The dialogic aspects of Mantle of the Expert pedagogy used to teach devising at NCEA Level 2 in a Year 12 classroom "I don't think it's about credits- definitely not about credits"

This inquiry sets out to gather and consider student and teacher perceptions about the affordances and constraints of using Mantle of the Expert pedagogy, to support teaching and learning, through the process of devising drama at NCEA Level in a Year 12 classroom. Questions about the role of the teacher in a senior secondary drama classroom, and the epistemological frames used in the exploration of creative drama making formed the basis of the inquiry. The notion of a “learning community” (Ministry of Education, 2007, p.34) in which everyone “including the teacher, is a learner” is identified and the idea of “shared learning” is explored in contrast to traditional transmission models of teaching. The case study was conducted in a North Island secondary school where teachers and students were positioned together as members of THEATRON, a fictional professional theatre company. THEATRON, commissioned by an artistic director of a national arts festival, were to develop original, devised drama for festival audiences which captured the essence of “What it means to be human”. This qualitative study generated data from interviews with the class teacher and the students, observations of the lessons throughout the devising process and student documentation developed in both electronic and hard copy formats. Findings from the study, considered in the light of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, indicated that the dialogic aspects of the core elements of the Mantle of the Expert pedagogy could provide rich opportunities for purposeful creative collaboration, through student autonomy, to develop more effectively in the performance groups

Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development’, paper presented at the 4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ECEI), Antwerp, Belgium, 10-12 September, 2009.Increasingly the issues of entrepreneurship and new venture creation have become two of the most important drivers for future success of the UK economy, especially in the current climate of economic turbulence and uncertainty. The creation of an enterprise culture, one that depends on entrepreneurs, is one of the strategic goals of the UK Government’s action plan for micro- and small-enterprises. The development of these enterprise cultures will naturally create a marketplace ‘churn’, one that stimulates both continuous and radical innovations, and as a consequence of this contribute to the overall UK’s overall productivity and sustained economic performance. Yet research on entrepreneurs, and particularly third-age entrepreneurs, their abilities and motivation to start-up new enterprises within the environmental good and services sector is limited.Our research study utilizes qualitative data collection and analysis. We have engaged with 12 small enterprise entrepreneurs who are currently, or have already started-up a new enterprise in the EGS sector. Our research studies on how opportunities and threats influence third-age enterpreneurs’ values, attitudes and practices suggested that both, sector-wide values and practices, as well as the strength of sector-based systems of innovations, significantly influence the effective prediction of venture creation, development and creative destruction practices. It is these third- age entrepreneurs mindset Business Models (BMs), how they perceive they can generate business value and align their business practices around EGS sector opportunities and threats, that both determines their propensity to create new ventures, and their motivation and success in driving new venture creation and development oportunities. A framework is proposed based on our limited entrepreneurial mindset analysis that links their values, vision and actions with a more substantial evaluation of their overall mindset business model.Peer reviewe

States Buying Smarter: Lessons Learned From Minnesota and Virginia

Profiles successful government procurement practices, including aggregating demand, promoting innovation, streamlining processes, emphasizing price, and strengthening negotiating skills and vendor relationships; challenges; and principles across states

Operational Excellence in Manufacturing, Service and the Oil & Gas: the Sectorial Definitional Constructs and Risk Management Implication

The current global business climate has not been favorable to most firms irrespective of industry affiliation. That condition necessitated companies to adopt operational excellence as a strategy for optimising output with little resources, reducing lead time with the efficient use of assets and employees and avoiding safety and health issues to people and the environment. As a result of the need for operational excellence, many kinds of literature defined the concept based on the context of industry or sector. Industries such as manufacturing, services, oil and gas, mining and so many industries to mention a few, have their unique construct in the definition and therefore causing dilemma on which dimension to hold on to. It is against this backdrop that this paper synthesizes and integrate all the varying dimensions and fuses out similarities, differences and the antecedence of research directions taken on the few mentioned sectors. The paper thus concludes that the unique construct among all the definitions is continuous improvement, cost reduction, quality, time utilization, operational efficiency, staff involvement and output optimisation. However, they varied on risk management, staff health, safety and the concern for the environment, which is unique to oil and gas industry and that can affect the choice of research variables

Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats’, paper presented at the 15th Annual Edineb Conference, Malaga, Spain, 15-18 June, 2008.Enterprises are presented with ever increasing challenges regarding marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity. They face competitive pressures from local and international sources, their competitors are constantly tweaking products and services to jostle ahead of them, and their customers expect responsiveness and innovativeness to their expressed and latent needs. The enterprises’ very success, and survival, depends on their ability to change their business, market and product strategies to fit these challenges. Underlying these business, market and product strategies is the enterprises’ business model. Simply, business models are an organisation’s understanding and interpretation of how they currently, and in the future, achieve their revenue and profit streams. These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders. In SMEs the creation, development and creative deconstruction of business models is most often driven by the founding entrepreneur, or subsequent corporate entrepreneurs brought in to provide professional management of these rapidly growing businesses. Interestingly, more recent research has strongly linked entrepreneurs’ mindset, or mental models (Zahra, Korri et al. 2005), associated with the challenges to the enterprise, with their drivers for innovation and changes in their enterprises’ business models. Certainly research has identified the potential value changes, business and customer, that can often facilitate the construction and deconstruction of business value-based innovations (Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst et al. 2004), and then reflecting these in their overall business processes. This paper discusses the research study, undertaken by the authors, to explore the link between entrepreneurs’ understanding and interpretation of business opportunities and threats, and the potential influence in challenging their mindset business model. The paper begins by discussing the two broad approaches to modelling enterprise strategies and the resulting integrated business models: innovation and process orientations.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy: A Mandate for Reform

Corporate support for big-government liberal advocacy groups is at an all-time high. This continuing trend underscores the debate over the role of charity sparked earlier this year by the Bush Administration. This article deals with the trends in corporate giving in the US

Colleges as agents for construction innovation - a case study

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to highlight the low level of adoption of innovative products in the UK and to illustrate, through a case study, an investigation into the potential for UK further education colleges (FECS) to extend their existing activity and develop a role as independent centres for specialist knowledge of innovative products. Design/methodology/approach - Two surveys were employed to test assumptions which had been previously published by Government departments (Departments of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform [BBERR] and Trade and Industry [Dti]) focused on the level of knowledge and experience of construction SMEs regarding innovative products and processes. Six colleges collaborated and successfully bid for funding to test their ability to deliver a wider role in the construction community. Each appointed a full-time fully funded adviser to research, collect and diffuse information about a specific specialist area. Findings - The results indicate that there is evidence of the need for independent sources of information about innovative products. The colleges have shown their ability to build knowledge and capacity to offer independent advice. The outcome indicates, however, that without an effective business case and the commitment of senior college management teams the sustainability of the role is unlikely