Ladybird Books: a study in social and economic history

The research undertaken for this project relates to the history of the 'Ladybird' imprint together with the company that produced these popular children's books. The period, from 1914 to present day, during which the books were produced, and throughout which the company operated, was one of great technological change in the print industry as well as one of great social change, and the company was shaped by many outside factors. In turn, its books were widely read and, arguably, themselves influenced generations of children. The research covers the books and the company from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Various factors that have influenced the company and its books, such as the British education system, the First and Second World wars, changes in print and communications technology, the British library system and bookselling practices, evolving social and political attitudes, the impact of the media and the company's competitors, have all been taken into account. The ways in which the brand has emerged and evolved is discussed within the context of commercial, social and political factors

Corporate venturing in the media & entertainment industry: contextual factors that influence corporate venture decision making

This research study focuses on Corporate Venturing (CV) within the Media and Entertainment(M&E) industry and investigates factors that influence CV decision-making. CV provides a viable strategy to facilitate innovation and organizational change within companies; however, this area is understudied within the M&E industry. Companies that make up the entertainment industry may not have specific insight into how best to exploit this opportunity. Specifically, this study looks at the influence of firm characteristics, industry characteristics, and other outside factors using the PESTLE strategy model characteristics impacting the parent or venture unit\u27s CV decision-making within the M&E industry. In terms of this research project, the focus is on the CV activity of the firm. Activity is defined as the decision to engage in corporate venturing, as well as the mode of CV to engage in. CV modes include, but are not limited to, corporate venture capital (CVC), venture alliances, and transformation arrangements. Additionally, in terms of M&E, this research focuses on television, film, and streaming with a specific emphasis on innovation and growth strategies. This research is a descriptive study and provides propositions to contribute to the emerging convergent literature on the topic. This research makes a relevant contribution to the fields of CV and strategy and to the entertainment and technology industries

Temporary Clusters and Knowledge Creation: The Case of Tourism@

With respect to the knowledge-based-view and management science, innovations contribute to a company's competitiveness. And for successful innovation process, companies need to share, create and combine their internal knowledge as well as managing their external relationships and opportunities. Consequently, it is widely accepted that clusters - systemic and local configurations - by supporting horizontal and vertical knowledge exchange could be a fundamental mean for innovation. However, the prolific literature on clusters analyse them only as durable and permanent entities. Yet, interestingly, some forms of temporary organizations as trade fairs, conventions and other professional gatherings, are similar to permanent clusters, but in a temporary, repeated and intensified form. Maskell, Bathelt and Malmberg (2004) even call them “temporary cluster” using the concept to define a short-lived hotspot of intense knowledge exchange, network building and idea generation. It gathers heterogeneous participants in the same spot enabling them to bring together their specific knowledge through intensive interactions. Nevertheless, to date, we observed that the literature focusing on temporary clusters is limited. Notwithstanding, it requires growing attention for management science. In fact, the literature existing on temporary clusters, had asserted that these transient events are important for companies to access markets and knowledge pools in different part of the world. Therefore we consider temporary clusters as a significant vector for the building of trans-local business relations in common situations of incomplete knowledge and uncertainty. Besides, temporary clusters help developing global knowledge pipelines to benefit from outside knowledge.In this context, the paper will analyze a specific empirical case of temporary organization related to the tourism industry. Two arguments support this choice. On the one hand, as stated by Maskell et al. (2005), ‘identifying, selecting, approaching and interacting with new partners is a tricky and costly process' and, we think, even more in the tourism industry. Indeed, the tourism industry is structured by dispersed activities in nature, time and space that need to be combined and assembled dynamically. On the other hand, the tourism industry has been one of the most innovative activities related to the development of ICT, almost 50% of the innovations in the e-commerce activity come from e-tourism or m-tourism. Therefore, the analysis of a temporary cluster dedicated to this ‘dispersed' activity is particularly relevant.The paper will thus focus on such an event called Tourism@. This major event gathers the main actors of e-tourism and is dedicated to the usages of ICT in the tourism industry. It appears as a unique international trade fair in Europe dedicated to start up innovative companies, high tech SMEs, academic research, as well as large multinationals. Tourism@' specificity lies in the fact that each year, since 2001, the event includes the organization of a competition rewarding projects for their creativity and commitment in developing and implementing either new technologies or new uses for the tourism industry. The projects involved in this competition (175 since 2001) will be the basic elements of the temporal database we have build, in which the nature of the projects is extensively described (nature of the firm, of the technology, of the team, capabilities implemented, level of innovation...). In order to analyze the evolution of innovative activities in e-tourism, the initial step will be to characterize the projects through three main features: the market they address, nature of the technology and their innovative intensity. The study reveals that, each year, a main technology or a main innovation in terms of uses emerges showing some kind of self organization. Then, two points of the case study will be examined: first, the evolution of the dominant technology over time, and secondly, the diffusion of the emerging technology. Therefrom, the empirical study will aim at analyzing if temporary proximity allows the different actors from tourism industry to set up or mobilize knowledge and social links without requiring durable co-location. Furthermore, it will aim at identifying if, in a dynamic context of annual event, the repeated face to face temporary relations can result in trust and durable cooperation between different organizations. It might be expected that Tourism@ trade fair, in the role of a temporary cluster, enables to develop or implement innovative solutions, supports technology transfers and backs the creation of new markets as well as the fostering of horizontal and vertical relations between stakeholders.The paper is structured as follows. First section will investigate the theory field of temporary clusters and question in what extent a temporary cluster can be considered as a specific temporary organization regarding the interactions it support that lead to knowledge creation. Section two will present the Tourism@ case study; the methodology used and will develop the statistical analysis of the database. Lastly, the third section will be dedicated to the discussion of temporary clusters as a specific form of inter-firm organization that allows intensive exchange of knowledge.Knowledge creation; Temporary cluster; Tourism; Technological innovation

