Designing market-oriented beta-glucan enriched functional foods through conjoint analysis: evidence of differing consumer preferences

New product development (NPD) has a significant role to play in the rapidly evolving food supply chain where firms wish to utilise innovative novel ingredients to meet consumers’ increased needs for healthier foods. It is a knowledge intensive process where the generation of new ideas and concepts requires detailed knowledge of both products and consumers. Beta-glucan, a novel soluble fibre, is of major interest to global food firms for its ability to increase the functionality of food and beverage products through increasing the soluble fibre content. The determination of intrinsic and extrinsic product attributes that maximise consumer acceptance of beta-glucan enriched products is largely dependant on a market-oriented NPD process. This study utilised a Conjoint Analysis methodology to examine the tradeoffs consumers would make during the purchasing decision process for healthy beta-glucan enriched breads. Three hundred consumers rated twenty-two hypothetical products on a nine-point Likert scale according to their willingness to purchase. This research identified key attributes which determined consumers’ preferences for these enriched products and identified four viable consumer segments. Managing customer knowledge during the early stages of the NPD process can help firms overcome customer acceptance issues associated with innovative functional ingredients and encourage firms to respond to new market opportunities along the food supply chain.Knowledge Management, Market orientation, Conjoint Analysis, Beta-glucan., Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Assessment of Farmers’ Plant Disease Knowledge in Organic Cacao Cultivation

The Alto Beni region on the eastern foothills of the Andes accounts for 90% of certified organic cacao production in Bolivia and other tropical products for the city of La Paz. In the region more than 2200 households strongly depend on the cultivation of cacao. Cacao is cultivated on small holder farms mostly in diversified agroforestry systems. These systems contribute to both the conservation of biodiversity and the food security of the farmers. An outbreak of the frosty pod disease caused by Moniliophthora roreri in 2011 is now threatening these relatively sustainable production systems. Examples all over Latin America showed the abandonment and elimination of cocoa systems and the loss of biodiversity and local revenues after its attack. Frosty pod rot is an extremely invasive and destructive disease causing yield losses of 30–80% after establishment in a region. An efficient and applicable disease management strategy should address both, ecologic and socioeconomic conditions of the entire agro-ecological system. Scientific knowledge must therefore be complemented with the local farmers’ knowledge in general and especially their local knowledge on disease management. The aim of this qualitative study was to gather farmers’ local disease knowledge to building a fundament for the participatory development of a disease management strategy. Data was collected by combined 24 in depth interviews with on-farm field visits. We found that there is a certain lack of ecosystem knowledge among the ethnically diverse farmers group, which might be due to the recent colonisation of the area. Cacao cultivation knowledge is present on a basic level but is unequally distributed and the level of performance of disease prevention and control practices lags behind their level of awareness. It was also found that the process of knowledge formation is ongoing and co-evolving with the active adaptation of the cultivation system. Most sustainable practices related to an additional labour input are strictly challenged by the lack of skilled labour and the migration out of the region into the bigger cities. These constraints should be considered when designing an efficient disease management strategy

Building a More Resilient University Campus: Lessons Learned from Six Emergency Management Service Learning Projects

Emergency management students must be prepared to enter the evolving and challenging work environment with practical and theoretical knowledge. Yet, linking the two forms of knowledge in a meaningful way remains an educational challenge. One pedagogical approach gaining popularity in the emergency management discipline is service learning. University of Central Florida graduate students in the Managing Emergencies and Crises course are collaborating for the first time with the university’s Office of Emergency Management on six service-learning projects. The six projects are: (1) Develop an evacuation plan for the main campus; (2) Develop an evacuation and housing plan for resident students living on campus; (3) Research various types of technology used in Emergency Operations Centers (EOC) in institutions of higher education; (4) Research the placement of an Office of Emergency Management in an institution of higher education organizational chart; (5) Develop measurable objectives and a pre/post test to measure the impact of public outreach for active shooter awareness educational program; and (6) Research emergency notification systems at institutions of higher education. This presentation will briefly review national trends in using service learning in the emergency management discipline, highlight the final products of this semester’s service-learning projects, and conclude with lessons learned from the student, professor, and client perspectives

