Business Commons^™

Virtual Teams And Management Challenges, Nader Ale Ebrahim, Shamsuddin Ahmed, Zahari Taha

Nader Ale Ebrahim

Introduction: Collaboration is becoming increasingly important in creating the knowledge that makes business more competitive. Virtual teams are growing in popularity [1] and many organizations have responded to their dynamic environments by introducing virtual teams. Additionally, the rapid development of new communication technologies such as the Internet has accelerated this trend so that today, most of the larger organization employs virtual teams to some degree [2]. A growing number of flexible and adaptable organizations have explored the virtual environment as one means of achieving increased responsiveness [3]. Howells et al. [4] state that the shift from serial to simultaneous and …

A World Without Work? [Review Of The Books The End Of Work And The Jobless Future], Lance A. Compa

Lance A Compa

[Excerpt] These two books take different routes to the same conclusion: This Time It's For Real. The end of work is now upon us, and the jobless future beckons. This was portended in the past--by the development of steam-powered machinery, then electrical power, then by mid-twentieth century automation reflected in numerically-controlled machine tools, and even by the first and second generations of computers--but never realized as new outlets for employment took shape. Those days are done now. Advanced computers and software are bringing into being what Jeremy Rifkin calls a "near-workerless economy."

How To Conduct A Literature Review, Nader Ale Ebrahim

Nader Ale Ebrahim

No abstract provided.

Organization And Environment Factors As Inhibitors Of External Learning In New Product And Technology Development, So-Jin Yoo, Wee Liang Tan

Wee Liang TAN

No abstract provided.

Organizational Learning And New Product Development Within Innovative Firms, Wee Liang Tan, So-Jin Yoo, Dylan Jones-Evans

Wee Liang TAN

No abstract provided.

Singapore And Surroundings, Thomas Menkhoff

Thomas MENKHOFF

No abstract provided.

Spatial Distribution Of Commercial Banks In Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State, Nigeria, I B. Abdullahi, M A. Ijaiya, A Abdulraheem, R I. Abdulkadir, R O. Ibrahim

Confluence Journal of Environmental Studies (CJES), Kogi State University, Nigeria

The spatial distribution of banks in any geographic entity determines the level of accessibility to its services by the public. This study examined the pattern of banks distribution in Ilorin metropolis. Field survey was employed in determining the number of available commercial banks and their respective distances between each other. The spatial analysis technique such as the nearest neighbour analysis as used ascertain the degree of clustering, density and the average distance taken to access these services. The study revealed that about 96% of the total number of banks are situated in the Central Business District which exhibited a very …

Innovation Rules : A Step By Step Approach Towards Identifying New Innovation Opportunities., Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This book is organized in three sections. The first section introduces twenty five innovation rules that reflect how innovations have progressed over time. The second section explains how the innovation rules can be used to identify possible innovation opportunities. The third section explains how to choose innovations for commercialization. Pay sufficient attention to each of the Innovation Rules when you read the first section. Each rule captures the introduction and evolution of successful innovations. Each rule is listed on one page and its description on the opposite page. Rules have more than one stage, the initial stage followed by one …

A Framework For The Integration Of Expert Systems With Multimedia Technologies, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

Expert system (ES) technology allows the capture and replication of expertise in an application domain. So far, the type of data that is used by an expert system for its reasoning process remains primarily alphanumeric. Image, graphics, and other dynamic data such as voice and video are part of an emerging technology generally termed multimedia technology. This article highlights the critical issues in building a successful application combining the two technologies. Based on these critical issues, it also provides a framework for the integration of multimedia technology with expert systems technology.

