Organisational Learning And Multinational Strategy

Increasingly, it has been recognised that in their process of internationalisation multinationals may learn. They may take a strategy not only of exploitation, to leverage existing assets, competencies and products, built up in their home countries, but also, and perhaps even primarily, of exploration, to profit from diversity of host countries to develop new products and competencies. The question is how they can manage and integrate resulting diversity. This article analyses that issue, using a theory of organisational learning. It employs a ‘cycle of discovery’ that seeks to resolve the problem of combining exploitation and exploration. That problem arises more widely, apart from internationalisation, and solutions to it may yield solutions for problems of internationalisation.globalization;innovation;organizational learning;international business;multinational corporations

Natural language processing for aviation safety: Extracting knowledge from publicly-available loss of separation reports

Background: The air traffic management (ATM) system has historically coped with a global increase in traffic demand ultimately leading to increased operational complexity. When dealing with the impact of this increasing complexity on system safety it is crucial to automatically analyse the losses of separation (LoSs) using tools able to extract meaningful and actionable information from safety reports. Current research in this field mainly exploits natural language processing (NLP) to categorise the reports,with the limitations that the considered categories need to be manually annotated by experts and that general taxonomies are seldom exploited. Methods: To address the current gaps,authors propose to perform exploratory data analysis on safety reports combining state-of-the-art techniques like topic modelling and clustering and then to develop an algorithm able to extract the Toolkit for ATM Occurrence Investigation (TOKAI) taxonomy factors from the free-text safety reports based on syntactic analysis. TOKAI is a tool for investigation developed by EUROCONTROL and its taxonomy is intended to become a standard and harmonised approach to future investigations. Results: Leveraging on the LoS events reported in the public databases of the Comisión de Estudio y Análisis de Notificaciones de Incidentes de Tránsito Aéreo and the United Kingdom Airprox Board,authors show how their proposal is able to automatically extract meaningful and actionable information from safety reports,other than to classify their content according to the TOKAI taxonomy. The quality of the approach is also indirectly validated by checking the connection between the identified factors and the main contributor of the incidents. Conclusions: Authors' results are a promising first step toward the full automation of a general analysis of LoS reports supported by results on real-world data coming from two different sources. In the future,authors' proposal could be extended to other taxonomies or tailored to identify factors to be included in the safety taxonomies

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

International migration and national development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewpoints and policy initiatives in the countries of origin

Zoomers A, van Naerssen T. International migration and national development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewpoints and policy initiatives in the countries of origin. COMCAD Arbeitspapiere - working papers, 32. Bielefeld: COMCAD - Center on Migration, Citizenship and Development; 2007

Continuous Rationale Management

Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) is a software life cycle model open to frequent changes in requirements or technology. During CSE, software developers continuously make decisions on the requirements and design of the software or the development process. They establish essential decision knowledge, which they need to document and share so that it supports the evolution and changes of the software. The management of decision knowledge is called rationale management. Rationale management provides an opportunity to support the change process during CSE. However, rationale management is not well integrated into CSE. The overall goal of this dissertation is to provide workflows and tool support for continuous rationale management. The dissertation contributes an interview study with practitioners from the industry, which investigates rationale management problems, current practices, and features to support continuous rationale management beneficial for practitioners. Problems of rationale management in practice are threefold: First, documenting decision knowledge is intrusive in the development process and an additional effort. Second, the high amount of distributed decision knowledge documentation is difficult to access and use. Third, the documented knowledge can be of low quality, e.g., outdated, which impedes its use. The dissertation contributes a systematic mapping study on recommendation and classification approaches to treat the rationale management problems. The major contribution of this dissertation is a validated approach for continuous rationale management consisting of the ConRat life cycle model extension and the comprehensive ConDec tool support. To reduce intrusiveness and additional effort, ConRat integrates rationale management activities into existing workflows, such as requirements elicitation, development, and meetings. ConDec integrates into standard development tools instead of providing a separate tool. ConDec enables lightweight capturing and use of decision knowledge from various artifacts and reduces the developers' effort through automatic text classification, recommendation, and nudging mechanisms for rationale management. To enable access and use of distributed decision knowledge documentation, ConRat defines a knowledge model of decision knowledge and other artifacts. ConDec instantiates the model as a knowledge graph and offers interactive knowledge views with useful tailoring, e.g., transitive linking. To operationalize high quality, ConRat introduces the rationale backlog, the definition of done for knowledge documentation, and metrics for intra-rationale completeness and decision coverage of requirements and code. ConDec implements these agile concepts for rationale management and a knowledge dashboard. ConDec also supports consistent changes through change impact analysis. The dissertation shows the feasibility, effectiveness, and user acceptance of ConRat and ConDec in six case study projects in an industrial setting. Besides, it comprehensively analyses the rationale documentation created in the projects. The validation indicates that ConRat and ConDec benefit CSE projects. Based on the dissertation, continuous rationale management should become a standard part of CSE, like automated testing or continuous integration