Organizational Changes and Management Challenges Induced by New Operational Security Requirements and Trends for Integration of European TSOs

A rapid rate of change characterizes European electricity markets. New government regulations, new products and services, growing renewables, increased competition, technological developments, and an evolving workforce compel Transmission System Operators to undertake changes on a regular basis.  Current operational security requirements and trends for integration of some functions of European TSOs might imply significant organizational changes.   In our current paper, we address the key management challenges induced by organizational changes of European TSOs. We join the debate of scholars and industry professionals of change management with a clear need of revisiting some fundamental questions in relation of TSOs and their operational security.   Based on our research, we can conclude that European TSOs should engage in continuous organizational changes to achieve higher performance and coordination among themselves. A key question of decision-makers is how to identify champions who will become local change agents in their organizations. Change agents must be efficient in handling resistance to change.   In a rapidly changing environment, the knowledge that is most useful to TSOs helps them change and perform effectively. To achieve relevance and generate knowledge that is useful for TSOs there is a need for cooperation between academics and industry professionals to fully understand complex problems and contribute to solutions.   Keywords: Organizational changes, change management, knowledge management, TSO, operational security, European electricity marke

The evolving role of customer focus in quality management: Using customer feedback to mobilize quality improvements in the age of digitalization and increased service delivery

Understanding customer needs is fundamental for being able to deliver high quality products and services, and, as a result, maintain and improve customer satisfaction. Achieving this has become a challenge, as rapid technological developments, market saturation, and increasingly skilled competition from low-cost economies have led to progressively more complex customer needs. In addition, more manufacturing firms are offering services, thus shifting the focus from merely providing a physical product to also providing services. These changes result in an array of challenges for quality management regarding how to manage the integrated duality of product and service quality. Consequently, the need for quality management to understand how customers perceive the quality of the firm’s offering is becoming increasinglyimportant, as merely focusing on technical product quality improvements is insufficient. Compiling five papers, based on four studies across both manufacturing and service industries, this thesis outlines the evolving role of quality management in the age of digitalization and increased service delivery, by exploring the use of customer feedback for quality improvements in both products and services.First, the thesis identifies the prerequisites needed to use customer feedback for quality improvements, identifying the importance of access to the different interfaces through which customer feedback emerges. These interfaces are growing in number and complexity as digitalization and increased service delivery reshape how firms and customers interact and how offerings are delivered. Second, the capacities needed to mobilize customer feedback for quality improvements are explored using the concept of absorptive capacity, which describes the capacity to acquire and use external information. The studied firms are found to have underdeveloped absorptive capacity in terms of mobilizing customer feedback regarding service quality compared to mobilizing customer feedback on product quality. Third, the evolving boundaries and scope of quality management, driven by digitalization and increased service delivery, require quality management to go from reactive and inward-focused to embracing a proactive, continuous, and customer-focused way of working. Furthermore, the abundance of codified customer feedback in the form of big data readily available for firms today, leads to the risk of predominantly focusing on technical quality aspects while neglecting more intangible quality elements. The importance of integrating small data into firm efforts to manage quality is therefore key to ensuring quality improvements encompass the entire customer experience. Conclusively, the evolving role of customer focus in quality management requires the reconceptualization of quality to quality-in-use, and the development of both the capturing and the converting roles of quality management in terms of mobilizing customer feedback for both quality improvements and increased customer knowledge

Understanding Occupational and Skill Demand in New Jersey's Finance Industry

The finance industry in New Jersey employs over 200,000 people. Many more workers benefit from the state's proximity to the finance industry in New York City. Jobs in the industry are evolving rapidly in response to national and global trends, such as deregulation, increasingly complex laws, and new technologies. As jobs change, skill requirements for both entry-level and incumbent workers increase. This report summarizes the skill, knowledge, and educational requirements of key finance occupations and identifies strategies for meeting the workforce challenges facing the industry

