5,724 research outputs found

    Organizing sustainable development

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    The role and meaning of sustainable development have been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. However, there has recently been a dynamic increase in interest in the subject, which results in numerous, in-depth scientific research and publications with an interdisciplinary dimension. This edited volume is a compendium of theoretical knowledge on sustainable development. The context analysed in the publication includes a multi-level and multi-aspect analysis starting from the historical and legal conditions, through elements of the macro level and the micro level, inside the organization. Organizing Sustainable Development offers a systematic and comprehensive theoretical analysis of sustainable development supplemented with practical examples, which will allow obtaining comprehensive knowledge about the meaning and its multi-context application in practice. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, management studies, organizational studies and corporate social responsibility

    Antecedents, Moderators, Mediators and Outcome of Open Innovation: A Study Among Manufacturing Firms in the UK

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    This thesis integrates the resource-based theory, the capability-based view, and the contingency approach to examine the key antecedents, moderators, mediators, and outcomes of open innovation. Based on a rigorous systematic literature review, using a comprehensive set of survey data from 206 UK manufacturing firms, this thesis integrates three interrelated papers on open innovation. The first paper examines the current state of knowledge in open innovation literature. Nine hundred and forty-four (944) articles from leading journals on open innovation were reviewed and synthesised. Overall, the findings identify common themes in the literature and highlight research gaps that, if pursued, could enrich the literature. The second paper examines the influence of technological capability and marketing capability on inbound and outbound open innovation, and the moderating effect of government support. The study shows that technological capability enhances inbound and outbound open innovation, while marketing capability hinders inbound and outbound open innovation. In addition, the study shows that the interaction of government support and technological capability is significant and positive for inbound open innovation, but insignificant for outbound open innovation. Furthermore, the interaction of government support and marketing capability is significant and negative for both inbound and outbound open innovation. The third paper examines the internal mechanisms between inbound and outbound open innovation on firm performance. It was found that both inbound and outbound open innovation were not significantly related to firm performance. In addition, strategic flexibility negatively mediated the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm performance, while innovation performance did not mediate this relationship. Furthermore, strategic flexibility and innovation performance were serial mediators in the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm performance. In addition, organisational relearning positively moderated the relationship between inbound open innovation and firm performance

    Photocatalysis in the Wastewater Treatment

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    The use of photocatalysis for wastewater treatment is an important area of research, which is not yet fully exploited at an industrial level and has significant potential in the disposal of many industrial effluents, particularly the effluents that are difficult to treat by conventional treatment processes. This reprint tries to know the latest advances in the field of wastewater treatment by photocatalysis. In this sense, it is worth mentioning the treatments based on photolysis, TiO2/solar light, oxidants/ultraviolet irradiation, oxidants/catalyst/ultraviolet irradiation, etc. In addition, the reprint describes catalyst manufacturing methods and reaction mechanisms

    Digitalization and Development

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    This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents. The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term. This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies

    Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa

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    Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE). This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy. Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license

    What informs a firm’s Attractiveness as an Alliance Partner? The development of a survey instrument.

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    Strategic alliances are defined as inter-organisational collaborative arrangements whose purpose is to achieve the strategic targets of partners (Das and Teng, 1998). Within the pharmaceutical industry, they represent a key form of disintegration that enables organisations to create a network based on partnerships, whereby the overarching goal is to pursue a set of agreed-upon goals, in which they share the benefits (Chen and Chen, 2002). Despite the high prevalence of strategic alliances within this industry, only 50% are considered stable or achieve performance perceived by the partners as satisfactory (McCutchen et al., 2008) and up to 70% terminate early (Kogut, 1989; Park and Russo, 1996; Park and Ungson, 1997). Nevertheless, 85% of the senior executives still believe alliances are and will continue to be essential or important to their business (Powerlinx, 2014), and as such have invested significantly in becoming attractive alliance partners, or partner of choice. Further, both conceptual and empirical evidence has signaled that a partner’s attractiveness can have significant contribution to the success of the alliance itself (Coombs and Deeds, 2000; Lee, 2007). Despite this evidence, there is no validated approach for a firm to test how attractive they are perceived to be by prospective partners. Without this, a firm is not able to tangibly understand what their perceived strengths and weaknesses are, and how these evolve over time. The purpose of this research is to address this gap. Further, the research aims to understand the impact of firm’s Alliance Strategy on their attractiveness scores. As such, this research makes three overarching and significant contributions; (1) the identification of two key antecedents of a firm’s Attractiveness as an Alliance Partner (2) the development of a self-assessment questionnaire for a firm to use in order to quantify their attractiveness, and (3) the development of research propositions for how an Alliance Strategy moderates the relationship between Attractiveness and its antecedents. This research applies Network Theory, which, in its most simple terms, refers to a firm’s relationships with others that have important and desired resources (Ireland et al., 2002). Networks promote alliance formation and firm success through ‘social capital’, described as the benefits a firm derives from their relationships (Coleman, 1988). Social capital increases in alliances with greater diversity within their networks (Baker, 2000) and with the quality of the alliances themselves (Glaister and Buckley, 1999). As such, this theory plays a key part in explaining the identified antecedents of Attractiveness - Previous Alliance Performance and Alliance Portfolio Diversity. In turn, this research extends Network Theory in two ways. Firstly, by introducing the novel concept of Attractiveness as an Alliance Partner as an indicator of a firm’s success or performance. Secondly, by introducing the novel concept of an Alliance Strategy as an important condition that will moderate a firm’s attractiveness. A mixed method approach has been used, comprising of four Empirical Studies in order to develop and finalise the research propositions and questionnaire. This research has been conducted within and for the pharmaceutical industry specifically but can be applied to other industries

