Revitalising African agriculture through innovative business models and organisational arrangements : promising developments in the traditional crops sector.

Within the last four years, a number of high profile reports outlining new strategies for pulling African agriculture out of its current impasse have emerged. These include the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme of NEPAD, and the InterAcademy Council Report commissioned by UN Secretary General Koffi Annan. Whilst these strategies are a welcome improvement on those that have characterised African agriculture in the past, it is argued here that like their predecessors, they fail to focus on business-competitive approaches as an integral part of the reform package needed to stimulate African agricultural productivity and development. This paper draws on innovation, business and organisation literature to highlight some of these approaches. It focuses on three concepts : value innovation, lead user focus and organisational value logic

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

ICT Study implications for human interaction and culture: Intro to a special issue

culture, human, interaction

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Digital Barriers: Making Technology Work for People

This paper was originally given as an oral presentation at the ‘3rd International Conference for Universal Design’, International Association for Universal Design, Hamamatsu, Japan (2010) and subsequently published. Peer reviewed by the conference’s International Scientific Committee, it looks at how the emerging techniques of design ethnography could be applied in a business context and qualitatively evaluates the benefits. It outlines the differences between inclusive design research conducted for digital devices/services and the large body of existing research on inclusive products, buildings and environments. It advances the view that technology companies are today in danger of repeating the same inclusive design mistakes made by kitchen and bathroom manufacturers 20 years ago, and calls for technology companies to develop new techniques to avoid this happening. The paper charts in detail the challenges and processes involved in transferring academic inclusive design research into the business arena, describing research conducted by Gheerawo and his co-authors on projects with research partners Samsung and BlackBerry. The paper helped define the ‘people and technology’ research theme in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design’s Age & Ability Research Lab, which Gheerawo leads. It was also important, as part of evidence of the benefits of an inclusive technology approach, in persuading a number of companies (Sony, BT, Samsung) to undertake new studies with the Lab. Gheerawo used this pathfinder paper in further work, including an essay on digital communication for www.designingwithpeople.org (i-Design3 project EPSRC), membership of the steering committee for Age UK’s Engage accreditation for business, and lectures at ‘CitiesforAll’ conference, Helsinki (2012), ‘WorkTech’, London (2010), ‘Budapest Design Week’ (2011) and the ‘Business of Ageing’ conference, Dublin (2011). Gheerawo also co-wrote an article ‘Moving towards an encompassing universal design approach in ICT’ in The Journal of Usability Studies (2010), for which he was also a guest editor

Opportunities for greater Lincolnshire's supply chains: full report

A study of the key sector supply chains across Greater Lincolnshire, and identification of barriers and opportuniteis for growth

Towards the Development of a Definitive Infrastructure Policy in

The Government of AP , India , needs to rethink its Infrastructure strategy in the light of current state priority. Unless these are in line with state priorities, the strategies will not work and will perpetually be at cross purposes. The current direction taken by the state appears to point towards the development of rural infrastructure,such as irrigation facility and linkages. The paper attempts to assess the need for these linkages and evolve broad policies to be implemented by these strategies.Infrastructure Policy