Guidelines for successful crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is defined as the process of taking a project or business, in need of investment, and asking a large group of people to supply this investment. This phenomena has exponentially increased in popularity over the last few years and, as a consequence, is now presented as a viable method of funding for designers. Regardless of its new-found popularity, however, statistics show that the vast majority of crowdfunding campaigns dramatically fail with 81% of failed campaigns reaching less than 20% of their funding goal. This poses two questions; how can designers ensure crowdfunding success and can engineers design their products to prepare for crowdfunding? In order to answer the second question, the authors have decided to answer the first with an in-depth study of crowdfunding campaigns that is presented in this paper. Previous attempts to decipher the key to crowdfunding success has left many opportunities for further research. For example, this paper seeks to use both qualitative as well as quantitative methods, it seeks to determine crowdfunding success from both the perspective of the project creator and the funder, and it seeks to consider smaller crowdfunding platforms based in both the UK and abroad. Finally, this paper is unique among other academic explorations of crowdfunding since it translates academic research into a user-friendly guidance tool for practical application. The paper closes by discussing the implications of crowdfunding on the design process and how designing for crowdfunding fits into an overall development of a design framework for the 21st century

Social product development:the democratization of design, manufacture, and innovation

With increasing globalization and 21st century trends such as the personalization and commoditization of technology, product design has become a level playing field for both engineering professionals and members of the maker’s communities. Terms associated with this shift in the industry include crowdsourcing, cloud-based design and manufacture, mass collaboration and Open Innovation. While academics have considered the impact of these phenomena individually, there has yet to be a discussion on how these terms work together to influence the process of product development. This paper serves as an introduction to a new area of research that treats these terms as tenants of a multi-faceted term labelled Social Product Development. By considering the relationships and impacts of these modern phenomena as a group for the first time, progress can be made in evolving traditional product development frameworks to take advantage of the tools the 21st century has to offer. In this paper, the authors present an overview of the tenants of Social Product Development and discuss what they actually mean in the context of 21st century product development. Future work is then discussed which considers how an SPD framework could be formed

Exploring changes in patient experience with increasing practice size: observational study using data from the General Practice Patient Survey

Background For the last few years, English general practices, which are traditionally small, have been encouraged to work together to serve larger populations of registered patients, by merging or collaborating with each other. Meanwhile, patient surveys suggest worsening continuity of care and access to care. Aim To explore whether increasing size of practice population and working collaboratively are linked to changes in continuity of care or access to care. Design and setting Observational study in English general practice using data on patient experience, practice size and collaborative working Methods The main outcome measures were General Practice Patient Survey practice-level proportions of patients reporting positive experiences of access and relationship continuity of care. We compared change in proportions 2013-2018 among practices that had grown and those that had stayed about the same size. We also compared patients’ experiences by whether practices were working in close collaborations or not in 2018. Results. Practices that had grown in population size had a greater percentage fall in continuity of care, by 6.6% (95% confidence interval 4.3% to 8.9%) than practices that had stayed about the same size, after controlling for other factors. There was no similar difference in relation to access to care. Practices collaborating closely with others had marginally worse continuity of care than those not working in collaboration and no important differences in access. Conclusion Concerns that larger general practice size threatens continuity of care may be justified

Automation of duplicate record detection for systematic reviews: Deduplicator

Background: To describe the algorithm and investigate the efficacy of a novel systematic review automation tool “the Deduplicator” to remove duplicate records from a multi-database systematic review search. Methods: We constructed and tested the efficacy of the Deduplicator tool by using 10 previous Cochrane systematic review search results to compare the Deduplicator’s ‘balanced’ algorithm to a semi-manual EndNote method. Two researchers each performed deduplication on the 10 libraries of search results. For five of those libraries, one researcher used the Deduplicator, while the other performed semi-manual deduplication with EndNote. They then switched methods for the remaining five libraries. In addition to this analysis, comparison between the three different Deduplicator algorithms (‘balanced’, ‘focused’ and ‘relaxed’) was performed on two datasets of previously deduplicated search results. Results: Before deduplication, the mean library size for the 10 systematic reviews was 1962 records. When using the Deduplicator, the mean time to deduplicate was 5 min per 1000 records compared to 15 min with EndNote. The mean error rate with Deduplicator was 1.8 errors per 1000 records in comparison to 3.1 with EndNote. Evaluation of the different Deduplicator algorithms found that the ‘balanced’ algorithm had the highest mean F1 score of 0.9647. The ‘focused’ algorithm had the highest mean accuracy of 0.9798 and the highest recall of 0.9757. The ‘relaxed’ algorithm had the highest mean precision of 0.9896. Conclusions: This demonstrates that using the Deduplicator for duplicate record detection reduces the time taken to deduplicate, while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to using a semi-manual EndNote method. However, further research should be performed comparing more deduplication methods to establish relative performance of the Deduplicator against other deduplication methods.</p

