Workflow Patterns for Business Process Modeling

For its reuse advantages, workflow patterns (e.g., control flow patterns, data patterns, resource patterns) are increasingly attracting the interest of both researchers and vendors. Frequently, business process or workflow models can be assembeled out of a set of recurrent process fragments (or recurrent business functions), each of them having generic semantics that can be described as a pattern. To our best knowledge, so far, there has been no (empirical) work evidencing the existence of such recurrent patterns in real workflow applications. Thus, in this paper we elaborate the frequency with which certain patterns occur in practice. Furthermore, we investigate completeness of workflow patterns (based on recurrent functions) with respect to their ability to capture a large variety of business processes

Occupations, Organizations, and Boundaryless Careers

[Excerpt] The central premise of this chapter is that, as organizations become less important in defining career pathways and boundaries, occupations will become increasingly more important. While occupational demarcations have always had a significant, albeit often unacknowledged, impact on individual career patterns, the significance of such demarcations for careers is likely to be heightened by current trends in employment relationships. In this chapter, then, I review the sociological literature on occupational labor markets and on the structure of professional occupations, in an effort to shed light on a number of issues associated with occupationally based careers. Of specific concern are three questions: What kinds of job and occupational characteristics foster such careers? When occupations become the major locus of careers, what are the consequences for organizations? And finally, what are some of the key career-management issues for individuals pursuing occupation-ally based careers

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Sustainable and traditional product innovation without scale and experience, but only for KIBS!

This study analyzes the ideal strategic trajectory for sustainable and traditional product innovation. Using a sample of 74 Costa Rican high-performance businesses for 2016, we employ fuzzy set analysis (qualitative comparative analysis) to evaluate how the development of sustainable and traditional product innovation strategies is conditioned by the business’ learning capabilities and entrepreneurial orientation in knowledge-intensive (KIBS) and non-knowledge-intensive businesses. The results indicate two ideal strategic configurations of product innovation. The first strategic configuration to reach maximum product innovation requires the presence of KIBS firms that have both an entrepreneurial and learning orientation, while the second configuration is specific to non-KIBS firms with greater firm size and age along with entrepreneurial and learning orientation. KIBS firms are found to leverage the knowledge-based and customer orientations that characterize their business model in order to compensate for the shortage of important organizational characteristics—which we link to liabilities or smallness and newness—required to achieve optimal sustainable and traditional product innovation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Technology and the economy

Overview of economics of innovatio

Looking for synergy in organizations: The role of the concept of configuration in contemporary theory

The aim of this article is to add to organization theory by exploring the theoretical concept of organizational configuration and identifying its added value. Why is it used and what possibilities does it offer for organizational theorists? We will examine the underlying assumptions and try to produce a sound definition of configuration. This article is based on 77 articles and books from which we identified 6 authors as being the main theorists for configuration theory.microeconomics ;

What we talk about when we talk about "global mindset": managerial cognition in multinational corporations

Recent developments in the global economy and in multinational corporations have placed significant emphasis on the cognitive orientations of managers, giving rise to a number of concepts such as “global mindset” that are presumed to be associated with the effective management of multinational corporations (MNCs). This paper reviews the literature on global mindset and clarifies some of the conceptual confusion surrounding the construct. We identify common themes across writers, suggesting that the majority of studies fall into one of three research perspectives: cultural, strategic, and multidimensional. We also identify two constructs from the social sciences that underlie the perspectives found in the literature: cosmopolitanism and cognitive complexity and use these two constructs to develop an integrative theoretical framework of global mindset. We then provide a critical assessment of the field of global mindset and suggest directions for future theoretical and empirical research

Research Agenda for Studying Open Source II: View Through the Lens of Referent Discipline Theories

In a companion paper [Niederman et al., 2006] we presented a multi-level research agenda for studying information systems using open source software. This paper examines open source in terms of MIS and referent discipline theories that are the base needed for rigorous study of the research agenda

Intra and Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer Processes Identifying the Missing Links

Inspired by the resource- and knowledge-based views, much attention has been focused on knowledge transfer as a process of strategic importance. Still, many open questions regarding knowledge transfer processes need to be addressed to complete our understanding. For instance, what are the barriers to knowledge transfer, and what are the facilitators? A review of the literature reveals that it is divided into two streams: articles on intra-firm knowledge flows and articles on inter-firm knowledge flows. Part of the incompleteness of our understanding of knowledge transfer processes, we argue, derives from the fact that it is unclear in which way intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows are different. The paper investigates three questions: first, how knowledge transfer is defined differently in intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows; second: how barriers to knowledge transfer processes differ; and thirdly: what we need to know to be able to formulate a management view of organizational knowledge flows, whether intra- or inter-organizational. The concluding section argues five research questions whose answers may enable research to formulate a management view of knowledge flows.Review; internal knowledge flows; external knowledge flows; definition; barriers to knowledge flows