Bridging the Gap

School districts across the country are increasingly seeking out digital tools to support the work of educators, in the hopes of improving students' academic achievement. With the rapid emergence of this new market, many districts have been challenged by the task of identifying and procuring educational technology (ed-tech) products that match the needs of their educators and students.The NYC Department of Education's "Innovate NYC Schools" division, supported by a U.S. DOE Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, aims to address this problem, in part by promoting "user-centered design," an approach that puts the needs and preferences of products' intended users (in this case, teachers, students, and parents) front and center in the development and procurement of new technology.Bridging the Gap describes the design and implementation of three Innovate NYC Schools initiatives grounded in user-centered design theory:School Choice Design Challenge (SCDC),an effort to develop apps that would help students explore and narrow down their choices of high school.#SharkTankEDU events, during which ed-tech developers present a product to a panel of educators who provide feedback on the tool.Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenges (SCEC), a classroom-based, semester-long pilot of ed-tech tools intended to inform product development, as well as the ultimate procurement decisions of school staff.The report focuses on four phases of work involved in bringing ed-tech companies and the users of their products together: defining a problem; selecting users and ed-tech companies; implementing pilot-based initiatives; and evaluating products. It describes strategies used and challenges faced, and offers practical lessons gleaned from the experiences of the individuals who designed and participated in these efforts.

Return on Equality: Investment Opportunities that Help Close the Global Gender Gap

There is significant opportunity for individual investors, asset managers and companies to move closer to achieving the goal of gender equality and make direct social, market and global economic impacts, according to a compelling report launched today by BNY Mellon and the UN Foundation.The report, Return on Equality: Investment Opportunities to Help Close the Global Gender Gap, reveals new insights that underscore the urgency and opportunities for closing the global gender gap and proposes steps investors can take to advance progress towards the United Nations' Sustianable Development Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls." "We not only have a moral imperative to bridge the global gender gap, but the potential market benefits and investment opportunities in doing so are pivotal," according to Michael Cole-Fontayn, Executive Vice President, and Chairman of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). "Companies engaging in 'gender-lens' investing have typically supported women-led businesses and those promoting gender diversity. However, there is an increasing need to focus on the third (and less common) type of investing, in companies that advance gender equality through their products and services."Investors can now pursue these three gender-lens investment strategies through a variety of investment vehicles, including index funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs), venture capital and private equity opportunities, and innovative financing structures, such as private debt vehicles. However, investment vehicles related to products and services that advance gender equality are far and few in between.The five sectors examined in this report that present investment opportunities in products and services and further the advancement of women have an estimated market impact nearing U.S. $300 billion alone in incremental annual opportunity globally by 2025. They include telecommunications, contraception, childcare, water and energy

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim\ud that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.\ud The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company

Bridging the gap between service provision and customer expectation

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reminder to all managers that they must understand their customers, from the customers’ perspective, and not make assumptions about customer needs. Design/methodology/approach: Customer Value Discovery workshops are held with undergraduate on-campus students and academic staff at Nottingham Trent University to identify customer values and irritations. Library staff participate in the workshops and vote as they expected their customers to vote. The gaps identified between staff assumptions of customer perceptions of service importance and performance serve as a catalyst for staff engagement in the change process that is necessary to deliver on the value propositions and reduce customer irritations. Findings: Library staff assumptions of customer perceptions were not always accurate. The gaps identified helped to engage staff in the change process that was necessary to improve perceptions of value and to reduce irritations. By explicitly addressing the value propositions with the aims of adding value and reducing irritation, student satisfaction with library services, as measured by two independent satisfaction surveys, improved considerably. Research limitations/implications: The research is based on two customer segments of one university library. The research should be repeated after a gap of three-four years to check if the value propositions and irritations have changed in that time. If so, the goals of the library’s operational plan would have to change to reflect the new value propositions

What Are Best Practices to Promote High Ranking Female Employees?

Companies still have a long way to go to ensure gender diversity especially in leadership positions. Recent research indicated that although entry-level men and women are hired at an increasingly equal rate, women often times reach a mid-career “the glass ceiling”. Our research investigated the best practices and drew insights on how to tackle the gender diversity challenge

Standardization Framework for Sustainability from Circular Economy 4.0

The circular economy (CE) is widely known as a way to implement and achieve sustainability, mainly due to its contribution towards the separation of biological and technical nutrients under cyclic industrial metabolism. The incorporation of the principles of the CE in the links of the value chain of the various sectors of the economy strives to ensure circularity, safety, and efficiency. The framework proposed is aligned with the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development regarding the orientation towards the mitigation and regeneration of the metabolic rift by considering a double perspective. Firstly, it strives to conceptualize the CE as a paradigm of sustainability. Its principles are established, and its techniques and tools are organized into two frameworks oriented towards causes (cradle to cradle) and effects (life cycle assessment), and these are structured under the three pillars of sustainability, for their projection within the proposed framework. Secondly, a framework is established to facilitate the implementation of the CE with the use of standards, which constitute the requirements, tools, and indicators to control each life cycle phase, and of key enabling technologies (KETs) that add circular value 4.0 to the socio-ecological transition

On the Frontiers of Finance: Scaling Up Investment in Sustainable Small and Medium Enterprises in Developing Countries

Outlines the economic, social, and environmental benefits of investing in sustainable small and medium enterprises; the lending practices of financial intermediaries; and barriers. Includes case summaries and recommendations for sectoral growth