Venture Out: An Entrepreneurial Introduction to Business

Venture Out is a semester-long project which introduces elementary business skills and concepts from an entrepreneurial perspective. Student teams research and select a product to sell to students, create a mini-business plan, and present their plan to a board of judges from the business community. If their request is approved (up to $500), teams purchase and sell their product. After repaying the loan, teams donate their profits to a beneficiary and they reflect on their performance and lessons learned. Venture Out benefits students, the academic business program, and the community in tangible ways. Venture Out and other classroom-as-organization (CAO) programs are described.

Better Together: Improving Food Security and Nutrition by Linking Market and Food Systems

Market-based approaches to food security often increase agricultural productivity and income yet sometimes fail to enhance nutrition. When food security programming combines market and food systems with a specific focus on women and girls, economic and nutrition outcomes benefit. We identify distinctive and shared elements from market and food systems and highlight how they enhance nutrition outcomes when they are combined. We describe food security programming by CARE and World Vision in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, demonstrating nutrition gains in food insecure households

“Gain all You Can, Save all You Can, Give all You Can”: An Exercise in Giving

Theologically-informed approaches to giving are critical to faith-based business curricula, yet few resources are available for use in personal financial planning or other courses to expose students to the practice of giving. Based on a recently developed model of giving (Brister, Litton, Lynn, and Tippens, 2016), we offer background content for discussion and an exercise to catalyze thinking and practice about lifetime giving from a Christian perspective

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Utjecaj kulture na organizacijsko ponašanje

In the paper the authors first present two approaches to the scrutiny of the culture - Hofstede\u27s dimensions of cultural values and Hall\u27s approach to high- and low-context cultures. In the second part they devote their attention to the interaction of culture and organizational behaviour. They also describe how culture affects the ethics and motivation of employees in companies, the way of communicating, success of conflict solving and organizational change. A special issue is the ethics of interdependence.U ovom članku autori su prezentirali dva pristupa temeljitom proučavanju kulture – Holfstedeove dimenzije kulturalnih vrijednosti i Hallov pristup visokom i niskom kontekstu kulture. U drugom dijelu pažnju su posvetili interakciji kulture i organizacijskog ponašanja. Također su promatrali kako kultura utječe na etiku i motivaciju zaposlenika u organizacijama, način iznalaženja uspjeha u rješavanju konflikta i organizacijske promjene, te su analizirali etiku uzajamne ovisnosti

Congregational Aid: North American Protestant Engagement in International Relief and Development

<p>A review of large North American Protestant congregations (n = 423) engaging in global relief and development, or ‘holistic mission’ (HM), suggests that half engage in HM activities per year, with the majority of those activities focused on human and physical sectors. Most activities are led by religious NGOs or missionaries and about half are short-term. A mix of proximity, poverty, population, and policy variables direct short- and long-term aid. Findings provide a benchmark for enhancing learning and partnerships among churches, NGOs, and development scholars, ultimately enhancing the efficacy of Protestant aid.</p

Small Slovene Firms and Strategic Information Technology Usage

The extent to which information technology (IT) is used strategically is measured in a sample of 147 small Slovene firms. Slovenia is interesting from a small business perspective, because from 1990, when the transformation of its economy started, the number of small business has increased almost 6 times (from almost 6.500 to nearly 35.000 in 1998). The results have shown IT industry leadership and also IT’s role in a firm to be the strongest predictors in the strategic usage of IT. It was also found that IT is particularly well utilized in firms emphasizing innovation and, to a lesser degree, an efficiency strategy. Firms pursuing a low-cost strategy were the least likely to utilize IT strategically

Service Orientation in Transitional Economies - Analysis of Critical Service Factors in two Slowenian Banks Compared to the USA

Service quality, and the service-oriented practices that create that quality, have been shown to yield competitive advantage to firms in developed and mature markets. The role that service-driven practices play in transitional economies, however, has not been tested. In this study, the SERVOR scale, a measure of organizational service-orientation, was analyzed from 105 employees in two Slovenian banks-one which is a newly established private bank and the other which is a large, older previous state-supported bank. Results indicate that the private bank is more service-oriented in its approach to the marketplace.Es hat sich erwiesen, daß Dienstleistungsqualität und dienstleistungsorientierte Verfahrensweisen, welche diese Qualität hervorbringen, Wettbewerbsvorteile für Firmen in entwickelten und etablierten Märkten bedeuten. Die Rolle, die dienstleistungsorientierte Praktiken in Wirtschaftssystemen spielen, welche sich im Transformationsprozeß befinden, wurde jedoch noch nicht untersucht. In der vorliegenden Studie wurde der SERVOR-Maßstab, ein Instrument zur Messung der Dienstleistungsorientierung einer Organisation, von 105 Angestellten in zwei slowenischen Banken analysiert. Eine der Banken ist eine neu gegründete private Bank, die andere eine große, ältere, früher staatlich unterstützte Bank. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, daß die private Bank einem stärker dienstleistungsorientierten Ansatz folgt