Innovation in Services - Theoretical Approach

The aim of this article is to present the evolution of theoretical studies on service innovation. The author also attempts to put these different approaches to service innovation into order and to indicate the possible forms of service innovation that emerge from these researches. In further part of the article the issue of the availability of statistical data and its relevance to the possible forms of service innovation, as well as some changes that has been implemented recently in order to improve this relevance, are discussed.Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie ewolucji teoretycznych badań nad innowacjami w usługach. Autorka podejmuje również próbę uporządkowania różnych podejść do kwestii innowacji usługowych oraz wskazać możliwe formy tych innowacji, wyłaniające się z analizowanych badań. W dalszej części artykułu, podejmowana jest kwestia dostępności danych statystycznych oraz ich adekwatności, jeśli chodzi o możliwość zastosowania do analizy różnych form innowacji usługowych. Omawiane są również wprowadzone ostatnio zmiany, mające na celu poprawę adekwatności tych danych

Information Technology and Change in Danish Organizations

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between organizational change and information technology (IT) in Danish manufacturing and service companies. The data material is a survey covering 1900 Danish companies. In the paper it is shown that there in a three-year period are major correlations between introductions of IT´s and movements towards more integrative organizations. These moves are evident in companies which in the three-year period both have introduced IT and changed their organizations. However in organizations which have introduced IT but reported that they have not changed their organizations, there also seem to be this movement compared to companies which have not done anything. Accordingly moves towards integrative organizations seem to a high degree to go hand in hand with introductions of IT. Three conclusions are deduced from these results. First, that Danish companies apparently have learned the lesson from the mideighties, to think in terms of organization instead of technology when implementing IT. Second, that the word IT apparently comprises powerful technical systems that, when faced, pushes companies towards organizational change. Third I consider if the organizational changes reflect a new learning paradigm or another paradigm labelled reliability.Information technology, organizational change, integration

Prospects for summative evaluation of CAL in higher education

Many developers and evaluators feel an external demand on them for summative evaluation of courseware. Problems soon emerge. One is that the CAL may not be used at all by students if it is not made compulsory. If one measures learning gains, how does one know that one is measuring the effect of the CAL or of the motivation in that situation? Such issues are the symptoms of the basic theoretical problem with summative evaluation, which is that CAL does not cause learning like turning on a tap, any more than a book does. Instead, it is one rather small factor in a complex situation. It is of course possible to do highly controlled experiments: for example to motivate the subjects in a standardized way. This should lead to measurements that are repeatable by other similar experiments. However they will be measurements that have little power to predict the outcome when the CAL is used in real courses. Hence the simple view of summative evaluation must be abandoned. Yet it is possible to gather useful information by studying how a piece of CAL is used in a real course and what the outcomes were. Although this does not guarantee the same outcomes for another purchaser, it is obviously useful to know that the CAL has been used successfully one or more times, and how it was used on those occasions. Such studies can also serve a different ‘integrative’ rather than summative function by pointing out failings of the CAL software and suggesting how to remedy them

Biopiracy <i>versus </i>one-world medicine – from colonial relicts to global collaborative concepts

Background: Practices of biopiracy to use genetic resources and indigenous knowledge by Western companies without benefit-sharing of those, who generated the traditional knowledge, can be understood as form of neocolonialism.Hypothesis: : The One-World Medicine concept attempts to merge the best of traditional medicine from developing countries and conventional Western medicine for the sake of patients around the globe.Study design: Based on literature searches in several databases, a concept paper has been written. Legislative initiatives of the United Nations culminated in the Nagoya protocol aim to protect traditional knowledge and regulate benefit-sharing with indigenous communities. The European community adopted the Nagoya protocol, and the corresponding regulations will be implemented into national legislation among the member states. Despite pleasing progress, infrastructural problems of the health care systems in developing countries still remain. Current approaches to secure primary health care offer only fragmentary solutions at best. Conventional medicine from industrialized countries cannot be afforded by the impoverished population in the Third World. Confronted with exploding costs, even health systems in Western countries are endangered to burst. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular among the general public in industrialized countries, although the efficacy is not sufficiently proven according to the standards of evidence-based medicine. CAM is often available without prescription as over-the-counter products with non-calculated risks concerning erroneous self-medication and safety/toxicity issues. The concept of integrative medicine attempts to combine holistic CAM approaches with evidence-based principles of conventional medicine.Conclusion: To realize the concept of One-World Medicine, a number of standards have to be set to assure safety, efficacy and applicability of traditional medicine, e.g. sustainable production and quality control of herbal products, performance of placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials, phytovigilance, as well as education of health professionals and patients

