Mobile Application Development: developing a finance application with React Native

At the time of its highest growth thus far, the assigner, Now Finance, considered the development of a Mobile Application to be used by their customers for managing their Personal Loans. Their existing Web Portal Application had been suffering from low user adaptation and its complete re-development was being deprioritized over other, more strategic projects. It was decided that the author would be employed to develop a modern mobile application from the ground up. The author took the time to explore the tools to be used for the task at hand and proceeded with designing and developing the application. In this process, the focus was a fast turnaround, customer satisfaction, efficiency, and scalability. The diary method was chosen as the most appropriate. This method is based on the strong research diary tradition and follows the autoethnographic model where the writer applies her/his own experience to better understand the field of phenomena. Due to the nature of the topic, the diary method will play an important role in promoting necessary filed research. The research will be useful for software developers and managers interested in Mobile Application Development and shows some insights into the technical and business aspects of the field. The results prove that a mixture of appropriate tools, detailed requirements and design analysis, and careful implementation can lead to positive outcomes. The road of software development is not always clear and predictable. Sometimes there are big challenges or roadblocks to overcome so it requires resilience. In the mobile world, the barrier of acceptable features has been set higher than ever before and that should be taken into consideration early in the process

The diffusion of University spinoffs : Institutional and ecological perspectives

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Information-based imitation of university commercialization strategies : the role of technology transfer office autonomy, age, and membership into an association

We investigate whether university technology transfer offices, that is, divisions responsible for the commercialization of academic research, imitate their industry peers when designing their commercialization strategy. We borrow from information-based theories of imitation and the literature on academic entrepreneurship to argue that given a technology transfer office’s autonomy to strategize independently from its parent university, information from within and outside the technology transfer office affects its propensity to imitate the commercialization strategy of the “most successful peers,” that is, those with the largest live spinoff portfolio and greatest revenues from spinoffs in the industry. We contend that a technology transfer office’s experience, that is, a function of its age, represents a key internal source of information for the technology transfer office when deciding whether to imitate or not; we also consider the technology transfer office’s embeddedness in a network where the most successful peer is also a member as a key external source of information. From data on 86 British university technology transfer offices and their commercialization strategies between 1993 and 2007 that were drawn from both secondary sources and in-depth interviews with technology transfer office managers, we find that there is a negative relationship between technology transfer offices’ autonomy and their level of imitation of the most successful technology transfer office’s strategy, and that this relationship is moderated by the technology transfer offices’ age and by their membership into an association where the most successful technology transfer office is also a member

Resisting change: organizational decoupling through an identity construction perspective

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that explains how individual organizational members’ self-construction processes motivate them to support or reject decoupling as a form of resistance to institutionally mandated change. Most studies have looked at powerful organizational actors and top management teams that decide to decouple. This paper broadens our understanding through a micro-level approach that focuses on the role of individual members within organizational. Specifically, it looks at what happens inside organizations after the decision to decouple has been taken. This paper identifies three alternative self identity construction pathways that members may choose following the decision of an organization to decouple: a) strong identification with the organization; b) strong identification with the institutional pressure; and c) adoption of both organizational and institutional identities. Our framework specifies how and under which conditions the way individuals identify and manage identity multiplicity impacts organizational resistance to change. Future research could test the proposed framework particularly through case studies or qualitative designs that look deep into organizational processes and individual attitudes towards decoupling. Practitioners, particularly top management teams, can adopt a moderating role in influencing the identification process of their employees. They can also communicate better why efficiency is more important than the mandated changes, and why decoupling must be supported to safeguard the organization’s “efficient” identity. Our paper integrates institutional theory’s macro-perspectives with micro-perspectives of individual members’ identity and self-construction processes within organizations. It contributes to existing institutional accounts of agentic change and resistance to change through a dynamic framework that prescribes individual interests and preferences based on identification processes