Appraising and enhancing a leadership in innovation model

Innovation is a significant contributor to effective economies worldwide. This paper aims to apprise a model of Innovation and Leadership created by Grant Mooney and Ken Dovey (Mooney & Dovey 2008). The model examines the resource of individual creativity and organisational innovation through the use of constructs and metrics. Recent developments have identified constructs that were used to appraise and enhance the model as a result of the strong correlations identified in literature and their high level of relevance. The new factors are (1) 'followership' or confidence in top leadership, and (2) 'return on investment' which measures the innovation efforts in an organisation

Navigating service sector innovation using co-creation partnerships

©Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse a series of engineering services partnerships to better understand requisites needed in building high value co-creation alliances – especially where innovation is the strategic goal. Design/methodology/approach – Using a combination of quantitative surveys, qualitative “deep-dive” assessments and a small number of in-situ mini-case investigations this research sets out to analyse 99 joint-venture innovation partnerships. These ventures represent a variety of asymmetric and symmetric alliances within the engineering services sector. Particular emphasis is given to those where the prerequisites for co-creative innovation are either in place or could be built. Findings – Partnering and progressing innovative ideas are important behaviours for organisations seeking higher levels of commercial success and competitive advantage. Navigating the partnering dynamic can also be harder than expected, potentially hindered by misunderstandings and differing expectations between enterprises. Particularly for symmetric endeavours, success often hinges upon not only having clarity in the degree of innovation sought but also alignment as to the depth and stage of the partnering dynamic itself. However, when such collaboration works customer satisfaction and associated contract retention can increase significantly. Originality/value – Most inter-company innovation projects historically seem to occur where one firm is significantly larger than the other. In contrast, this study highlights issues encountered when innovation co-creation projects are undertaken by a mature (as opposed to maturing) organisation in collaboration with partners where the power balance is similar between the two enterprises. In such cases, customer satisfaction surveys can be useful tools for objectively navigating the innovation co-creation experience

Towards Project Portfolio Management for Sustainable Outcomes in the Construction Industry

It is imperative that organisations improve their sustainability and there is a global push to reduce the environmental impact from project activities. This is especially true in construction, yet there is no ex1stmg framework to guide decision making and project portfolio management (PPM) for sustainable construction. This paper discusses the application of project portfolio management to the area of sustainable development in the construction industry. Using the understanding gained from existing PPM practices in a range of industries and the current approaches to risk and sustainability management in the construction industry, we propose a new maturity model for PPM. The maturity model aims to guide the introduction of sustainability factors into multi-project resource scheduling and risk analysis in the coustruction industry, and can be used to make the contribution to sustainability from an overall portfolio more sustainable than the sum of the contribution from individual projects, 1

Transition to Online Learning during COVID-19: What do Students Think?

This paper describes the transition from face-to-face to online delivery of a postgraduate project management subject in an Australian university that was necessitated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as presenting student reflections on these changes.</jats:p

The dimensions of software engineering success

Software engineering research and practice are hampered by the lack of a well-understood, top-level dependent variable. Recent initiatives on General Theory of Software Engineering suggest a multifaceted variable – Software Engineering Success. However, its exact dimensions are unknown. This paper investigates the dimensions (not causes) of software engineering success. An interdisciplinary sample of 191 design professionals (68 in the software industry) were interviewed concerning their perceptions of success. Non-software designers (e.g. architects) were included to increase the breadth of ideas and facilitate comparative analysis. Transcripts were subjected to supervised, semi-automated semantic content analysis, including a software developer vs. other professionals comparison. Findings suggest that participants view their work as time-constrained projects with explicit clients and other stakeholders. Success depends on stakeholder impacts – financial, social, physical and emotional – and is understood through feedback. Concern with meeting explicit requirements is peculiar to software engineering and design is not equated with aesthetics in many other fields. Software engineering success is a complex multifaceted variable, which cannot sufficiently be explained by traditional dimensions including user satisfaction, profitability or meeting requirements, budgets and schedules. A proto-theory of success is proposed, which models success as the net impact on a particular stakeholder at a particular time. Stakeholder impacts are driven by project efficiency, artifact quality and market performance. Success is not additive, e.g., ‘low’ success for clients does not average with ‘high’ success for developers to make ‘moderate’ success overall; rather, a project may be simultaneously successful and unsuccessful from different perspectives

The Use of Wikispace in Engineering Education

Wikispaces was piloted as an educational tool for improving teaching and learning at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales with class of 54 enrolled students. An active and self-directed learning approach was used in this subject based on interactive/ discussion-based lectures and tutorials, debates and presentations as well as private study. Students experiences and readings were to be reflected through contributions to class and wiki discussions to facilitate brain-storming, inquisitions and facilitate students' learning from each other. This paper reflects on the use of Wikispaces as a teaching strategy and presents results of students' responses to a questionnaire about the use of the wiki tool, and general teaching and learning of the subject. Analyses of responses suggested that students expressed positive experiences using wikispaces and that wikispaces correlated positively with students' performance

Critical success factors for quality implementation in the manufacturing industry

© 2017 International Business Information Management Association IBIMA. All Rights Reserved. Quality directly influences organizational performance in the manufacturing industry. Through an examination of literature, critical success factors that lead to the implementation of six-sigma in the manufacturing industry are identified for organisations of differing sizes: SMEs, large enterprises and general/ unspecified organisations (not specified as either SMEs or Large in literature). It is found that general success factors across organisations (unspecified) include Employee Education/Training, Top Management Commitment, Project Selection, Employee Involvement/Communication, Project Management/Leadership. While for large enterprises the following factors were identified: Project Selection, Alignment with Customer Requirements, Employee Education/Training, Senior Management Commitment, Use of Quality Tools, Visible Cost Saving. The results serve as a guide for a better understanding of the requirements leading to the successful implementation of six-sigma in organizations and where to best direct resources

Taming wicked problems: A review of critical success factors

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the readers understanding of critical success factors (CSFs) for taming wicked problems. In particular, it aims to provide practitioners facing wicked problems with practical recommendations of the order in which the CSFs should be addressed to ensure the most effective use of time. In order to achieve this, the paper presents the results of a systematic literature of the topic and ranks the importance of each CSF according to their frequency of appearance in the literature. The ease in which various actors can control each CSF was then evaluated according to the number of parties involved. These two aspects were then combined to develop a ranking in which the CSFs should be addressed in order to accomplish the most progress towards taming a wicked problem in the least amount of time. In addition, this research can also be used to facilitate the development of more effective and holistic approaches for taming wicked problems or for the improvement of existing ones