HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

Market Networks and the Value in Knowledge Exchanges: Evidence from Biotechnology Strategic Alliances

Researchers have argued that market networks are an integral part of the firm's value output, but the extent to which the structural characteristics of firms and their partners in market networks mediate the link between network embeddedness and value generation remains a largely unexplored area of research. This paper argues that diffusion mechanisms within market networks enable them to selectively impute and know the value of inter-organisational knowledge exchanges. The purpose of this paper is to empirically determine the extent of this phenomenon in the context of the strategic alliance market network in the biotechnology industry. I find evidence that the position of firms' partners in the network of strategic alliances is a significant predictor of wealth gains from the announcement of knowledge exchange deals. Also, for explicit knowledge exchanges, the market reacts more to announcements by firms that are in the periphery of the strategic alliance network.alliances, networks, value, centrality

Marketing higher education in Africa : challenges and opportunities

This chapter examines the global marketing environment of today’s higher education institutions (HEIs). (Semi) Autonomous HEIs and business schools are increasingly behaving like for-profit organisations as they seek new opportunities and resources to prioritise revenue creation. Therefore, they are diversifying the portfolio of their student populations by recruiting domestic and international students. In this light, this contribution deliberates on contemporary integrated marketing communications that are intended to support HEIs to promote their quality, student-centred education as well as their high-impact and meaningful research in global markets. Moreover, it reports on how HEIs’ marketing endeavours will be able to forge fruitful and collaborative relationships with industry stakeholders; foster student mobility and engagement in exchange programmes, as they can create partnership agreements with other institutions, among other strategic avenues. These issues imply that tomorrow’s educational institutions will have to keep investing in adequate resources, competences and capabilities to leverage themselves amid intensifying competition in challenging socio-economic environments.peer-reviewe

State Capacity and Non-state Service Provision in Fragile and Conflict-affected States

How can governments effectively engage with non-state providers (NSPs) of basic services where capacity is weak? This paper examines whether and how fragile and conflict affected states can co-ordinate, finance, and set and apply standards for the provision of basic services by NSPs. It explores ways of incrementally engaging the state, beginning with activities that are least likely to do harm to non-state provision. Through the ‘indirect’ roles of setting the policy environment and engaging in policy dialogue, regulating and facilitating, contracting, and entering into mutual and informal agreements with NSPs, the state can in principle assume responsibility for the provision of basic services without necessarily being involved in direct provision. But government capacity to perform these roles is constrained by the state’s weak legitimacy, coverage and competence, lack of basic information about the non-state sector, and lack of basic organisational capacity to form and maintain relationships with NSPs. The experience of the exercise of the indirect roles in fragile settings suggests: * Governments may be more willing to engage with NSPs where there is recognition that government cannot alone deliver all services, where public and private services are not in competition, and where there is evidence that successful collaboration is possible (demonstrated through small-scale pilots). * The extent to which engagements are ‘pro-service’may be influenced by government motives for engagement and the extent to which the providers that are most important to poor people are engaged. * Formal policy dialogue between government and NSPs may be imperfect, unrepresentative and at times unhelpful in fragile settings. Informal dialogue - at the operational level - could more likely be where synergies can be found. * Regulation is more likely to be ‘pro-service’ where it offers incentives for compliance, and where it focuses on standards in terms of outputs and outcomes rather than inputs and entry controls. * Wide scale, performance-based contracting has been successful in delivering services in some cases, but the sustainability of this approach is often questioned. Some successful contractual agreements have a strong informal, relational element and grow out of earlier informal connections. * Informal and mutual agreements can avoid the capacity problems and tensions implicit in formal contracting but may present problems of non-transparency and exclusion of competition. Paradoxically, the need for large-scale approaches and quick co-ordination of services in fragile and conflict-affected settings may require ‘prematurely high’ levels of state-NSP engagement, before the development of the underlying institutional structures that would support them. When considering strategies to support the capacity of government to engagement with NSPs, donors should: * Recognise non-state service provision and adopt the ‘do no harm’ principle: It would be wrong to set the ambition of 'managing ‘ non-state provision in its entirety, and it can be very harmful for low-capacity states to seek to regulate all NSP or to draw it into clumsy contracts. * Beware of generalisation: Non-state provision takes many forms in response to different histories and to political and economic change. The possibilities and case for state engagement have to be assessed not assumed. The particular identities of NGOs and enterprises should be considered. * Recognise that state building can occur through any of the types of engagement with NSPs: Types of engagement should therefore be selected on the basis of their likely effectiveness in improving service delivery. * Begin with less risky/small scale forms of engagement where possible: State interventions that imply a direct controlling role for the state and which impose obligations on NSPs (i.e. contracting and regulation) require greater capacity (on both sides) and present greater risk of harm if performed badly than the roles of policy dialogue and entering into mutual agreements. * Adopt mixed approaches: The choice between forms of engagement does not have to be absolute. Rather than adopting a uniform plan of engagement in a particular country, it may be better to try different approaches in different regions or sectors

