Google popular times : towards a better understanding of tourist customer patronage behavior

This paper aims to investigate actual tourist customer visiting behavior with behavioral data from Google Popular Times to evaluate the extent that such an online source is useful to better understand, analyze, and predict tourist consumer behaviors. Following six hypotheses on tourist behavior, a purpose-built software tool was developed, pre-tested, and then used to obtain a large-scale data sample of 20,000 time periods for 198 restaurants. Both bi-variate linear regression and correlation analyses were used for hypothesis testing. Support was established for the hypotheses, through an analysis of customer reviews, timing effects, the number of pictures uploaded, and price segment information provided by tourists to a given restaurant. Also, a relationship to average duration time was found to be positive. The findings demonstrate that data provided through Google Popular Times matches theoretical and logical assumptions to a high degree. Thus, the data source is potentially powerful for providing valuable information to stakeholders (e.g., researchers, managers, tourists). This paper is the first to both conceptually and empirically demonstrate the practicality and value of Google Popular Times to better understand, analyze, and predict tourist consumer behaviors. Value is thereby provided by the potential for this approach to offer insights based behavioral data. Importantly, until now such an approach to gathering and analyzing this volume of actual customer data was previously considered far less practical in terms of time and expense

Transferência de tecnologia em cooperações promotoras de inovações voltadas para o desenvolvimento sustentável : análise da cooperação Suécia-Brasil na área de mobilidade urbana em Curitib

Orientadora: Profa. Dra. Andréa Paula SegattoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração. Defesa : Curitiba, 18/12/2018Inclui referências: p.126-140Resumo: A cooperacao interorganizacional no contexto da inovacao e vista com a finalidade de desenvolver capacidades inovativas, fomentar a transferencia de conhecimento, possibilitar o acesso a novos mercados, bem como aproximar atores de diversas esferas institucionais. Alem disso, possibilitam o crescimento economico, visto que as organizacoes nao possuem todos os recursos e capacidades para inovar, mas utilizam-se da interacao com parceiros para buscar conhecimento e tecnologia. O desenvolvimento sustentavel, e visto enquanto questao complexa que vai abranger diversos stakeholders, incentivando cooperacoes interorganizacionais que contribuam para corresponder as necessidades demandadas. Estas cooperacoes possibilitam que parceiros e demais stakeholders se relacionem tanto para criar valor sustentavel, como para adotar e transferir tecnologias especificas direcionadas a inovacoes voltadas para o desenvolvimento sustentavel. Assim, o objetivo deste estudo e analisar os processos de transferencia de tecnologia em cooperacoes voltadas para a geracao de inovacoes tecnologicas direcionadas ao desenvolvimento sustentavel para a mobilidade urbana. Para isso, utilizou-se abordagem qualitativa pautada na estrategia de estudo de caso, a fim de investigar o projeto de cooperacao "Smart City Concepts" (SCC), estabelecido como parte de acordo bilateral entre Brasil e Suecia, e desenvolvido na area de mobilidade urbana em Curitiba, bem como duas outras cooperacoes estabelecidas no decorrer projeto. Os dados foram coletados por meio de documentos, entrevistas semiestruturadas e observacao nao participante, e foram analisados utilizando-se da tecnica de analise de conteudo. O software Atlas.ti foi utilizado para organizar e codificar os dados conforme as categorias de analise determinadas nessa pesquisa. A partir dos resultados foi possivel evidenciar o engajamento dos atores enquanto fator de ligacao em cooperacao que busca gerar inovacoes direcionadas ao desenvolvimento sustentavel. Ao buscar alternativas para problemas ambientais que podem ser agravados no futuro e trazer consequencias para a sociedade como um todo, o engajamento se torna um facilitador, atuando como caracteristica que difere a cooperacao voltada para o desenvolvimento sustentavel, de outros tipos de cooperacao. Alem disso, esse fator possibilita o pensamento conjunto entre os atores na definicao de estrategias de cooperacao, de modo que tambem podera influenciar a transferencia de tecnologia, quando estiver abarcada. Palavras-chave: Cooperacoes interorganizacionais. Transferencia de tecnologia. Inovacoes voltadas para o desenvolvimento sustentavel.Abstract: Inter-organizational cooperation in the context of innovation has the aim of developing innovative capacities, fostering knowledge transfer, enabling access to new markets, and bringing actors from different institutional spheres together. In addition, they enable economic growth, since organizations do not have all the resources and capabilities to innovate, thus using interaction with partners to seek knowledge and technology. Sustainable development is seen as a complex issue that will encompass diverse stakeholders, encouraging interorganizational cooperation that contributes to respond to the needs demanded. These partnerships enable stakeholders and other partners to relate both to creating sustainable value and to adopting a nd transferring specific technologies geared towards innovations towards sustainable development. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the processes of technology transfer in cooperation towards the generation of technological innovations aimed at sustainable development for urban mobility. To do so, a qualitative approach based on the case study strategy was used to investigate the "Smart City Concepts" (SCC) cooperation project, established as part of a bilateral agreement between Brazil and Sweden, developed in the area of mobility in Curitiba, as well as two other cooperations established during the project. Data were collected through documents, semistructured interviews and non-participant observation, and were analyzed using the content analysis technique. The Atlas.ti software was used to organize and encode the data according to the categories of analysis determined in this research. Based on the results, it was possible to observe the actor's engagement as a linking factor in cooperation that seeks to generate innovations towards sustainable development. When seeking alternatives to environmental problems that may be aggravated in the future and bring consequences for the society as a whole, engagement becomes a facilitator, acting as a feature that differs from cooperation for sustainable development and other types of cooperation. In addition, this factor enables joint thinking among actors in the definition of cooperation strategies, so that it may also influence technology transfer, when considered. Key-words: Interorganizational cooperation. Technology transfer. Innovations towards sustainable development