Cloning, reassembling and integration of the entire nikkomycin biosynthetic gene cluster into Streptomyces ansochromogenes lead to an improved nikkomycin production

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nikkomycins are a group of peptidyl nucleoside antibiotics produced by <it>Streptomyces ansochromogenes</it>. They are competitive inhibitors of chitin synthase and show potent fungicidal, insecticidal, and acaricidal activities. Nikkomycin X and Z are the main components produced by <it>S. ansochromogenes</it>. Generation of a high-producing strain is crucial to scale up nikkomycins production for further clinical trials.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To increase the yields of nikkomycins, an additional copy of nikkomycin biosynthetic gene cluster (35 kb) was introduced into nikkomycin producing strain, <it>S. ansochromogenes </it>7100. The gene cluster was first reassembled into an integrative plasmid by Red/ET technology combining with classic cloning methods and then the resulting plasmid(pNIK)was introduced into <it>S. ansochromogenes </it>by conjugal transfer. Introduction of pNIK led to enhanced production of nikkomycins (880 mg L^-1, 4 -fold nikkomycin X and 210 mg L^-1, 1.8-fold nikkomycin Z) in the resulting exconjugants comparing with the parent strain (220 mg L^-1nikkomycin X and 120 mg L^-1nikkomycin Z). The exconjugants are genetically stable in the absence of antibiotic resistance selection pressure.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A high nikkomycins producing strain (1100 mg L^-1nikkomycins) was obtained by introduction of an extra nikkomycin biosynthetic gene cluster into the genome of <it>S. ansochromogenes</it>. The strategies presented here could be applicable to other bacteria to improve the yields of secondary metabolites.</p

Networking Innovation in the European Car Industry : Does the Open Innovation Model Fit?

The automobile industry is has entered an innovation race. Uncertain technological trends, long development cycles, highly capital intensive product development, saturated markets, and environmental and safety regulations have subjected the sector to major transformations. The technological and organizational innovations related to these transformations necessitate research that can enhance our understanding of the characteristics of the new systems and extrapolate the implications for companies as well as for the wider economy. Is the industry ready to change and accelerate the pace of its innovation and adaptability? Have the traditional supply chains transformed into supply networks and regional automobile ecosystems? The study investigates the applicability of the Open Innovation concept to a mature capital-intensive asset-based industry, which is preparing for a radical technological discontinuity - the European automobile industry - through interviewing purposely selected knowledgeable respondents across seven European countries. The findings contribute to the understanding of the OI concept by identifying key obstacles to the wider adoption of the OI model, and signalling the importance of intermediaries and large incumbents for driving network development and OI practices as well as the need of new competencies to be developed by all players.Peer reviewe

Making meat collectivities : entanglements of geneticisation, integration and contestation in livestock breeding

To explore some of the contours of this meat ‘supply chain integration’ - ‘the phrase of the moment’ according to Farmers Weekly - this chapter draws on research conducted as part of a project exploring the effects of the emergence of particular types of genetic knowledge-practice in beef cattle and sheep breeding in the UK and their entanglement with ‘traditional’ ways of knowing and valuing livestock. The research is interested in the production and circulation of genetic knowledge-practices in agriculture, in examining how such knowledge-practices become established and gain legitimacy, how they become tangled up with visual and other traditional knowledge-practices, and in the effects of genetic knowledge-practices on how cattle and sheep are bred and managed and on human-nonhuman animal relationships in livestock farming. The research has increasingly led us to explore the process of ‘geneticisation’ beyond the farm gate, to look at how the establishment of particular genetic truths or ways of rendering ‘life itself’ (Franklin, 2000) are entangled with processes of restructuring and differentiation within UK food systems

The architectures of media power: editing, the newsroom, and urban public space

This paper considers the relation of the newsroom and the city as a lens into the more general relation of production spaces and mediated publics. Leading theoretically from Lee and LiPuma’s (2002) notion of ‘cultures of circulation’, and drawing on an ethnography of the Toronto Star, the paper focuses on how media forms circulate and are enacted through particular practices and material settings. With its attention to the urban milieus and orientations of media organizations, this paper exhibits both affinities with but also differences to current interests in the urban architectures of media, which describe and theorize how media get ‘built into’ the urban experience more generally. In looking at editing practices situated in the newsroom, an emphasis is placed on the phenomenological appearance of media forms both as objects for material assembly as well as more abstracted subjects of reflexivity, anticipation and purposiveness. Although this is explored with detailed attention to the settings of the newsroom and the city, the paper seeks to also provide insight into the more general question of how publicness is material shaped and sited