On economic bicameralism

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2004."September 2004."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-104).(cont.) for both economic profitability and democratic justice, is explored after the roots of the idea of economic bicameralism in socio-economic history and existing socio-economic institutions (such as Works Councils) are reviewed. Economic bicameralism is thus an original form of governance of the firm with regards to both its philosophy and its institutions. It is founded on the recognition that two quests take place within the context of the firm, each of which is pursued primarily by one of the firm's two major agents, capital and labor. In the structure of economic bicameralism, two chambers, one representing each group of agents, govern the firm jointly. The Chamber of Capital assembles the investors in capital, who value an instrumental rationality while seeking profit as their foremost objective; and the Chamber of Labor assembles the investors in person, who display a political rationality and are best understood as seeking democratic justice as their primary goal. While investors in capital remain the sole legal shareholders of the bicameral firm, the governance of the firm is managed by these two chambers, which occupy an equal footing and are consequently bound to cooperate in order to allow the firm to function efficiently. The collaboration hence induced between investors in capital and investors in labor enables the firm to effectively respect the aspiration towards democratic justice that infuses the work experience with the objective of economic profitability that motivates first the investors in capital.This study contributes to normative democratic theory by exploring the relevance of the democratic ideal within the context of the capitalist economic system. It reviews the five traditional arguments for economic democracy before advancing a sixth, original argument, which both encompasses and surpasses its predecessors, based on the political meaning of the work experience. This provides for an understanding of the "political rationality" that animates workers, who, in investing their own person in the firm, experience work as an expressive, political experience that places them in a public space where their conceptions of the just are challenged in complying with the rules of the workplace. In the traditional capitalist shareholder firm, where workers are not entitled to take part in setting those rules, this political rationality also involves a normative content: an aspiration towards democratic justice within the context of the firm, embodied in the idea that every investor-in person as well as in capital- should have a say in the decisions that concern the organization. Consequently, after reviewing the limits of the traditional models of the shareholder firm and the stakeholder firm, this study introduces a theory of the firm capable of reflecting the two rationalities that animate the firm: on the one hand, the traditional rationality of the capitalist firm which is instrumental, displayed by the shareholders (the investors in capital), which is tied to the quest for economic profitability, and on the other hand the political rationality, displayed by the workers (the investors in person), informed by a quest for democratic justice. The scheme of the bicameral firm, whose institutions are conceived in order to jointly address the questsby Isabelle Ferreras.S.M