Evolution: Complexity, uncertainty and innovation

Complexity science provides a general mathematical basis for evolutionary thinking. It makes us face the inherent, irreducible nature of uncertainty and the limits to knowledge and prediction. Complex, evolutionary systems work on the basis of on-going, continuous internal processes of exploration, experimentation and innovation at their underlying levels. This is acted upon by the level above, leading to a selection process on the lower levels and a probing of the stability of the level above. This could either be an organizational level above, or the potential market place. Models aimed at predicting system behaviour therefore consist of assumptions of constraints on the micro-level – and because of inertia or conformity may be approximately true for some unspecified time. However, systems without strong mechanisms of repression and conformity will evolve, innovate and change, creating new emergent structures, capabilities and characteristics. Systems with no individual freedom at their lower levels will have predictable behaviour in the short term – but will not survive in the long term. Creative, innovative, evolving systems, on the other hand, will more probably survive over longer times, but will not have predictable characteristics or behaviour. These minimal mechanisms are all that are required to explain (though not predict) the co-evolutionary processes occurring in markets, organizations, and indeed in emergent, evolutionary communities of practice. Some examples will be presented briefly

Is project management the new management 2.0?

This paper considers the evolving nature of project management (PM) and offers a comparison with the evolving nature of management generally. Specifically, we identify a number of management trends that are drawn from a paper that documents a proposed ‘Management 2.0’ model, and we compare those trends to the way in which PM is maturing to embrace the challenges of modern organizational progress.Some theoretical frameworks are offered that assist in explaining the shift from the historically accepted ‘tools and techniques’ model to a more nuanced and behaviorally driven paradigm that is arguably more appropriate to manage change in today’s flexible and progressive organizations, and which provide a more coherent response, both in PM and traditional management, to McDonald’s forces. In addition, we offer a number of examples to robustly support our assertions, based around the development of innovative products from Apple Inc. In using this metaphor to demonstrate the evolution of project-based work, we link PM with innovation and new product development.

Light me up: power and expertise in risk communication and policy-making in the e-cigarette health debates

This paper presents a detailed account of policy-making in a contemporary risk communication arena, where strong power dynamics are at play that have hitherto lacked theoretical analysis and empirical validation. Specifically, it expands on the understanding of how public health policy decisions are made when there is a weak evidential base and where multiple interpretations, power dynamics and values are brought to bear on issues of risk and uncertainty. The aim of the paper is to understand the role that power and expertise play in shaping public health risk communication within policy-related debates. By drawing on insight from a range of literatures, the paper argues that there several interacting factors that shape how a particular narrative gains prominence within a wider set of perspectives and how the arguments and findings associated with that perspective become amplified within the context of policy choices. These findings are conceptualised into a new model – a policy evaluation risk communication (PERC) framework – and are then tested using the Electronic cigarette debate as a case study

A Smart Products Lifecycle Management (sPLM) Framework - Modeling for Conceptualization, Interoperability, and Modularity

Autonomy and intelligence have been built into many of today’s mechatronic products, taking advantage of low-cost sensors and advanced data analytics technologies. Design of product intelligence (enabled by analytics capabilities) is no longer a trivial or additional option for the product development. The objective of this research is aimed at addressing the challenges raised by the new data-driven design paradigm for smart products development, in which the product itself and the smartness require to be carefully co-constructed. A smart product can be seen as specific compositions and configurations of its physical components to form the body, its analytics models to implement the intelligence, evolving along its lifecycle stages. Based on this view, the contribution of this research is to expand the “Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)” concept traditionally for physical products to data-based products. As a result, a Smart Products Lifecycle Management (sPLM) framework is conceptualized based on a high-dimensional Smart Product Hypercube (sPH) representation and decomposition. First, the sPLM addresses the interoperability issues by developing a Smart Component data model to uniformly represent and compose physical component models created by engineers and analytics models created by data scientists. Second, the sPLM implements an NPD3 process model that incorporates formal data analytics process into the new product development (NPD) process model, in order to support the transdisciplinary information flows and team interactions between engineers and data scientists. Third, the sPLM addresses the issues related to product definition, modular design, product configuration, and lifecycle management of analytics models, by adapting the theoretical frameworks and methods for traditional product design and development. An sPLM proof-of-concept platform had been implemented for validation of the concepts and methodologies developed throughout the research work. The sPLM platform provides a shared data repository to manage the product-, process-, and configuration-related knowledge for smart products development. It also provides a collaborative environment to facilitate transdisciplinary collaboration between product engineers and data scientists