Atitudes dos gestores face à criatividade e às práticas de inovação nas indústrias criativas

This article aims to demonstrate that the relationship between entrepreneurs' attitudes to creativity and business innovation practices is stronger in the case of creative industries. A sample of 454 managers of micro and medium-sized companies (94 belonging to creative industries) was surveyed using an inventory of innovative business practices and the scale of attitudes towards creativity. The results, derived from a linear regression model (two factors for the scale of attitudes - Leadership and Autonomy - and for the inventory of business practices - Performance and Strategy), confirmed the proposition by revealing the influence of the creative attitudes of managers regarding the company's innovative practices, fundamentally on Strategy, especially in the creative industries segment. The innovative manager appeared as a disciplined individual driven to collaborating with the employees. Although this research requires further evidence, the results suggest interesting characterisations of the managers who develop their activity in the cluster of creative industries.Este artigo tem como objetivo demonstrar que a relação entre as atitudes do empresário face à criatividade e as práticas de inovação é mais forte no caso das indústrias criativas. Foram inquiridos 454 gestores de micro, pequenas e médias empresas (94 pertencentes às indústrias criativas), utilizando um inventário de práticas empresariais e uma escala de atitudes face à criatividade. Os resultados, obtidos utilizando um modelo de regressão linear (dois fatores para a escala de atitudes –Liderança e Autonomia - e dois para o inventário de práticas empresariais – Desempenho e Estratégia) confirmaram a hipótese, ao revelar a influência das atitudes do empresário face à criatividade sobre as práticas inovadoras da empresa, nomeadamente na Estratégia e no segmento das indústrias criativas. O gestor inovador surge como um indivíduo disciplinado, orientado para colaborar com os empregados. Apesar desta investigação necessitar de maior aprofundamento, os resultados sugerem uma caracterização interessante dos gestores que desenvolvem a sua atividade no cluster das indústrias criativasinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Criatividade e inovação empresarial nas indústrias criativas

O presente artigo visa demonstrar que a relação de influência entre a atitude dos empresários face à criatividade e as práticas de inovação empresarial é mais forte no setor que envolve as indústrias criativas. Para o efeito foi inquirida uma amostra constituída por 454 empresários, em que 94 pertenciam às indústrias criativas, responsáveis por microempresas e PME portuguesas, através de um inventário de práticas empresariais inovadoras, elaborado a partir do formulário de candidatura à rede PME inovação da COTEC Portugal; e uma escala de atitudes criativas, construída a partir da teoria do investimento, de Sternberg & Lubart (1996). A análise dos resultados permitiu confirmar a proposição e apresentar o empresário inovador como um indivíduo disciplinado e orientado para a partilha com os colaboradores. Se bem que a presente investigação necessite de prova adicional, os resultados obtidos sugerem caracterizações interessantes dos empresários que optam por desenvolver a sua atividade no cluster das indústrias criativas

Competências para a integração social: um estudo exploratório com os beneficiários de rendimento social de inserção do concelho de Évora

Sendo certo que nem a pobreza nem a exclusão social desaparecerão da face da terra, com este trabalho pretendemos contribuir para um melhor conhecimento dessa problemática, considerando em simultâneo a importância da competência humana no processo de integração social. A compreensão da competência humana é um desafio presente na história da Psicologia e nas últimas duas décadas emergiram modelos holísticos que procuram integrar diversos elementos com o objetivo de representarem a complexidade e o dinamismo desse conceito. Neste trabalho discutiremos esses contributos, para uma representação tridimensional do conceito de competência. Em função dos níveis de informação sobre os quais opera a competência humana distinguimos a competência profissional, pessoal e social. Na crença de que esta conceção alargada de competência humana favorecerá um novo olhar sobre o ser humano, concretamente sobre a sua (ex) (in) clusão social, empiricamente, procurámos compreender a perceção da competência num conjunto de pessoas caracterizadas pela carência económica, em função de variáveis de natureza biográfica, sócio-económica e contextual. /ABSTRACT - Given the fact that neither poverty nor social exclusion will disappear from the face of the earth, what we intend with this study is to contribute to an improved knowledge of these themes, by simultaneously taking into consideration the importance of human competency in the social integration process. The understanding of the human competency is a challenge that has been present in the history of Psychology and in the past two decades holistic models have emerged which envisage the integration of the various elements with the objective of representing the complexity and dynamism of this concept. In this study we will be discussing these contributes, in a tri-dimensional representation of the concept of competency. In function of the information levels on which the human competency operates, we distinguish the professional, personal and social competencies. In the belief that this extended concept of human competency favours a new look on the human being, specifically on its social (ex)(in)clusion, empirically, we search to understand the perception of competency in a group of people characterized by low income, due to biographical, social-economical and contextual variables

