Green business models and organisational changes: Lessons from the UK construction sector

PhD studyGreen business models (GBMs) can support green growth because they are based on green value creation and capture with emphasis on clients role. However, GBMs require substantial investment and strong change capabilities. This paper maps organisational changes associated with GBMs transformation. For this purpose, 19 semi-structured interviews are conducted with a heterogeneous sample of academics and managers from the UK construction sector. The interviews then are analysed by a means of thematic analysis with aim to capture any common changes and to form similar patterns of changes which occurred within the sample. Surprisingly, there are a lot of similarities that can be grouped broadly into three major themes: green profile development; structure; and operations. In addition, the change starts from the strategic level (policy) to the operational level but it may be triggered by the people at the operational level. Furthermore, GBMs not only change product/service and process but also catalyse broader systems change of the green value chain. Therefore, construction organisations have to accept that transition to GBMs will bring significant changes to the way they work if these models are to flourish

Energy-efficient cloud computing application solutions and architectures

Environmental issues are receiving unprecedented attention from business and governments around the world. As concern for greenhouse, climate change and sustainability continue to grow; businesses are grappling with improving their environmental impacts while remaining profitable. Many businesses have discovered that Green IT initiatives and strategies can reform the organization, comply with laws and regulations, enhance the public appearance of the organization, save energy cost, and improving their environmental impacts. One of these Green IT initiatives is migrating or building the business applications in the cloud. Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running enterprise and web applications. As a result, building enterprise systems on cloud computing platform is increasing significantly today. However, cloud computing is not inherently proposing energy efficiency solutions for these businesses. In this thesis, a concept has been developed to support organizations choosing suitable energy-efficient cloud architecture while moving their application to the cloud or building new cloud applications. Thus, the concept focuses on how to employ the cloud computing technology as an energy efficient solution from the application perspective. The main idea applied in the concept is identifying architectures for cloud applications depending on the inherent properties of cloud computing such as virtualization and the elasticity that can make them green potential, and identifying correlations between these architectures with already identified business process patterns used in green business process design. Alongside with these correlations, the application has been decomposed into basic technical and business attributes that can describe the application. The relations between these attributes and the cloud architectures have been defined. The relations between the different components the application attributes, application architectures, and the green patterns can lead to not only the energy-efficient cloud architecture for the business application, but also to the architectures that can achieve the organization technical and business requirements. Prototypically, a recommender system has been implemented that supports the identification of suitable energy-efficient cloud application architectures in addition to the cloud migration decision

FLEXIBILITY IMPROVEMENT ON ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF PUNCHING MACHINE BASED ON GREEN MANUFACTURING METHOD AT PT BUANA INTAN GEMILANG

These days, Green Manufacturing has established become a new thing for professional engineers and manufacturing workers to be an important part in the business world. Green manufacturing is one of method for manufacturing that can minimizes waste and pollution. Green Manufacturing was created to reflect the new manufacturing paradigm techniques to make something become more eco-efficient by reducing the energy consumption. Jacquard punching machine is a machine that designed to cut a hole in material such as card stock named jacquard card. This card controlled the weaving process in textile industry to enabling produce the patterns of fabric. This machine is still working manually with the flexibility less than 90 percent that led to the longest production time in meeting the demand, thus causing the electrical energy released for this machine is also very high. On the basis of these problems required a system to improve the flexibility of the machine in order to be able to reduce energy consumption and make the company become more green environmentally friendly. From this research generated an automation system which will be applied on a jacquard punchine machine that can increase 9 percent of flexibility machine to be more than 90 percent. This system has saving the electricity consumption of 2092 KWh every making a complete curtain pattern

Do Process Modelling Techniques Get Better? A Comparative Ontological Analysis of BPMN

Current initiatives in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) strive for the development of a BPM standard notation by pushing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). However, such a proposed standard notation needs to be carefully examined. Ontological analysis is an established theoretical approach to evaluating modelling techniques. This paper reports on the outcomes of an ontological analysis of BPMN and explores identified issues by reporting on interviews conducted with BPMN users in Australia. Complementing this analysis we consolidate our findings with previous ontological analyses of process modelling notations to deliver a comprehensive assessment of BPMN

Sustainable innovation: key conclusions from Sustainable Innovation Conferences 2003–2006 organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design

The following is taken directly from the introduction. This booklet summarises the key conclusions from the 2003–2006 conferences on Sustainable Innovation organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design (www.cfsd.org.uk). The conclusions are drawn from the respective conference presentations, papers and discussions. The publication has been sponsored as part of a ‘Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Innovation & Design’ project awarded to The Centre for Sustainable Design by the South-East England Development Agency (SEEDA)

Production for a green economy

In the chapter are discussed new approaches of production development in order to achieve the objectives of sustainable development and put the green economy into practice. Conventional approaches to the production must be re-oriented towards the promotion of renewable, cleaner and more effi technologies aimed at the conservation of all natural resources. This requires a new approach to the design of products and their production, and requires the inclusion of post-industrial and post-consumer residues into permanent circulation and the development of eco-innovative management patterns. In the implementation of such solutions the “cradle to cradle” approach could be useful.Wydanie współfinansowane ze środków Miasta Łodzi w ramach zadania “Współpraca z wyższymi uczelniami” – umowa 100/03/201

Community Aliveness: Discovering Interaction Decay Patterns in Online Social Communities

Online Social Communities (OSCs) provide a medium for connecting people, sharing news, eliciting information, and finding jobs, among others. The dynamics of the interaction among the members of OSCs is not always growth dynamics. Instead, a $\textit{decay}$ or $\textit{inactivity}$ dynamics often happens, which makes an OSC obsolete. Understanding the behavior and the characteristics of the members of an inactive community help to sustain the growth dynamics of these communities and, possibly, prevents them from being out of service. In this work, we provide two prediction models for predicting the interaction decay of community members, namely: a Simple Threshold Model (STM) and a supervised machine learning classification framework. We conducted evaluation experiments for our prediction models supported by a $\textit{ground truth}$ of decayed communities extracted from the StackExchange platform. The results of the experiments revealed that it is possible, with satisfactory prediction performance in terms of the F1-score and the accuracy, to predict the decay of the activity of the members of these communities using network-based attributes and network-exogenous attributes of the members. The upper bound of the prediction performance of the methods we used is $0.91$ and $0.83$ for the F1-score and the accuracy, respectively. These results indicate that network-based attributes are correlated with the activity of the members and that we can find decay patterns in terms of these attributes. The results also showed that the structure of the decayed communities can be used to support the alive communities by discovering inactive members.Comment: pre-print for the 4th European Network Intelligence Conference - 11-12 September 2017 Duisburg, German

Sustainable consumption: towards action and impact. : International scientific conference November 6th-8th 2011, Hamburg - European Green Capital 2011, Germany: abstract volume

This volume contains the abstracts of all oral and poster presentations of the international scientific conference „Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact“ held in Hamburg (Germany) on November 6th-8th 2011. This unique conference aims to promote a comprehensive academic discourse on issues concerning sustainable consumption and brings together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: it is a ubiquitous social practice and an economic driving force, yet at the same time, its consequences are in conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards “sustainable consumption” has therefore become a major political issue. In order to properly understand the challenge of “sustainable consumption”, identify unsustainable patterns of consumption and bring forward the necessary innovations, a collaborative effort of researchers from different disciplines is needed