Hierarchies of adaptable learning during product development

Shorter product lifecycles, shrinking time-to-market and increasing global competition, drive companies to premature transitions from the development laboratory to full-scale commercial production. This ramp-up period is usually considered as a transient phenomenon and often ignored by a large body of literature. Hence, the current push for accelerated development and quality manufacturing of new products, has increased the need to model and measure production performance during ramp-up. Despite this need for a concrete framework of these early stages of the product life cycle, a useful model of ramp-up, formalizing this tradeoff between product design and process modeling during the execution phase, is missing. In this context the present work deals with this issue throught a structured methodology that highlights the system sensitivities by decoupling process and product design, proposing an algorithm that uses empirical evaluation measures of manufacturing complexity. © 2011 IEEE

Developing strategic learning alliances: partnerships for the provision of global education and training solutions

The paper describes a comprehensive model for the development of strategic alliances between education and corporate sectors, which is required to ensure effective provision of education and training programmes for a global market. Global economic forces, combined with recent advances in information and communication technologies, have provided unprecedented opportunities for education providers to broaden the provision of their programmes both on an international scale and across new sectors. Lifelong learning strategies are becoming increasingly recognized as an essential characteristic of a successful organization and therefore large organizations have shown a preparedness to invest in staff training and development. The demands for lifelong learning span a wide range of training and educational levels from school-level and vocational courses to graduate-level training for senior executive

Designing Software Architectures As a Composition of Specializations of Knowledge Domains

This paper summarizes our experimental research and software development activities in designing robust, adaptable and reusable software architectures. Several years ago, based on our previous experiences in object-oriented software development, we made the following assumption: ‘A software architecture should be a composition of specializations of knowledge domains’. To verify this assumption we carried out three pilot projects. In addition to the application of some popular domain analysis techniques such as use cases, we identified the invariant compositional structures of the software architectures and the related knowledge domains. Knowledge domains define the boundaries of the adaptability and reusability capabilities of software systems. Next, knowledge domains were mapped to object-oriented concepts. We experienced that some aspects of knowledge could not be directly modeled in terms of object-oriented concepts. In this paper we describe our approach, the pilot projects, the experienced problems and the adopted solutions for realizing the software architectures. We conclude the paper with the lessons that we learned from this experience

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

A spiral model for adding automatic, adaptive authoring to adaptive hypermedia

At present a large amount of research exists into the design and implementation of adaptive systems. However, not many target the complex task of authoring in such systems, or their evaluation. In order to tackle these problems, we have looked into the causes of the complexity. Manual annotation has proven to be a bottleneck for authoring of adaptive hypermedia. One such solution is the reuse of automatically generated metadata. In our previous work we have proposed the integration of the generic Adaptive Hypermedia authoring environment, MOT ( My Online Teacher), and a semantic desktop environment, indexed by Beagle++. A prototype, Sesame2MOT Enricher v1, was built based upon this integration approach and evaluated. After the initial evaluations, a web-based prototype was built (web-based Sesame2MOT Enricher v2 application) and integrated in MOT v2, conforming with the findings of the first set of evaluations. This new prototype underwent another evaluation. This paper thus does a synthesis of the approach in general, the initial prototype, with its first evaluations, the improved prototype and the first results from the most recent evaluation round, following the next implementation cycle of the spiral model [Boehm, 88]

An open value-based perspective to healthcare building

AIM. This paper aims to build a conceptual relationship between value and open building and scenario planning to aid the assesment of healthcare infrastructures over the short, medium and long term and against dynamically changing contexts. BACKGROUND. Faced with the current financial climate, organisations often find themselves debating the impact of short-term economic pressures, at the expense of planning the strategic long-term sustainability and value of their physical assets. Existing decision making and stakeholder consultation approaches are inadequate and as such an open and dynamic value-based approach to scenario planning is required that will capitalise on the benefits of standardisation, customisation and learning. METHODOLOGY. This paper is supported by a critical and comparative review of health infrastructure, value management and open building literature to understand similarities and differences. It also reports on a workshop with academics and industry professionals and coins open planning and open building. IMPLICATIONS. Value is an important concept in open scenario planning and building. Furthermore, a new method of categorising open value as benefits, sacrifices and resources is trialled

Should I make or should I buy? Innovation strategies and governance structures in the Italian food sector

This paper analyses the “make or buy” decision of food firms applied to innovation strategy using 389 Italian food firms data from the Unicredit 2007 database. We develop a set of hypothesis from three theoretical perspectives such as transaction cost economics, strategic management and resource-based view. Our paper aims at highlight whether or not different firm’s features can be linked to the decision to make or buy. We found out that these two decisions are positively interlinked. Moreover we also found out that it is difficult to indicate a clear-cut behaviour for the Italian food firms if we refer to making or buying decisions. We discuss these results and use them to bring some interesting outcomes to discuss managerial implications and/or policy interventions in this highly strategic domain

Networks in the shadow of markets and hierarchies : calling the shots in the visual effects industry

The nature and organisation of creative industries and creative work has increasingly been at the centre of academic and policy debates in recent years. The differentiation of this field, economically and spatially, has been tied to more general arguments about the trend towards new trust-based, network forms of organization and economic coordination. In the first part of this paper, we set out, unpack and then critique the conceptual and empirical foundations of such claims. In the main section of the paper, we draw on research into a particular creative sector of the economy - the visual effects component of the film industry - a relatively new though increasingly important global production network. By focusing both on firms and their workers, and drawing on concepts derived from global value chain, labour process and institutional analysis, we aim to offer a more realistic and grounded analysis of creative work within creative industries. The analysis begins with an attempt to explain the power dynamics and patterns of competition and collaboration in inter-firm relations within the Hollywood studio-dominated value chain, before moving to a detailed examination of how the organisation of work and reemployment relations are central to the capturing of value. On the basis of that evidence, we conclude that trust-based networks and collaborative communities play some part in accessing and acquiring leverage in the value chain, but do not explain the core mechanisms of resource allocation, coordination and work organisation

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Whatever Happened to Apprenticeship Training

This paper examines the development of apprenticeship training in three English-speaking countries where apprenticeship has fared very differently. It declined at an early date in the US in most sectors of the economy; it survived intact in Britain well into the post-Second World War period; and it has survived relatively strongly in Australia up to the present day, though it is now under some pressure. The reasons for this decline are examined and an explanation is preferred in terms of the interaction between institutional supports and the ability and need felt by employers to sustain the system. Where apprentice training survives in these English-speaking countries, there is much to commend its continued existence. However, to survive in the future or to be revived, it needs significant institutional and government support and incentives or compulsions for employers.