Criatividade e inovação em contexto empresarial - Estudo da relação entre as atitudes criativas e as práticas inovadoras em microempresas e PME

Apesar de a literatura evidenciar a urgência da criatividade e da inovação nas empresas, não se encontraram pesquisas que analisem, especificamente, a relação entre as atitudes criativas e as práticas inovadoras. Assim, o presente trabalho de investigação pretendeu dar resposta a uma questão central: que relação existe entre as atitudes criativas dos empresários e as suas práticas empresariais inovadoras? Tendo como objetivo estabelecer uma relação entre essas variáveis no contexto das Microempresas e PME sedeadas em Portugal Continental, foi inquirida uma amostra constituída por 274 empresários, através de um inventário de práticas empresariais inovadoras e uma escala de autoperceção de atitudes criativas, construídos para o efeito. O tratamento dos dados recolhidos assentou na análise estatística, com recurso ao programa informático PASW Statistics e dividiu-se em duas fases: a análise das características métricas dos instrumentos e o estudo das hipóteses. A avaliação das características métricas dos instrumentos de recolha dos dados começou com um estudo piloto, que permitiu avaliar a sua sensibilidade, fidelidade e validade e confirmou-se num estudo principal, cujos resultados apontam para instrumentos com a robustez necessária, medindo os construtos para os quais foram desenvolvidos. Para o efeito recorreu-se à estatística descritiva, à análise de componentes principais para dados categóricos e à análise fatorial exploratória, com recurso à análise de componentes principais. Da operacionalização da questão de investigação definiram-se as hipóteses, para cujo teste se recorreu ao estudo de correlação, à análise de variância e à análise do valor preditivo das variáveis. Os resultados estabelecem uma relação entre as variáveis e confirma-se parcialmente a hipótese de trabalho, apontando a influência das atitudes criativas sobre as práticas empresariais inovadoras; ABSTRACT: Although literature highlights the urgency of creativity and innovation in enterprises, no studies were found that specifically examine the relationship between creativity attitudes and innovative practices. So, this research intended to address a central question: what kind of relationship exists between creative attitudes of entrepreneurs and their innovative business practices? Facing the objective of establishing the relationship between attitudes towards creativity and innovative business practices in the context of Micro and SMEs, based in mainland Portugal, a sample of 274 entrepreneurs has been inquired through an inventory of innovative business practices and a scale of self-rated creative attitudes, both built from scratch. Using computer program PASW Statistics, the data collected was treated through statistical analysis, divided in two phases: the analysis of metric characteristics of the instruments and the study of hypotheses. The evaluation of the metric characteristics of the instruments of data collection began with a pilot study to assess their sensitivity, reliability and validity and was confirmed in the main study, where results showed the instruments robustness, by measuring the constructs for which the instruments have been developed. For this purpose we used descriptive statistics, principal components analysis for categorical data and exploratory factor analysis, again using the principal component analysis. Through the operationalization of the research question, hypotheses were defined, and tested with study correlation, analysis of variance and analysis of the predictive value of variables. The results point to a relationship between the variables partially confirming the research hypothesis, showing the influence of attitudes towards creativity in innovative business practices

Physicochemical characterization of psyllium fiber

Psyllium is the common name used for several members of the plant genus Plantago, whose seeds are commercially used for mucilage production. Owing to its considerable fiber amount it has been used as dietary fiber supplement. Psyllium has a strong gelling ability, even at low temperature, enabling its use as a gelling agent in the food industry. This work is part of a project to developing jellies enriched with fiber, honey and propolis, aiming to increase these products intake, with evident health benefits. The chemical characterization of psyllium was performed, with the following results (in dry matter): total ash 2.5%, fat content 3.4% and total protein 1.4%. After qualitative acid hydrolysis polymeric sugars were quantified (in dry matter): glucan 7.3%, xylan 61.1% and arabinan 22.9%. This means that total fiber content is about 90%, being soluble fiber predominant, and allows classifying psyllium hemicellulose as an arabinoxylan. Psyllium functional properties were evaluated by water-binding capacity and swelling determination: 27.1 g/g and 36.9 ml/g, respectively. These properties are important in the food industry, but under certain circumstances may limit the food type that can be enriched with this fiber. An important part of the research consisted on the characterization of gels viscoelastic behavior and texture, which were prepared with different psyllium particle dimension (raw and ground) and concentration (2.0%, 2.5% and 3.0%). The Response Surface Methodology was used to study the effect of process conditions (time and temperature) on texture and color characteristics of gels. Texture properties of gels were evaluated by Texture Profile Analysis. Gels dynamic behaviour was studied by a sequence of oscillatory measurements of temperature, time and frequency sweeps. Psyllium gelling properties were improved with the reduction of the fiber particle dimension. Gels revealed potential viscoelastic properties that might be interesting in the industrial purpose of honey jelly production

