Evolutionary Business Information Systems - Perspectives and Challenges of an Emerging Class of Information Systems

This article reflects on existing and emerging future challenges arising in the area of “evolutionary business in- formation systems”, a class of systems that demand an evolutionary software development process and which sup- port secondary design of various con- ceptual layers. We place both existing contributions and future research op- portunities in context by referring to an idealized, preliminary system archi- tecture. Finally, we emphasize our plu- ralistic perspective on the research ob- ject and the resulting need for method- ological flexibility in the sense of inter- disciplinary configurations of research methods

Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie

Advances and challenges in innovation studies

The article discusses recent advances and future challenges in innovation studies. First, it separately considers four main strands of research, studying innovation at the organisational, systemic, sectoral and macroeconomic levels. Then, considering the field as a whole, the article points to the existence of important neglected topics and methodological challenges for future research. In fact, several fundamental issues are still unexplored, such as the co-evolution between technological and institutional change; the role of demand; and the impacts of innovation on individual and collective welfare. There are also important methodological challenges, such as the need for more systematic interactions between the different levels of analysis; the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technological and institutional changes; and the search for a combination of contingent explanations based on case studies with general analytical results based on econometric and formal models.Innovation; Innovation management; innovation systems; innovation and growth

An entrepreneurial model of economic and environmental co-evolution

A basic tenet of ecological economics is that economic growth and development are ultimately constrained by environmental carrying capacities. It is from this basis that notions of a sustainable economy and of sustainable economic development emerge to undergird the ‘standard model’ of ecological economics. However, the belief in ‘hard’ environmental constraints may be obscuring the important role of the entrepreneur in the coevolution of economic and environmental relations, and hence limiting or distorting the analytic focus of ecological economics and the range of policy options that are considered for sustainable economic development. This paper outlines a co-evolutionary model of the dynamics of economic and ecological systems as connected by entrepreneurial behaviour. We then discuss some of the key analytic and policy implications.

XXQ FACTORS FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT: A SYSTEMS ECONOMICS VIEW

Modern cities turn increasingly into functional areas seeking for a balance between agglomeration forces and urban quality of life. This paper will address the issue of sustainable urban development from a quality (performance) perspective. It aims to identify the critical access factors for the highest possible quality (XXQ) of the urban economy. A plea is made for a coherent methodological approach based on a systems economic view. In addition to a sketch of recent dynamic trends in urban systems in OECD countries, it pays attention to theories on urban growth and performance. Next, five critical success conditions for a high performance of cities will be presented in a coherent urban systems economics framework. The policy lessons of the analysis will form the last part of the paper.urban development, sustainability, critical access factors, systems economics

Energy and Economy: Recognizing High-Energy Modernity as a Historical Period

This introduction to Economic Anthropology’s special issue on “Energy and Economy” argues that we might find inspiration for a much more engaged and public anthropology in an unlikely place—19th century evolutionist thought. In addition to studying the particularities of energy transitions, which anthropology does so well, a more engaged anthropology might also broaden its temporal horizons to consider the nature of the future “stage” into which humanity is hurtling in an era of resource depletion and climate change. Net energy (EROEI), or the energy “surplus” on which we build and maintain our complex societal arrangements, is a key tool for anthropologists as we bring our trademark cross-cultural, ethnographically grounded knowledge and perspectives to bear in examining the complex interplay of material infrastructures, energy flows, social organization, and culture. We are now mindful of the always already cultural nature of such circuitry and interactions—in ways obviously unavailable to our nineteenth-century forebears. And yet even as our energy futures are neither predetermined nor inevitable, neither are they as unfettered by material constraints as many have come to think. A robust anthropology of energy informed by awareness of the energetic basis of the historically specific moment in which we find ourselves seems poised to help us get beyond the developmentalist ideas of Morgan and Tylor and to overcome a seeming inability to think comprehensively about the human predicament in simultaneously general and particular terms. We have a chance in the space now opening to get beyond the antinomies—materialist—mentalist, infrastructure—superstructure, agency—structure, objective—subjective, and so on—that dominated much of twentieth-century anthropology

An emergence perspective on entrepreneurship: processes, structure and methodology

This paper explores entrepreneurship from the perspective of emergence, drawing on literature in complexity theory, social theory and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is conceptualised as the production of emergence, or emergent properties, via a simple model of initial conditions, processes of emergence that produces emergent properties at multiple levels (new phenomena such as products, services, firms, networks, patterns of behaviour, identities). Conceptualisation through emergence thus embraces actors, context, processes and (structural) outcomes. This paper builds on previous work that theorises the relationship between entrepreneurship and social change. We extend that work by considering the methodological implications of relating processes of entrepreneurship to the emergence of new phenomena

Social Sustainability: A design research approach to sustainable development

While issues such as clean production and energy efficiency are still central in sustainable development discourse, attention is increasingly on patterns of consumption at multiple levels in society. This opens new opportunities and responsibilities for design research, as we shift from a focus on product lifecycles to people’s lifestyles. It also requires further understanding the ‘social sustainability’ aspects of the environment and development, including the complexity of problematics characterized by uncertainties, contradictions and controversies. In response, we propose a programmatic approach, in which a tentative assemblage of theoretical and experimental strategies frame a common ground for a collaborative and practice-led inquiry. We present a design research program based on two propositions: socio-cultural practices are the basic unit for design, and; transitions, and transition management, are the basic points of design intervention. Rather than affirming the status quo or the prevailing discourse, we argue for design research as a ‘critical practice’, in which cultural diversity, non-humans and multiple futures are considered