Context constraint integration and validation in dynamic web service compositions

System architectures that cross organisational boundaries are usually implemented based on Web service technologies due to their inherent interoperability benets. With increasing exibility requirements, such as on-demand service provision, a dynamic approach to service architecture focussing on composition at runtime is needed. The possibility of technical faults, but also violations of functional and semantic constraints require a comprehensive notion of context that captures composition-relevant aspects. Context-aware techniques are consequently required to support constraint validation for dynamic service composition. We present techniques to respond to problems occurring during the execution of dynamically composed Web services implemented in WS-BPEL. A notion of context { covering physical and contractual faults and violations { is used to safeguard composed service executions dynamically. Our aim is to present an architectural framework from an application-oriented perspective, addressing practical considerations of a technical framework

Intellectual capital communication: evidence from social and sustainability reporting

The purpose of this study is to investigate the level and quality of intellectual capital information communicated through social and sustainability report for a sample of 37 Italian listed company over two years (2005 and 2006). The study use the resource based theory to explain the relationship between corporate social responsibility and intellectual capital. Content analysis is applied through a multidimensional framework composed by three main disclosure profiles(time orientation, nature and type of information) which permits to analyse in depth the quality of intellectual capital information. The results highlight significant and increasing presence of intellectual capital information in CSR reports which is communicated principally in non financial, quantitative and non time specific terms. Human capital is the most reported category followed by relational and organisational capital. There are many similarities between the two typology of report contributing to the ongoing debate on corporate reporting practices.The results suggest that the integration between IC report and CSR report is a plausible issue and that could be useful to enhance the transparency and the understanding of company processes and activities both for internal and external stakeholders. Very few studies have analysed the intellectual capital in CSR report in atheoretical and mono-dimensional way. Moreover the resource base theory has been scarcely applied to explain the disclosure of intellectual capital even if there are several similarities between the two perspectives.intellectual capital, disclosure, social and sustainability reporting, resource based view, corporate social responsibility

Competitive Priorities and Competitive Advantage in Jordanian Manufacturing

The purpose of this research was to explore and predict the relationship between the competitive priorities (quality, cost, flexibility and delivery) and the competitive advantage of firms in the Jordanian Industrial Sector. A population of 88 Jordanian manufacturing firms, registered on the Amman Stock Exchange, was targeted using a cross-sectional survey employing a questionnaire method of data collection. The results of the data analysis indicate a significant relationship between competitive priorities and competitive advantage. The research suggests that recognising and nurturing this relationship provides the master key for a firm to survive in a turbulent environment. Therefore, operational and marketing strategies should place emphasis on competitive priorities such as quality, cost, flexibility and delivery to achieve, develop and maintain competitive advantage. This study is one of the first to examine the relationship between the competitive priorities of Jordanian manufacturing firms and their competitive advantage

Competitive collaboration & market contestability: Cases in Mexican & UK banking (1945-1975)

