Quantify resilience enhancement of UTS through exploiting connect community and internet of everything emerging technologies

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy based quantification of the VR on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario (water bomb/flash flooding) considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deploye

Consumer-driven innovation networks and e-business management systems

This paper examines the use of consumer-driven innovation networks within the UK food-retailing industry using qualitative interview-based research analysed within an economic framework. This perspective revealed that, by exploiting information gathered directly from their customers at point-of-sale and data mining, supermarkets are able to identify consumer preferences and co-ordinate new product development via innovation networks. This has been made possible through their information control of the supply-chain established through the use of transparent inventory management systems. As a result, supermarkets’ e-business systems have established new competitive processes in the UK food-processing and retailing industry and are an example of consumer-driven innovation networks. The informant-based qualitative approach also revealed that trust-based transacting relationships operated differently from those previously described in the literature

How and When Socially Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Organizations Benefit From Adopting Social Alliance Management Routines to Manage Social Alliances?

Social alliance is defined as the collaboration between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Building on the insights derived from the resource-based theory, we develop a conceptual framework to explain how socially entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations (SENPOs) can improve their social alliance performance by adopting strategic alliance management routines. We test our framework using the data collected from 203 UK-based SENPOs in the context of cause-related marketing campaign-derived social alliances. Our results confirm a positive relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. We also find that relational mechanisms, such as mutual trust, relational embeddedness, and relational commitment, mediate the relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. Moreover, our findings suggest that different types of social alliance motivation can influence the impact of social alliance management routines on different types of the relational mechanisms. In general, we demonstrate that SENPOs can benefit from adopting social alliance management routines and, in addition, highlight how and when the social alliance management routines–social alliance performance relationship might be shaped. Our study offers important academic and managerial implications, and points out future research directions

The Performance of University Spin-Offs: The Impact of Entrepreneurial Capabilities and Social Networks of Founding Teams during Start-Ups

Objectives: University spin-offs have increasingly received attention from academia, governments, and policymakers because they not only generate new innovations, productivity, and jobs the regional economies but also significantly improve university productivity and creativity (Hayter, 2013, Urbano and Guerrero, 2013). However, a lack of understanding of the contribution made by a founding team to a spin-off’s performance still remains within current studies. Employing a resource-based view theory and social networks approach, this paper addresses this gap by exploring university spin-offs in Spain. Prior work: University spin-off studies have concentrated on analysing entrepreneurial business models (Ndonzuau et al., 2002, Vohora et al., 2004b, Bower, 2003, Mets, 2010) to understand how the commercialization of research is undertaken to create a university spin-off. University spin-offs were also been analysed from the perspective of a university’s capabilities (Powers and McDougall, 2005), or capabilities and social networks of an established spin-off instead of the founding teams (Walter et al., 2006). Moreover, Vohora et al. (2004a) and Shane (2004) have suggested founders need to build capable teams, which must have entrepreneurial capabilities and qualitative social networks, to create effective university spin-offs. Both entrepreneurial capability and social network theory have been studied in prior entrepreneurship research, but have received less attention within the context of the university spin-offs (Gonzalez-Pernia et al., 2013). Approach: Utilising an internet-based survey, this paper explores entrepreneurial capabilities and social networks of founding teams in Spanish university spin-offs using quantitative data analysis. Basing upon resource-based view theory of Barney (1991) to study entrepreneurial capabilities of the founding teams, the research employ entrepreneurial technology, strategy, human capital, organizational viability, and commercial resources (see Vohora et al., 2004a). To study social networks of a founding team, we employ the conceptual model of Hoang and Antoncic (2003) that divides networks into three components: structure, governance, and content. Results and implications: The results from an examination of the sample of 181 Spanish university spin-offs empirically demonstrate that by exploiting social networks a founding team can improve its entrepreneurial capabilities, which in turn enhance its spin-off’s performance. By employing the work of Vohora et al. (2004a) and Shane (2004), this paper constructs a model in which entrepreneurial capabilities play a mediate role between social networks and spin-off’s performance. Thus, the paper has implications for universities in training and policy development to support spin-off’s activity. Value: This study addresses some fundamental questions to contribute to the theory-based understanding of university spin-offs: How do entrepreneurial capabilities of founding teams influence the performance of university spin-offs? How do social networks of founding teams contribute to the process of the university spin-offs

University Spin-off Fundraising: The Impact of Entrepreneurial Capabilities and Social Networks Of Founding Teams during Start-ups

University spin-offs have increasingly received attention from academia, governments, and policymakers in studying the financing policies, venture capital investment decision making, the roles of venture capitalist in the development of new ventures, and the contributions of entrepreneur’s social capital to the fundraising activities. However, the limited number of studies in understanding of the contribution made by the entrepreneurial capabilities and social networks of a founding team to its fundraising ability still remains, especially within university spin-off context. Employing resource-based view theory and social networks approach, this paper enriches the knowledge by exploring university spin-offs in Spain. The results of this study empirically demonstrate that by exploiting social networks a founding team can improve its entrepreneurial capabilities, which in turn enhance its fundraising ability

The links between international production and innovation: a double network approach

This paper examines the changing role of multinationals in the global generation, adoption and transfer of innovation. It is argued that the combination of traditional asset exploiting objectives with increasing asset seeking activities entails a transition of multinationals towards a double network structure. On the one hand multinationals are more and more characterised by the interconnection of a large number of internal units that are deeply involved in the company’s use, generation and absorption of knowledge. On the other hand, units belonging to the internal network tend to develop external networks with other firms and institutions that are located outside the boundaries of the multinational firm, in order to increase the potential for use, generation and absorption of knowledge. Extending the analysis to a more general level, it is suggested that each of the external actors with which multinationals are interconnected across countries are themselves involved in extensive webs of relationships with other firms and institutions. By becoming embedded in different local contexts, multinational firms act as bridging institutions connecting a number of geographically dispersed economic and innovation systems. As a result, they are conditioned by, and contribute to, the evolution of different contexts in which they operate.innovation, multinational firms, networks.

A New Role for Human Resource Managers: Social Engineering Defense

[Excerpt] The general risk of social engineering attacks to organizations has increased with the rise of digital computing and communications, while for an attacker the risk has decreased. In order to counter the increased risk, organizations should recognize that human resources (HR) professionals have just as much responsibility and capability in preventing this risk as information technology (IT) professionals. Part I of this paper begins by defining social engineering in context and with a brief history pre-digital age attacks. It concludes by showing the intersection of HR and IT through examples of operational attack vectors. In part II, the discussion moves to a series of measures that can be taken to help prevent social engineering attacks