    The determinants of Public Grants and Venture Capital financing: Evidence from Europe

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    This monograph compares the characteristics of firms supported by public and private sources of early-stage financing to investigate funding patterns for innovative companies. We examine whether the two sources of funding target similar firms using a portfolio approach on EU-based firms raising either Venture Capital financing, public grants under the Horizon 2020 ‘SME Instrument’ scheme, or both in the period 2008-2017. Our findings show that venture capitalists fund more innovative and younger firms, whereas public investors finance smaller companies. This pattern is supported by robustness checks and expansions that address multiple dimensions of heterogeneity behaviors in the interaction of private and public funding

    The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: African Imaginaries of Technoscientific Futures

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    Imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) have transcended geographies of the Global North and become increasingly entangled with narratives of economic growth, progress, and modernity in Africa. This raises several issues such as the entanglement of AI with global technoscientific capitalism and its impact on the dissemination of AI in Africa. The lack of African perspectives on the development of AI exacerbates concerns of raciality and inclusion in the scientific research, circulation, and adoption of AI. My argument in this dissertation is that innovation in AI, in both its sociotechnical imaginaries and political economies, excludes marginalized countries, nations and communities in ways that not only bar their participation in the reception of AI, but also as being part and parcel of its creation. Underpinned by decolonial thinking, and perspectives from science and technology studies and African studies, this dissertation looks at how AI is reconfiguring the debate about development and modernization in Africa and the implications for local sociotechnical practices of AI innovation and governance. I examined AI in international development and industry across Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, by tracing Canada’s AI4D Africa program and following AI start-ups at AfriLabs. I used multi-sited case studies and discourse analysis to examine the data collected from interviews, participant observations, and documents. In the empirical chapters, I first examine how local actors understand the notion of decolonizing AI and show that it has become a sociotechnical imaginary. I then investigate the political economy of AI in Africa and argue that despite Western efforts to integrate the African AI ecosystem globally, the AI epistemic communities in the continent continue to be excluded from dominant AI innovation spaces. Finally, I examine the emergence of a Pan-African AI imaginary and argue that AI governance can be understood as a state-building experiment in post-colonial Africa. The main issue at stake is that the lack of African perspectives in AI leads to negative impacts on innovation and limits the fair distribution of the benefits of AI across nations, countries, and communities, while at the same time excludes globally marginalized epistemic communities from the imagination and creation of AI

    Overcoming drug resistance: targeting the BCL-2 family and the long non-coding RNA HCP5 in medulloblastoma and colorectal cancer

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    Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancers in the UK and medulloblastoma is a common cancer found in children. While there has been a progressive improvement in treatment outcomes, success has been marred by drug resistance and severe side effects. Therefore, this project focused on two aspects of chemotherapeutic drug resistance, the first using the antimitotic agent vincristine in combination with inhibitors of the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, while the second investigated the role of the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), HCP5 in the resistance of cells to genotoxic agents. In the first part, three medulloblastoma cell lines (DAOY, MB03, ONS76) were analysed for the expression of Bcl-xL and ONS76 cells found to have the highest level of this anti-apoptotic protein. Subsequent results indicated that Bcl-xL encourages mitotic slippage and stemness and that knockdown of Bcl-xL in the high expressing ONS76 cells, reduces these and sensitizes the cells to the anti-mitotic agent vincristine. Thus, pharmacological inhibition of Bcl-xL should sensitize medulloblastoma cells to low doses of vincristine. Regarding the lncRNA HCP5, results showed that HCP5 was generally more highly expressed in a panel of CRC cell lines than the three medulloblastoma cell lines, corroborating data from an in-silico analysis for the corresponding tumours. One function of HCP5 is to translocate the multifunctional YB-1 protein from the cytoplasm to the nucleus where it carries out many of its functions. Knockdown of HCP5 followed by immunofluorescence indicated a reduction in the amount of YB-1 in the nucleus, confirming this function. Subsequently, HCP5 silencing sensitized all cell lines tested to the DNA damaging agents, cisplatin, oxaliplatin and tert-butyl hydroperoxide and also resulted in an increase in double-strand breaks as determined by H2AX formation. Finally, fluorescence activated cell sorting using Annexin V and propidium iodide confirmed a decrease in cell viability in HCP5 knockdown cells following treatment with genotoxic agents and that this was mirrored by an increased apoptotic fraction. Together, these studies indicate the possibilities of using novel therapeutics to increase the functionality of existing treatments to combat acquired drug resistance in cancer patients
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