This research explores the evolution of co-operation among different types of intermediaries in the UK and Mexican financial systems and provides an international comparison. In it we focus on how and why collaboration between commercial banks and non-bank financial competitors emerged in the context of the external innovations that modified the contestability of bank markets. Changes in Mexican banking consider collaboration between commercial banks and small regional banks, with an emphasis on the 1945 to 1975 period. The success of collaboration, between non-bank and non-finance providers to modify competitive capabilities and competitive challenges, in UK deposit markets is the benchmark for co-operation in Mexican banking. Business histories in the UK and Mexico show how some relations emerged out of integration strategies, with the purpose of establishing financial conglomerates. Other banks and non-bank providers in Mexico and the UK sought to create co-operative agreements that developed competitive capabilities and allowed barriers to enter deposit markets to be circumvented. As a result, the research sheds light on the success of collaboration agreements through changes in competitive strength rather than the longevity of the transaction or the formality and structural visibility of the agreements.Comparative Financial Markets (N20), Market Structure (L10), Networks (L22).

Knowledge management practices and the enhancement of customer capital: the importance of time

Actualmente, los responsables de las pequeñas y medianas empresas (PYMES) debido al hecho de tener que vigilar continuamente sus empresas a la búsqueda de mejoras en las relaciones con sus clientes y trabajadores, están otorgando un papel cada vez más estratégico a las prácticas de gestión del conocimiento. No obstante, hay situaciones donde las organizaciones y sus miembros se enfrentan a entornos cada vez más inciertos, por lo que es necesario reconsiderar las prácticas de gestión del conocimiento que se han venido desarrollando en la empresa desde sus inicios. Estas prácticas, en forma de procesos y rutinas, pueden basarse tanto en conocimiento tácito como explícito y también necesitan ser continuamente reconsideradas de cara a la captación de nuevo conocimiento. En tales circunstancias, sería necesario modificar e incluso eliminar parte del conocimiento existente al objeto de asegurarnos de que los empleados tienen acceso a conocimientos lo suficientemente actualizados como para que mantengan o garanticen las relaciones que las PYMEs tienen con sus clientes. Nuestro trabajo examina el impacto que un contexto de “mentalidad abierta” (openminded) en la organización existente en un momento dado (T) tiene sobre las actuaciones que intentan reconsiderar los conocimientos organizativos en un momento posterior (T+1). Analizamos además la relaciones entre los procesos de aprendizaje/conocimiento explorativo y aplicado sobre el capital relacional. Se utiliza para ello evidencias empíricas procedentes de 107 PYMES del sector de las telecomunicaciones en España, utilizando la técnica PLS.Actualmente, los responsables de las pequeñas y medianas empresas (PYMES) debido al hecho de tener que vigilar continuamente sus empresas a la búsqueda de mejoras en las relaciones con sus clientes y trabajadores, están otorgando un papel cada vez más estratégico a las prácticas de gestión del conocimiento. No obstante, hay situaciones donde las organizaciones y sus miembros se enfrentan a entornos cada vez más inciertos, por lo que es necesario reconsiderar las prácticas de gestión del conocimiento que se han venido desarrollando en la empresa desde sus inicios. Estas prácticas, en forma de procesos y rutinas, pueden basarse tanto en conocimiento tácito como explícito y también necesitan ser continuamente reconsideradas de cara a la captación de nuevo conocimiento. En tales circunstancias, sería necesario modificar e incluso eliminar parte del conocimiento existente al objeto de asegurarnos de que los empleados tienen acceso a conocimientos lo suficientemente actualizados como para que mantengan o garanticen las relaciones que las PYMEs tienen con sus clientes. Nuestro trabajo examina el impacto que un contexto de “mentalidad abierta” (openminded) en la organización existente en un momento dado (T) tiene sobre las actuaciones que intentan reconsiderar los conocimientos organizativos en un momento posterior (T+1). Analizamos además la relaciones entre los procesos de aprendizaje/conocimiento explorativo y aplicado sobre el capital relacional. Se utiliza para ello evidencias empíricas procedentes de 107 PYMES del sector de las telecomunicaciones en España, utilizando la técnica PLS