Collaboration in Buyer-Supplier Relationships.

This thesis focuses on collaboration in buyer-supplier relationships, with a specific interest for long-term, collaborative relationships that are part of a key supplier program. An extensive literature review of buyer-supplier collaboration is presented, before detailing the longitudinal, dyadic, multiple level, and multiple actor research design. The largest part of the empirical data is formed by 157 interview transcripts. The qualitative analysis of these transcripts is structured by using different types of data displays. The empirical chapters provide three different ways of looking at the development of collaborative buyer-supplier relationships. Furthermore, a dynamic model of relationship evolution has been developed in this thesis. This dynamic perspective advances on earlier work in the field of relationship development and provides insight in the mechanisms underlying the evolution of collaborative relationships.

Empowerment As Replacement for the Three Laws of Robotics

© 2017 Salge and Polani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.The greater ubiquity of robots creates a need for generic guidelines for robot behaviour. We focus less on how a robot can technically achieve a predefined goal, and more on what a robot should do in the first place. Particularly, we are interested in the question how a heuristic should look like which motivates the robot's behaviour in interaction with human agents. We make a concrete, operational proposal as to how the information-theoretic concept of empowerment can be used as a generic heuristic to quantify concepts such as self-preservation, protection of the human partner and responding to human actions. While elsewhere we studied involved single-agent scenarios in detail, here we present proof-of-principle scenarios demonstrating how empowerment interpreted in light of these perspectives allows one to specify core concepts with a similar aim as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in an operational way. Importantly, this route does not depend on having to establish an explicit verbalized understanding of human language and conventions in the robots. Also, it incorporates the ability to take into account a rich variety of different situations and types of robotic embodiment.Peer reviewe

Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

Exploring Fashion Industry Business Models and the Circular Economy

This dissertation examines post-consumer textile waste from the fashion industry's perspective, and addresses how business model innovation can facilitate reuse and recycling of garments and a transition towards a circular economy of fashion. Focusing on the emerging reuse and recycling practices of fashion brands the study builds upon one explorative and two in-depth case studies of industry pioneers and their endeavors of integrating reuse and recycling activities in their business models. Theoretically the study rests on business models, business model innovation for sustainability and circular economy. The study seeks to provide a unique contribution as it synthesizes the theoretical and empirical insights from the field of business model innovation and circular economy in the context of post-consumer textile waste. By highlighting and extending the idea of business model innovation for circular economy it makes a justification that product end-of-life phases require attention and can include new value propositions that companies can create, deliver and capture. This dissertation contains three articles, each of which contributes to an improved understanding of post-consumer textile waste management in the context of the fashion industry and its related opportunities and challenges. The findings cover both broad industry-level and more specific company-level discoveries. The industry-level findings provide a general understanding of existing practices among fashion companies while the company specific findings identify key issues and challenges of integrating a product’s end-of-life aspects in an existing business model. Collectively, the findings demonstrate that end-of-life management of products is an emerging field among fashion companies and used garments can provide new value propositions for fashion brands. The findings also illustrate that the field is in its infancy and lacks best practices within business models, supply chain infrastructure, technological solutions and consumer engagement. Transition towards a circular economy implies full systemic change, and innovation not only in business models, but also in technologies, society, policies and finance methods as well as consumer behavior. None of these aspects can work in isolation and require that different stakeholders work in tandem

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

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 Transformation and Social Business: A Practice-Based Pathway Framework for SMEs

This research focuses on the lessons learnt from case studies involving the digital transformation of three London SMEs. The companies adopted social technologies to renovate operations, develop new sets of skills and capabilities and remodel customer value propositions. The transformation processes had common elements that fed through to the companies’ strategies. We conceptualised our research as a network, regarding roles and interventions as network effects, to analyse the adoption process and dynamically link the technology and social context with digital transformation strategy. The lessons learned were distilled into a framework whose two-fold aim is to (a) support organisations through digital transformation and (b) inform organisational strategy. The framework is modular with components that assist and guide the various phases of designing, deploying, implementing and sustaining this transition