Employable during mid- and late career: A quantitative study on the drivers, barriers and outcomes of employability and mentoring in the Netherlands

This dissertation examines the drivers, barriers and outcomes of midcareer and senior employees’ employability – defined as employee proactivity, work ability and skills including mentorships – using a meso-level theoretical perspective and relying upon a mixture of panel, semi-experimental and cross-sectional survey data. My scientific inquiry brings some nuances to extant employability research by showing that senior employees’ proactivity is hardly moldable and that work ability (i.e., being able to perform one’s present job properly) rather than proactivity is key to their employment prospects (e.g., avoiding unemployment). My scientific inquiry extends extant mentoring research by showing that midcareer and senior employees can accrue skills (e.g., communication skills) and employment benefits from informal mentorships by being employed in an organization that offers learning opportunities as well as social support and anticipates time pressures and reorganizations

Innovation Ecosystems: A Sustainability Perspective

To be competitive, companies must develop capabilities that allow them to react rapidly to market demands. The innovation methods of the past are not adapted to the turbulence of the modern world. In the last decade, increasing globalization of markets and Industry 4.0 have caused profound changes in the best way to manage the innovation process. This e-book includes a collection of thirteen papers that discuss theoretical approaches, case studies, and surveys focused on issues related to open innovation and its mechanisms

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

Enabling flexibility through strategic management of complex engineering systems

”Flexibility is a highly desired attribute of many systems operating in changing or uncertain conditions. It is a common theme in complex systems to identify where flexibility is generated within a system and how to model the processes needed to maintain and sustain flexibility. The key research question that is addressed is: how do we create a new definition of workforce flexibility within a human-technology-artificial intelligence environment? Workforce flexibility is the management of organizational labor capacities and capabilities in operational environments using a broad and diffuse set of tools and approaches to mitigate system imbalances caused by uncertainties or changes. We establish a baseline reference for managers to use in choosing flexibility methods for specific applications and we determine the scope and effectiveness of these traditional flexibility methods. The unique contributions of this research are: a) a new definition of workforce flexibility for a human-technology work environment versus traditional definitions; b) using a system of systems (SoS) approach to create and sustain that flexibility; and c) applying a coordinating strategy for optimal workforce flexibility within the human- technology framework. This dissertation research fills the gap of how we can model flexibility using SoS engineering to show where flexibility emerges and what strategies a manager can use to manage flexibility within this technology construct”--Abstract, page iii

Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) Applications in Economics and Finance

This book includes the 14 articles accepted and published in the Special Issue “Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM): Applications in Economics and Finance” of the MDPI journal Mathematics, which encompasses a wide range of topics connected with the theory and applications of PLS-SEM methodology. These topics involve, among others, prediction of stock market investment intention, institutional quality and international competitiveness, governance paradigms and public innovation, information and communication technologies in the supply chain, influence of the ability to absorb information from the environment and proactivity on the company's results, quality management, effects of the corporate social responsibility on financial performance, resource management for the improvement of the healthcare system, and the application of maximum entropy bootstrapping to time series. It is expected that the book will prove worthwhile and helpful for those working in the area of PLS-SEM, regardless of the field of application (economics, finance, marketing, education or other). Applications of higher order constructs, mediating variables, multigroup analysis and the latest advances in applied methodology can all be found in this book

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Risk Assessment in Air Traffic Management

One of the most complex challenges for the future of aviation is to ensure a safe integration of the expected air traffic demand. Air traffic is expected to almost double its current value in 20 years, which cannot be managed without the development and implementation of a safe air traffic management (ATM) system. In ATM, risk assessment is a crucial cornerstone to validate the operation of air traffic flows, airport processes, or navigation accuracy. This book tries to be a focal point and motivate further research by encompassing crosswise and widespread knowledge about this critical and exciting issue by bringing to light the different purposes and methods developed for risk assessment in ATM

