Transforum system innovation towards sustainable food. A review

Innovations in the agri-food sector are needed to create a sustainable food supply. Sustainable food supply requires unexpectedly that densely populated regions remain food producers. A Dutch innovation program has aimed at showing the way forward through creating a number of practice and scientific projects. Generic lessons from the scientific projects in this program are likely to be of interest to agricultural innovation in other densely populated regions in the world. Based on the executed scientific projects, generic lessons across the whole innovation program are derived. We found that the agricultural sector requires evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to reshaping institutions. Measuring sustainability is possible against benchmarks and requires stakeholder agreement on sustainability values. Results show the importance of multiple social views and multiple stakeholder involvement in agricultural innovation. Findings call for flexible goal rather than process-oriented management of innovation. Findings also emphasise the essential role of profit in anchoring sustainable development in business. The results agree with concepts of evolutionary innovation. We conclude that there is no single best solution to making the agri-food sector more sustainable densely populated areas, but that the combination of a range of solutions and approaches is likely to provide the best way forward

House of Security: Locale, Roles and Resources for Ensuring Information Security Research-in-Progress

In this paper we redefine information security by extending its definition in three salient avenues: locale (beyond the boundary of an enterprise to include partner organizations), role (beyond the information custodians’ view to include information consumers’ and managers’ views), and resource (beyond technical dimensions to include managerial dimensions). Based on our definition, we develop a model of information security, which we call the House of Security. This model has eight constructs, Vulnerability, Accessibility, Confidentiality, IT Resources for Security, Financial Resources for Security, Business Strategy for Security, Security Policy and Procedures, and Security Culture. We have developed a questionnaire to measure the assessment and importance of information security along these eight aspects. The questionnaire covers multiple locales and questionnaire respondents cover multiple roles. Data collection is currently in process. Results from our analysis of the collected data will be ready for presentation at the conference

Integrating E-Commerce and Data Mining: Architecture and Challenges

We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g., clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.Comment: KDD workshop: WebKDD 200

On Diffusion-restricted Social Network: A Measurement Study of WeChat Moments

WeChat is a mobile messaging application that has 549 million active users as of Q1 2015, and "WeChat Moments" (WM) serves its social-networking function that allows users to post/share links of web pages. WM differs from the other social networks as it imposes many restrictions on the information diffusion process to mitigate the information overload. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on information diffusion in the WM network by crawling and analyzing the spreading statistics of more than 160,000 pages that involve approximately 40 million users. Specifically, we identify the relationship of the number of posted pages and the number of views, the diffusion path length, the similarity and distribution of users' locations as well as their connections with the GDP of the users' province. For each individual WM page, we measure its temporal characteristics (e.g., the life time, the popularity within a time period); for each individual user, we evaluate how many of, or how likely, one's friends will view his posted pages. Our results will help the business to decide when and how to release the marketing pages over WM for better publicity.Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2016

Bourdieuian approaches to the geography of entrepreneurial cultures

Culture has emerged as an important concept within the entrepreneurship literature to help explain differences in the nature of the entrepreneurship process observed between regions, industries and socio-cultural groups. Despite voluminous research on the topic, theories about how culture affects the entrepreneurship process remain underdeveloped. Without a framework to connect culture with everyday entrepreneurial practices and strategies, it is difficult to critically compare the role of culture between multiple contexts. Such a framework is necessary when examining the influence of local cultures on entrepreneurship, given the diverse ways they can influence economic activities. This paper introduces a Bourdieuian perspective on entrepreneurial culture that can be used to explain how particular entrepreneurial cultures emerge within regions, influence the local entrepreneurship process and evolve in the face of internal and external developments. Building on existing work on Bourdieu and entrepreneurship, this paper argues that entrepreneurship research must carefully consider how the concept of culture is used if it is to be a useful factor in explaining the heterogeneous geography of entrepreneurship we observe in the modern economy

Human Resources Strategy: The Era of Our Ways

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss some of the main features and trends in human resources (HR) strategy. Inasmuch as people are among the most important resources available to firms, one could argue that HR strategy should be central to any debate about how firms achieve competitive advantage. But this “people are our most important asset” argument is actually fairly hollow in light of the evidence. Far too many articles on HR start with this premise, but the reality is that organizations have historically not rested their fortunes on human resources. The HR function remains among the least influential in most organizations, and competitive strategies have not typically been based on the skills, capabilities, and behaviors of employees. In fact, as Snell, Youndt and Wright (1996:62) noted, in the past executives have typically tried to “take human resources out of the strategy equation--i.e., by substituting capital for labor where possible, and by designing hierarchical organizations that separate those who think from those who actually do the work.