Spartan Daily April 10, 2012

Volume 138, Issue 35https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1034/thumbnail.jp

GLOBAL GIAN: Online and Off line Incubation of Grassroots Innovations and Traditional Knowledge: Towards Tianjin Declaration

The forces of globalisation are known to squeeze space for local initiatives, ventures and sometimes even innovations. The markets are dominated by large players whose scale of economy makes it difficult for new entrants, even with better products and services to survive. At the same time, there are certain sectoral and regional niches and need segments in society which remain unfilled even by the forces of globalisation. The growth thus does not become inclusive. India, China and Brazil among three major countries in the world are facing this challenge to varying degree. There are certain needs of small farmers, artisans, urban vendors, mechanics and other self-employed people or small and tiny firms which are not met by the local R&D and design institutions in public or private sector. When these needs remain unfulfilled for long time, they may give rise to either apathy, adjustment or even dissatisfaction. Sometimes, this dissatisfaction may evolve into social disaffection leading to tensions, feeling of deprivation and exclusion. An international conference was organised at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics (TUFE), Tianjin, China to bring together the partners from China and Brazil besides representatives of 15 other countries. Tianjin declaration was issued at the end of the conference to invite stakeholders from all around the world to join this movement (see annexure 1). It is hoped that academics, industry associations, entrepreneurs, designers and technologists will join hands to strengthen the resolve of grassroots innovators to reach global markets. We have to ensure that disadvantaged people around the world are not deprived of opportunities of learning from creative people in different countries. The barriers of language, literacy and localism will have to be overcome.

Social Talent Scouting: A New Opportunity for the Identification of Football Players?

AbstractThis paper investigates the diffusion of digital technologies within the football talent scouting process. A qualitative exploration based on open discussions and unstructured interviews with professionals involved in the football system (coaches, scouts, players' agents, etc.) provides insights about how new technologies are used for recruiting athletes. The findings, which are mainly in the context of Italian football, indicate a cultural and generational gap in the use of new digital tools that creates a mismatch between young promising athletes (demand side) and "senior" team professionals (supply side)

Strategic Foresight in multinational enterprises – a case study on the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

Strategic Foresight activities enable companies to use weak signals to identify opportunities and threats. Research on Strategic Foresight proposes different methods, discusses their implementation and gives recommendations on how to link Strategic Foresight with other functions in an organization. Based on a literature review, we define a generic framework for the management of Strategic Foresight activities on the strategic, tactical and operational level and identify and discuss actors, methods and systems of Strategic Foresight. Building on an in-depth case study of the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories we shed light on the implementation of Strategic Foresight activities. In the discussion we focus on the interaction of methods from Consumer Foresight and Technology Intelligence. Taking an example project, we explore how Strategic Foresight is used on the operational level of innovation management. We conclude that Strategic Foresight can successfully contribute to coping with uncertainty and complexity and can feed the front-end of innovation from the market (customer needs) and technology (realization opportunities) perspective.strategic foresight; consumer foresight; technology foresight; technology intelligence; market foresight; trend analysis; future studies; future analysis; telecommunication industry

Using association rule mining to enrich semantic concepts for video retrieval

In order to achieve true content-based information retrieval on video we should analyse and index video with high-level semantic concepts in addition to using user-generated tags and structured metadata like title, date, etc. However the range of such high-level semantic concepts, detected either manually or automatically, usually limited compared to the richness of information content in video and the potential vocabulary of available concepts for indexing. Even though there is work to improve the performance of individual concept classifiers, we should strive to make the best use of whatever partial sets of semantic concept occurrences are available to us. We describe in this paper our method for using association rule mining to automatically enrich the representation of video content through a set of semantic concepts based on concept co-occurrence patterns. We describe our experiments on the TRECVid 2005 video corpus annotated with the 449 concepts of the LSCOM ontology. The evaluation of our results shows the usefulness of our approach

The OER FLOW and social media

This presentation introduces some strategies for producing, sharing and reusing OER through the OER Flow and social media. The aim of this investigation is to identify how colearners can apply the OER Flow and social media to make the production and adaptation processes of OER more explicit for anyone in the community to contribute. This work analyses, therefore, the interactions of “COLEARN” – an open community of research in collaborative learning technologies – who created and remixed diverse open media components for producing an open book about OER using the OER flow and Social Media. The outcomes show that educators and colearners can move from a passive position to a more active and informed network role when they are able to co-authoring OER

Simulation in Sport Finance

Simulations have long been used in business schools to give students experience making real-world decisions in a relatively low-risk environment. The OAKLAND A’S BASEBALL BUSINESS SIMULATOR takes a traditional business simulation and applies it to the sport industry where sales of tangible products are replaced by sales of an experience provided to fans. The simulator asks students to make decisions about prices for concessions, parking, and merchandise, player payroll expenses, funding for a new stadium, and more. Based on these inputs, the program provides detailed information about the state of the franchise after each simulated year, including attendance, winning percentage, revenues vs. expenses, revenue sharing, and stadium financing. The use of simulations such as this one enhances students’ organizational skills and students’ ability to think critically and imaginatively about the data while applying relevant knowledge and an appropriate strategy to achieve the best possible results. This is particularly important in the field of sport management where few, if any, other simulators exist that are specific to the field.baseball business; computer-based learning; simulation/gaming; stadium/facility financing; sport finance; sport management

Establishing National Innovation Foundation: How Does a Tail Wag the Dog?

A simple search on the web about unaided technological innovations by common people from the unorganized sector will reveal the paucity of information worldwide. It is this gap, which Honey Bee Network started at IIMA about two decades ago tried to fill. In this paper, a very brief history of the steps taken to establish National Innovation Foundation (NIF) has been given. A detailed history remains to be written. Now that NIF will become an autonomous Institute of Department of Science and Technology, its role within India and outside needs to be redefined. How a small academic initiative has spawned multiple institutional innovations is a subject that deserves further study.