A Social Network Study To Improve Collaborative Partnerships Among the Southeastern Health Equity Council (SHEC)

This report presents research conducted on the relationships among and attributes of members of the Southeastern Health Equity Council (SHEC, herein Council) to provide recommendations for partnerships, collaboration, and the recruitment of new members. The background, methods, results, and recommendations are outlined in detail throughout this report. Social networks are measured and defined as connections among people, organization, and/or other units. SNA is a valuable and innovative tool for recognizing strengths and weaknesses in collaborative partnerships. The evaluative study presented herein can be replicated in other councils within the Regional Health Equity Councils to improve collaborations not only among SHEC partnerships, but also the nine remaining regions as well. Among the SHEC, social networking models will be designed in an efforts to better understand partnerships, reach the desire goal to analyze partnerships among SHEC, and develop a better understanding of the broad-based constituency served by the Council for the purposes of improving collaborative partnerships

Guidelines for successful crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is defined as the process of taking a project or business, in need of investment, and asking a large group of people to supply this investment. This phenomena has exponentially increased in popularity over the last few years and, as a consequence, is now presented as a viable method of funding for designers. Regardless of its new-found popularity, however, statistics show that the vast majority of crowdfunding campaigns dramatically fail with 81% of failed campaigns reaching less than 20% of their funding goal. This poses two questions; how can designers ensure crowdfunding success and can engineers design their products to prepare for crowdfunding? In order to answer the second question, the authors have decided to answer the first with an in-depth study of crowdfunding campaigns that is presented in this paper. Previous attempts to decipher the key to crowdfunding success has left many opportunities for further research. For example, this paper seeks to use both qualitative as well as quantitative methods, it seeks to determine crowdfunding success from both the perspective of the project creator and the funder, and it seeks to consider smaller crowdfunding platforms based in both the UK and abroad. Finally, this paper is unique among other academic explorations of crowdfunding since it translates academic research into a user-friendly guidance tool for practical application. The paper closes by discussing the implications of crowdfunding on the design process and how designing for crowdfunding fits into an overall development of a design framework for the 21st century

Social product development:the democratization of design, manufacture, and innovation

With increasing globalization and 21st century trends such as the personalization and commoditization of technology, product design has become a level playing field for both engineering professionals and members of the maker’s communities. Terms associated with this shift in the industry include crowdsourcing, cloud-based design and manufacture, mass collaboration and Open Innovation. While academics have considered the impact of these phenomena individually, there has yet to be a discussion on how these terms work together to influence the process of product development. This paper serves as an introduction to a new area of research that treats these terms as tenants of a multi-faceted term labelled Social Product Development. By considering the relationships and impacts of these modern phenomena as a group for the first time, progress can be made in evolving traditional product development frameworks to take advantage of the tools the 21st century has to offer. In this paper, the authors present an overview of the tenants of Social Product Development and discuss what they actually mean in the context of 21st century product development. Future work is then discussed which considers how an SPD framework could be formed

Crowdsourcing in Product Development: Current State and Future Research Directions

The term crowdsourcing has been identified as a valuable paradigm in the open design movement. Despite its proven value, research focusing specifically on crowdsourcing in product development has been stagnating, with the general tone in this sector having moved from optimism to skepticism. In this paper, the authors present a literature analysis that reveals four hurdles limiting industry adoption. The authors are then able to suggest future research avenues that they anticipate will encourage adoption of crowdsourcing in professional product design and development settings in industry

Research on Teaching about Earth in the Context of Societal Problems

Knowledge and consideration of societal issues are critical for students majoring in the geosciences, as well as for non-science students and the general public who vote and make decisions that should be based on sound science. Thus, the importance of integrating geoscience with other disciplines such as urban planning, social justice, politics, communications and more has become a critical call to action for geoscience researchers and educators that merits examination. Improving undergraduate STEM education with the use of relevant issues such as societal problems is a useful mechanism to help students find science to be personally relevant and to develop their interest based on societal contexts (e.g., as is currently being done in the InTeGrate program). The grand challenges in this chapter examine the use of societal issues to teach about the Earth, which include consideration of the impact on student learning, the design principles of curricula that best integrate geoscience content within the context of societal issues, and the assessment needed to measure the efficacy of these methods