The OCareCloudS project: toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers

Studying learning and innovation networks – a conceptual and methodological framework

This paper outlines the main concepts and methodology that the SOLINSA project uses in its study of learning and innovation networks. This project aims to identify barriers to the development of Learning and Innovation Networks for sustainable agriculture (LINSA). In such networks, social learning processes take place, and knowledge about sustainable agriculture is co-produced by connecting between the different frames and social worlds of the stakeholders with the help of boundary objects. Studying such processes at the interface between different knowledge spheres of research, policy and practice requires a specific methodology. A transdisciplinary reflective learning methodology addresses the complex question of understanding learning and innovation. The paper highlights the challenges of this approach that involves stakeholders already in the phase of defining the research objectives and strategies. Results from a first round of application of the conceptual and methodological framework will be presented and discussed

Cultivating Collaborative Improvement: An Action Learning Approach

As competitive pressure mounts to innovate in the global knowledge economy, many organizations are exploring new ways of collaborating with their supply chain partners. However, the process of implementing collaborative initiatives across disparate members of supply networks is fraught with difficulties. One approach designed to tackle the difficulties of organizational change and inter-organizational improvement in practice is `action learning¿. This paper examines the experiential lessons that arise when cultivating collaborative improvement in an interorganizational learning environment. The authors, acting as action researchers, facilitated a practical learning program in an Extended Manufacturing Enterprise involving a large system integrator in the automotive industry and three of its\ud suppliers. Based on this experience, a practical learning model is offered to promote and facilitate inter-organizational change as part of a collaborative improvement process

Care: an integrated framework to support continuous, adaptable, reflective evaluation of eGovernment systems: A research note

CARE: an Integrated Framework to Support Continuous, Adaptable, Reflective Evaluation of Egovernment SystemsThis is an eGISE network paper. It is motivated by a concern to develop a better approach to learning from the experience of an eGovernment project and applying that knowledge in future projects. The proposed project is based on previous work in the construction industry that developed COLA, a Cross Organisational Learning Approach. Developing a similar strategy for Knowledge Management is likely to be effective because the ‘silo’ culture of local government organisations has parallels with the segmented organisational structures within the construction industry.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UK (grant GR/T27020/01

CARE: An integrated framework to support continuous, adaptable, reflective evaluation of egovernment systems: A research note

CARE: an Integrated Framework to Support Continuous, Adaptable, Reflective Evaluation of Egovernment SystemsThis is an eGISE network paper. It is motivated by a concern to develop a better approach to learning from the experience of an eGovernment project and applying that knowledge in future projects. The proposed project is based on previous work in the construction industry that developed COLA, a Cross Organisational Learning Approach. Developing a similar strategy for Knowledge Management is likely to be effective because the ‘silo’ culture of local government organisations has parallels with the segmented organisational structures within the construction industry.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK (grant GR/T27020/01

The role of socio-technical experiments in introducing sustainable Product-Service System innovations

This is the pre-print version of the chapter published in 2015 by Springer in the book “The Handbook of Service Innovation” (edited by Renu Agarwal, Willem Selen, Göran Roos and Roy Green). The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_18Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion are hindered by several cultural, corporate, and regulative barriers. Hence, an important challenge is not only to conceive sustainable PSS concepts, but also to understand how to manage, support, and orient the introduction and diffusion of these concepts. Building upon insights from transition studies (in particular, the concepts of Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management), and through an action research project, the chapter investigates the role of design in introducing sustainable radical service innovations. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments, partially protected spaces where innovations can be incubated and tested, become more mature, and potentially favor the implementation and scaling up process