Barriers to Predicting the Mechanisms and Risk Factors of Non-Contact Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury

High incidences of non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury, frequent requirements for ACL reconstruction, and limited understanding of ACL mechanics have engendered considerable interest in quantifying the ACL loading mechanisms. Although some progress has been made to better understand non-contact ACL injuries, information on how and why non-contact ACL injuries occur is still largely unavailable. In other words, research is yet to yield consensus on injury mechanisms and risk factors. Biomechanics, video analysis, and related study approaches have elucidated to some extent how ACL injuries occur. However, these approaches are limited because they provide estimates, rather than precise measurements of knee - and more specifically ACL - kinematics at the time of injury. These study approaches are also limited in their inability to simultaneously capture many of the contributing factors to injury

Scientific Associations as communities of practice for fostering collaborative knowledge building: Case study of IAKM

Knowledge building is a social process that is driven by the willingness of people to share their expertise and create new knowledge. Scientific Communities of Practice (CoPs) are communities of professors and researchers whose aim is to foster scientific knowledge generation. In the KM literature, research concerning this kind of CoPs has been substantially neglected so far. The present research analyses the case study of the International Association for Knowledge Management (IAKM) seen as a scientific CoP where members are mostly academics with research interests in developing and promoting knowledge management. Based on a collection of quantitative and qualitative data about member collaborations and scientific production, the study investigates the structure of interactions and the collaborative processes of IAKM members and the specific mechanisms of knowledge building within this CoP, seen as a paradigmatic example of scientific community. Members were asked to respond to a survey regarding their collaborative activities carried out with other IAKM members in the period of 2011 - 2020. The descriptive analysis revealed the kind of collaborations, the distribution of interactions across the community, and the dynamic patterns over time. A follow-up social network analysis was used to provide deeper insight into the community structure and dynamics. The research found that a CoP can really be useful for progress in a scientific field because it can provide a platform for trust and mutual acquaintance that reduces barriers to collaboration and knowledge building across different universities, professional roles, countries, and cultures, which is increasingly important for the progress of science. Most importantly, IAKM exhibited a cohesive and active core membership with pivotal roles played by a number of active members, which contributed significantly to the growth of the Association and, in general, to the advancements in the field of KM through collaborative knowledge building

Collaborative knowledge building: The case of iakm as a scientific community of practice (cop)

This study addresses the special context of Communities of Practice (CoPs) in the case of scientists and academics, which is still a little studied environment. The paper considers the case of Scientific Associations and, particularly, the International Association for Knowledge Management (IAKM). As will be examined in the paper, IAKM (www.iakm.net) can be considered as a sort of CoP for the international community of KM researchers. It was established in 2012 with a mission to address existing challenges in knowledge management (KM) research, and to contribute to a unified view of KM. This study analyzes the structure and collaborative processes of IAKM members to better understand the community's knowledge development behaviour and performance. It combines a qualitative representation of the "history" of IAKM and its salient characteristics and milestones as a CoP and a quantitative analysis of data on collaborative activities, collected from all IAKM members via email. Members were asked to fill in a spreadsheet form with the following data for each of their collaborative activities carried out in the period 2011-2020: (a) collaborating members, (b) type of collaboration, (c) year when carried out and (d) short description of collaborative activity. The initial analysis was performed by simple frequency count. A follow-up social network analysis (SNA) was used to provide deeper insight into the community dynamics. The initial analysis revealed some interesting points, in particular concerning the kind of collaboration, the distribution of interactions across the community, and the dynamic patterns of these interactions over time. Overall, these findings contributed to our enhanced understanding of the nature of a scientific association as a CoP, and how it informed KM-related scholarship over the past decade. Specifically, the study found that IAKM exhibited a cohesive and active core membership that contributed significantly to the development of the field. The study also pointed to areas for further improvement that could serve as a basis for future planning of scientific associations as CoPs

Strategica

In all industrialized countries, the automotive sector is regarded as the locomotive of economy in terms of its contribution to economy and pioneering of the other sectors today and it is of great economic importance thanks to the value added it creates, its contribution to employment, its tax revenues, and its demand creating state in many sectors. In this sector, competition among firms is increasing rapidly and such elements as an increase in productivity, the efficient use of resources and administrative and technical organization gain great importance accordingly. To obtain a competitive advantage, it is necessary to keep up with the dynamic structure of the age and be open to change and innovations. That's why enterprises must adapt the new systems, techniques, and technologies to themselves. Based on continuous improvement and aiming at continuous development and elimination of waste, lean production is a production system which contains no unnecessary element in its structure and in which such elements as error, cost, inventory, workmanship, the development process, production area, wastage, and customer dissatisfaction are minimized. This study describes the improvement activities in the conveyor line at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Turkey where the outer body parts of vehicles are assembled in line with the understanding of lean production. Within this scope, it is aimed to determine the standards of the conveyor line specified by the automotive factory and ensure that the operators work in conformity with these standards; to increase the network rates in processes and process productivity by making detailed work analyses of the processes in the line; and to create the flexible workforce line characteristics which will enable the processes to work with complete productivity

Prominent Determinants of Consumer-Based Brand Equity

In this paper we investigate the most prominent drivers of brand equity, from a consumer-based point of view. We present a new approach for measuring brand equity, which can be applied regardless of the brand sector and is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. This approach has the main advantage of allowing for comparisons to be made between non-directly measurable elements and also has the advantage of enabling the ranking of intangible criteria, such as consumers' feelings or purchase intentions. We focus on the fashion industry, since we believe in the higher value of our approach when applied to brands which offer products with less tangible characteristics. Thanks to a case study – which involved about 250 interviewees – we succeed in finding and prioritizing the elements which can have an impact on the brand value. We also provide a global ranking for three apparel brands: Gap, H&M and Zara. The results from our model are consistent with other popular ratings and can be extremely useful for brand managers