Generative AI in the Construction Industry: A State-of-the-art Analysis

The construction industry is a vital sector of the global economy, but it faces many productivity challenges in various processes, such as design, planning, procurement, inspection, and maintenance. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can create novel and realistic data or content, such as text, image, video, or code, based on some input or prior knowledge, offers innovative and disruptive solutions to address these challenges. However, there is a gap in the literature on the current state, opportunities, and challenges of generative AI in the construction industry. This study aims to fill this gap by providing a state-of-the-art analysis of generative AI in construction, with three objectives: (1) to review and categorize the existing and emerging generative AI opportunities and challenges in the construction industry; (2) to propose a framework for construction firms to build customized generative AI solutions using their own data, comprising steps such as data collection, dataset curation, training custom large language model (LLM), model evaluation, and deployment; and (3) to demonstrate the framework via a case study of developing a generative model for querying contract documents. The results show that retrieval augmented generation (RAG) improves the baseline LLM by 5.2, 9.4, and 4.8% in terms of quality, relevance, and reproducibility. This study provides academics and construction professionals with a comprehensive analysis and practical framework to guide the adoption of generative AI techniques to enhance productivity, quality, safety, and sustainability across the construction industry.Comment: 74 pages, 11 figures, 20 table

Communications technologies in collaborative design

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-78).by Dennis R. Shelden.M.S

A study of the management of promotion for competitive advantage in UK construction firms

This empirical research study focuses on the application of promotional management in UK construction firms. Relevant theories are reviewed and a model is developed. Promotion is seen within the context of the strategic and marketing management of the firm. The study provides an insight into the management organisation, processes and relative importance of promotional techniques for competitive differentiation through research involving construction firms and their promotional design and public relations consultants and advertising agents. The research examines the effectiveness of promotion, through surveys of client organisations and professional architectural, quantity surveying and other advisors. The combination of theoretical prediction and empirical research indicates an emphasis by construction firms on personal contacts and sales presentation across the design and management services offered, supported by other non-personal promotional techniques. Clients and their professional advisors rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from previous clients and to a much lesser extent on the promotion of construction firms. Problems of promotion identified in the research concern promotional material used as direct mail or in pre-selection presentations. These can be specified in terms of a lack of tailoring, targeting of efforts, and competitive differentiation through communication of specific benefits or the problem solving skills of the management team. Firms recognise the importance of good personal relationships with clients. However promotion is not given a sufficient priority in a highly competitive and dynamic environment

Mapping the process of product innovation: Contextualising the 'black box' of computer and video games design

The academic literature hitherto has mainly addressed the 'effects' of video games and not their creation. The thesis seeks to gain an understanding of the motivations behind the design choices in creating home computer and video games software in light of this 'gap'. The research sought to understand the process of constructing games by examining: (i) the individual designer's aims and how these were mediated by the contexts of. - (ii) the development team and organisation; (iii) the needs of the audience and their presence in the innovation process and (iv) the impact of the hardware manufacturer's quality assessment upon the game's design. These aims were met by outlining the industry structure operating in the video games' market from the period between the early 1980s to mid-1990s. This was performed with reference to the rise of Sega and Nintendo's hardware and software strategy, covering their diffusion from Japan to the US and UK. This highlighted the context surrounding the creation of three computer games from initial concept to actual commodity that served as the subject of case study analysis. The discussion seeks to explore the implications of the choices made in designing the games and widens the debate to the creation of other games. It is argued that the design of games mirrors aspects similar to the creation of other entertainment media but possess certain problems associated with aesthetic conventions, labour, industry and technical issues unique to this medium. Consequently the thesis outlines certain dimensions that impinge'upon the process of product innovation in entertainment software. From a theoretical perspective the application of a social constructivist approach to the emergence of a leisure technology is a novel one and demonstrates the contingent nature of game design