The Impact of Occupants’ Behaviours on Energy Consumption in Multi-Functional Spaces

Over the last 15 years, the estimation of energy consumption in buildings has become a critical process during various stages of building’s lifecycle due to growing global scientific and political pressure to respond to climate change. It has been widely acknowledged in the literature that there is a distinct performance gap between predicted and actual energy consumption of buildings which has attracted scholars across the world to investigate the sufficiency of software inputs and presumptions regarding how the buildings are actually used. Several studies have confirmed that occupant’s presence, in addition to, their interactions with building systems (such as: opening door and window, changing the thermostat set-point and using appliances), known as passive and active energy consumption behaviours, play significant roles in building’s energy consumption. However, the incorporation of occupants’ behaviours into the building energy performance analysis has been mostly overlooked. Most of the existing studies on the impacts of occupants on building energy consumption have focused on residential and office buildings. Therefore, there is a lack of knowledge about the impacts of occupants’ behaviours on energy consumption in public buildings such as: galleries, exhibitions, recreational facilities and institutional buildings. In such building occupants have limited access to building systems, and their energy consumption behaviours are limited to their presence and the production of metabolic heat (passive behaviour), in addition to, few activities such as: opening the entrance door. This research develops a conceptual framework to improve the accuracy of energy consumption assessment in multi-functional spaces at different stages of building’s lifecycle by integrating the impacts of occupants’ behaviours into building energy predictions to reduce the gap between actual and predicted energy consumption. In this quantitative research, a model simulation method is applied on multiple cases at different stages of the building lifecycle including design, construction and post-occupancy. The first two cases are multi-functional spaces of public buildings at the design and construction stages, which were studied to address the missing information and potential gaps in energy modelling and simulation. The study was then taken forward using case studies at the post-occupancy stage to integrate the realistic observed data into the building energy simulation tool. For each of the cases, energy simulation was run twice: first, using default values of the software, and second, using the collected data. The data collection included hourly observation of 38 zones in both cases at the post-occupancy stage for the duration of two weeks, in addition to, using available governmental and real-time statistics. The analysis of energy simulation results using default software values and collected data highlighted that lack of sufficient information regarding building working hours, space layout and function, occupancy density and schedules, the entrance door opening time and HVAC set-points may result significant performance gaps in energy consumption prediction of multi-functional spaces in institutional buildings and galleries. This study provides conceptual frameworks for the prospect energy modellers and researchers to obtain more accurate energy consumption predictions for multi-functional spaces of public buildings