Rare and severe complications of congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency : a case report

© 2013 Ferreira et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.Introduction: We report the case of a patient with classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency who presented with unusual anatomical and biochemical features, namely massively enlarged adrenal glands, adrenogenital rest tissue and an unexpected endocrine profile. The contribution of the adrenocortical cells in the adrenals and testicles was determined by a cosyntropin stimulation test before and after adrenalectomy. To the best of our knowledge this is the first report of such a case in the literature. Case presentation: A 35-year-old Caucasian man was admitted to the emergency room with an Addisonian crisis. He had been diagnosed with congenital adrenal hyperplasia in the neonatal period. He acknowledged poor adherence to treatment and irregular medical assistance. Physical examination revealed marked cutaneous and gingival hyperpigmentation, hypotension, and hard nodules in the upper pole of both testicles. Blood analysis showed mild anemia and hyponatremia and no evidence of acute infection. Endocrine evaluation showed very low cortisol levels, low dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate and elevated corticotropin, 11-deoxycortisol and delta-4-androstenedione. The concentration of 17-hydroxyprogesterone was 20,400ng/dL. After the cosyntropin stimulation test the pattern was similar and there was no significant increase in cortisol or 17-hydroxyprogesterone. The abdominal computed tomography scan revealed grossly enlarged and heterogeneous adrenal glands (left, 12cm; and right, six cm). A bilateral adrenalectomy was performed and pathologic examination revealed adrenal myelolipomas with nodular cortical hyperplasia. The sonogram showed bilateral heterogeneous masses on the upper pole of both testes which corresponded to the nodular hyperplasia of adrenal rest tissues. The genetic study revealed compound heterozigoty (mutations R124H and R356W), suggestive of a phenotypically moderate disease. We performed a cosyntropin stimulation test after adrenalectomy. The steroidogenic profile displayed the same unusual features, indicating an important contribution from the adrenogenital cells. Conclusion: This case illustrates that congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency can progress to severe acute and chronic complications. The masses in the patient’s adrenal glands and testicles resulted from chronically elevated adrenocorticotropic hormone and growth of adrenocortical cells. The basal and stimulated steroid profile, before and after adrenalectomy, revealed an unexpected pattern, suggesting significant contribution of the testicular adrenal cells to the steroidogenesis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Open Resources and Tools for the Shallow Processing of Portuguese: the TagShare project

This paper presents the TagShare project and the linguistic resources and tools for the shallow processing of Portuguese developed in its scope. These resources include a 1 million token corpus that has been accurately hand annotated with a variety of linguistic information, as well as several state-of­the-­art shallow processing tools capable of automatically producing that type of annotation. At present, the linguistic annotations in the corpus are sentence and paragraph boundaries, token boundaries, morphosyntactic POScategories, values of inflection features, lemmas and named­ entities. Hence, the set of tools comprise a sentence chunker, a tokenizer, a POS tagger, nominal and verbal analyzers and lemmatizers, a verbal conjugator, a nominal “inflector”, and a named­-entity recognizer, some of which underline several on­line services.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The socio-economic impact of a Polytechnic Institution in a local economy : some insights of field research

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are considered important mechanisms of regional development. However, due to the current economic recession and budget constraints, HEIs need to demonstrate the impact that their activities have on the surrounding community that contributes for its economic development. Hence, the aim of this paper is to present the results of a model to estimate the economic impact of different HEIs that are located in regions with different socio-economic development. Moreover, the common framework of analysis, whilst considering the different socio-economic realities, allows the comparisons of the results for the different HEIS

EAIR 35th Annual Forum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands 28-31 August 2013

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are considered important mechanisms of regional development. However, due to the current economic recession and budget constraints, HEIs need to demonstrate the impact that their activities have on the surrounding community that contributes for its economic development. Hence, the aim of this paper is to present the results of a model to estimate the economic impact of different HEIs that are located in regions with different socio-economic development. Moreover, the common framework of analysis, whilst considering the different socio-economic realities, allows the comparisons of the results for the different HEIS.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio