Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems to Optimize Learning

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of learners."Today, we know more than ever about how students learn, acknowledging that the process isn't the same for every student and doesn't remain the same for each individual, depending upon maturation and the content being learned. We know that students want to progress at a pace that allows them to master new concepts and skills, to access a variety of resources, to receive timely feedback on their progress, to demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways and to get direction, support and feedback from—as well as collaborate with—experts, teachers, tutors and other students.The result is a growing demand for student-centered, transformative digital learning using competency education as an underpinning.iNACOL released this paper to illustrate the technical requirements and functionalities that learning management systems need to shift toward student-centered instructional models. This comprehensive framework will help districts and schools determine what systems to use and integrate as they being their journey toward student-centered learning, as well as how systems integration aligns with their organizational vision, educational goals and strategic plans.Educators can use this report to optimize student learning and promote innovation in their own student-centered learning environments. The report will help school leaders understand the complex technologies needed to optimize personalized learning and how to use data and analytics to improve practices, and can assist technology leaders in re-engineering systems to support the key nuances of student-centered learning

Living Innovation Laboratory Model Design and Implementation

Living Innovation Laboratory (LIL) is an open and recyclable way for multidisciplinary researchers to remote control resources and co-develop user centered projects. In the past few years, there were several papers about LIL published and trying to discuss and define the model and architecture of LIL. People all acknowledge about the three characteristics of LIL: user centered, co-creation, and context aware, which make it distinguished from test platform and other innovation approaches. Its existing model consists of five phases: initialization, preparation, formation, development, and evaluation. Goal Net is a goal-oriented methodology to formularize a progress. In this thesis, Goal Net is adopted to subtract a detailed and systemic methodology for LIL. LIL Goal Net Model breaks the five phases of LIL into more detailed steps. Big data, crowd sourcing, crowd funding and crowd testing take place in suitable steps to realize UUI, MCC and PCA throughout the innovation process in LIL 2.0. It would become a guideline for any company or organization to develop a project in the form of an LIL 2.0 project. To prove the feasibility of LIL Goal Net Model, it was applied to two real cases. One project is a Kinect game and the other one is an Internet product. They were both transformed to LIL 2.0 successfully, based on LIL goal net based methodology. The two projects were evaluated by phenomenography, which was a qualitative research method to study human experiences and their relations in hope of finding the better way to improve human experiences. Through phenomenographic study, the positive evaluation results showed that the new generation of LIL had more advantages in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.Comment: This is a book draf

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing : the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large – network of people in the form of an open call.” Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of the company. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration with no other objectives than to help this company to design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present the three main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) elaboration of Crowdspirit business model; (2) value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3)Theoretical framework on business models based on crowdsourcing. In the conclusion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during this work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large - network of people in the form of an open call.”Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of a start-up: Crowdspirit. The company's concept is based on the outsourcing of the entire R&D process to a community of designers and users, in the domain of consumer electronics. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration mainly to help the company design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present four main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) The emergence of the Crowdspirit business model; (2) The value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3) The challenging of the company's initial business model and (4) The creation of a new business model successively open and closed models. In the discussion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during the work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation