proposed as a means to achieve such balance with structural or contextual ambidexterity as possible choices. Yet how organisations become ambidextrous is an as yet underresearched area, and different industry sectors may pose different innovation challenges. Using the case study method, this paper examines how a computer games company responds to an industry-specific innovation challenge and how it endeavours to balance exploration and exploitation. The findings suggest that ambidexterity is difficult to achieve, and is fraught with organisational tensions which might eventually jeopardise the innovation potential of a company. The paper suggests that more qualitative research is needed to further our understanding of innovation challenges, innovation management and organisational ambidexterity
Challenges in Complex Systems Science
FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT.
The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the
context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the
Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having:
many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition
laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial
conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities;
interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics;
combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving
subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context,
science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from
data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale
experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge
distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical
models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding
the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate
choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems
of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating
new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that
can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and
systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently
unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT
agenda
Complex Networks Unveiling Spatial Patterns in Turbulence
Numerical and experimental turbulence simulations are nowadays reaching the
size of the so-called big data, thus requiring refined investigative tools for
appropriate statistical analyses and data mining. We present a new approach
based on the complex network theory, offering a powerful framework to explore
complex systems with a huge number of interacting elements. Although interest
on complex networks has been increasing in the last years, few recent studies
have been applied to turbulence. We propose an investigation starting from a
two-point correlation for the kinetic energy of a forced isotropic field
numerically solved. Among all the metrics analyzed, the degree centrality is
the most significant, suggesting the formation of spatial patterns which
coherently move with similar vorticity over the large eddy turnover time scale.
Pattern size can be quantified through a newly-introduced parameter (i.e.,
average physical distance) and varies from small to intermediate scales. The
network analysis allows a systematic identification of different spatial
regions, providing new insights into the spatial characterization of turbulent
flows. Based on present findings, the application to highly inhomogeneous flows
seems promising and deserves additional future investigation.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
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