Assessment of Socio-Economic Sustainability and Resilience after COVID-19

The pandemic period has caused severe socio-economic damage, but it is accompanied by environmental deterioration that can also affect economic opportunities and social equity. In the face of this double risk, future generations are ready to be resilient and make their contribution not only on the consumption side, but also through their inclusion in all companies by bringing green and circular principles with them. Policy makers can also favor this choice

Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics

This book collects fifteen papers published in s Special Issue of Mathematics titled “Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics”, which was published in 2021. These paper cover a wide range of different tools from Fuzzy Set Theory and applications in many areas of Business Management and other connected fields. Specifically, this book contains applications of such instruments as, among others, Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Neuro-Fuzzy Methods, the Forgotten Effects Algorithm, Expertons Theory, Fuzzy Markov Chains, Fuzzy Arithmetic, Decision Making with OWA Operators and Pythagorean Aggregation Operators, Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The papers in this book tackle a wide variety of problems in areas such as strategic management, sustainable decisions by firms and public organisms, tourism management, accounting and auditing, macroeconomic modelling, the evaluation of public organizations and universities, and actuarial modelling. We hope that this book will be useful not only for business managers, public decision-makers, and researchers in the specific fields of business management, finance, and economics but also in the broader areas of soft mathematics in social sciences. Practitioners will find methods and ideas that could be fruitful in current management issues. Scholars will find novel developments that may inspire further applications in the social sciences

Digitally Enhancing Customer Agility and Competitive Activity: How Firms Use Information Technology to Sense and Respond to Market Opportunities in Hypercompetitive Environments

This dissertation studies how information technology (IT) facilitates customer agility and, in turn, competitive activity. Customer agility refers to the extent to which a firm is able to sense and respond quickly to customer-based opportunities for innovation and competitive action. As such, customer agility consists of two key dimensions: sensing and responding. We propose that IT plays a critical role in facilitating a firm\u27s customer agility - in particular, its sensing and responding components. The Internet has spawned a rich set of tools that allow firms to engage in rich, interactive dialogues with a broad and diverse customer base, thereby enhancing firms\u27 ability to sense and respond to shifting customer needs and preferences. Although academics and practitioners suggest that IT is a key enabler of customer agility, we know little concerning how IT facilitates customer agility. Building on the dynamic capability literature, we propose that the \u27knowledge creating\u27 synergy derived from the interaction between a firm\u27s web-based infrastructure and its analytical ability will enhance the firm\u27s ability to sense customer-based opportunities, and the \u27process enhancing\u27 synergy obtained from the interaction between a firm\u27s coordination efforts and its level of IT integration will facilitate the firm\u27s ability to respond to those opportunities. Finally, we propose that the alignment between customer sensing capability and customer responding capability will impact the firm\u27s competitive activity. We test our model with a two-stage longitudinal research design in which we survey marketing executives of high-tech firms. Our results find that web-based (resource and user) infrastructure has a significant effect on customer sensing capability. Moreover, analytical ability positively moderates these relationships. We also find that interfunctional coordination and channel coordination both have a significant impact on customer responding capability. Furthermore, internal information systems (IS) integration positively moderates the interfunctional-response relationship, yet external IS integration does not moderate the channel-response relationship. Our results also show that varying types of alignment between customer sensing capability and customer responding capability are related to different types of competitive activity. Specifically, a higher \u27match\u27 between sensing and responding results in actions which effectively meet or address customer needs. Furthermore, customer responding capability mediates the relationship between customer sensing capability and 1) number of actions executed and 2) the speed at which firms respond to changing customer needs. Finally, we also find that agility alignment is not related to action repertoire complexity. Our results have implications for both research and practice. To our knowledge, it is the first study to conceptualize and test a comprehensive yet parsimonious research model which includes the role of IT, customer agility and competitive activity. In doing so, we contribute to the IT business value literature, dynamic capabilities research, competitive dynamics literature, and organizational innovation research. We also give managers greater insight into how they can effectively leverage IT resources when sensing and responding to their customers in turbulent environments