Management Of Technology Deployed In Service Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

Services form a major portion of the GDP of several nations, especially that of the first world nations. These nations also experience high cost of providing services of different kinds. This has resulted in the displacement of non-customer facing services to countries that can offer them at lower prices. Nations have to be concerned about sustaining their economies even as such off-shoring of services continue to grow. It is therefore important to understand how countries can create those service innovations that will help them retain the growth trajectory of their economies. We believe that the different types of service innovations …

Service Innovation Opportunity Identification, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Innovation Is Bright And Shiny As Never Before, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This bright shiny future is due to several reasons including better understanding of opportunity identification and innovation management, significant advances in technologies, new economic realities and the shi ing focus to service innovation. Innovation was perceived as an art practised by an exclusive few sitting in an ivory tower of a corporate headquarters of a company. The availability of methods such as Disruptive Innovation, Blue Ocean Strategy and Innovation Rules has empowered ordinary individuals to identify innovation opportunities as never before. This is a sea change in the sheer number of minds searching for the innovation needles in other otherwise …

Innovation Engine, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This paper describes a meta-model for innovation using an automobile engine as a metaphor. This innovation meta-model is used to manage a collection of innovation models. We develop an algorithm to identify innovations with potential for success using this meta-model. This meta-model can be used by corporations and individuals to identify plausible innovations at any given point in time.

Innovation Stack - Choosing Innovations For Commercialization, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This paper describes a method for enterprises to order the innovations of interest according to a number of parameters including their own business strategy and core competencies. The method takes into account aspects such as ability to create entry barriers and complementary assets. Enterprises can now use this method to both filter out innovations that may not be of interest to them and then order the short listed or selected innovations according to their attractiveness.

A Method For Monetizing Technology Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

Technology innovations from most universities and research institutes are generally created with no clear path to commercialization in mind. This is largely due to the culture in academic institutions and research institutes whose mission it is to explore the creation of innovations that promise long term benefits. This culture of academic freedom leads to a stockpile of technology innovations at their technology transfer offices (TTOs). These offices are often in a dilemma on how best to monetize the technology innovations that are in their custody. While there have been many social science research methodology based studies on this subject under …

A Maturity Model For Innovation Management, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

No abstract provided.

Random Thoughts On Innovation, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

....We had to bring about an organizational innovation by reengineering the organization itself!!! The late 1990s saw us redefine the mission of the organization to be user and market centric aiming to produce solutions with a 10X difference. We had to create a program that will allow promising technologies and solutions created by engineers and scientists who were passionate to see their works utilized by the world. This required transforming a quasi-academic publicly funded lab into an engine that would generate new businesses. The transformation was not easy. This was also about the time when the dot com bubble was …

Re-Engineering Xid Technologies - From Enterprise To Consumer Markets, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

Several studies have addressed the process of taking ideas to markets but few have shared the experiences of start up companies that have reexamined their product strategies and repositioned their products and services for better revenues and profits. This paper reports the efforts related to repositioning of XID technologies, a start up company, into new markets while continuing to exploit its core technical competencies.

Crossing The Chasm: The Xid Technologies Story, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, Roberto Mariani

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

XID Technologies is a face processing start up company built initially around a disruptive face recognition technology. The technology innovation came from Kent Ridge Digital Labs, a publicly funded software research laboratory in Singapore. Face recognition is the least intrusive and harmless among the various biometric solutions available in the market. The basic approach to human face recognition is to identify a robust feature set that was unique enough to differentiate amongst the many millions of human faces that the system was required to verify. The technology innovation used by XID framed the problem differently and thereby overcame the challenges …

Designing The Dynamics Of Service Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

No abstract provided.

Redefining Medical Tourism, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

No abstract provided.

Readings In Innovation, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This is a collection of practice oriented papers that I had written from 2005 – 2010 and published in relevant conferences. The papers were written primarily to share my experiences as an innovator and an innovation manager over thirty five years of my professional life. They are a collection of frameworks, heuristic algorithms and processes that I have penned down from my experience. They are neither theories nor only options available to innovators and innovation managers. This is yet another offering in the world of “Innovation Buffet” that innovators could consume. The sole purpose in compiling these papers is to …

Bridging Academic And Industry Innovation Networks, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

No abstract provided.

Designing The Value Curve For Your Next Innovation, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU

This paper introduces an additional feature to the Strategy Canvas and Value Curve that will make innovation designers more effective. The new feature is to let the innovators carry out the designs of their new innovations taking into account both the cost of improving the quality of a parameter that the users value highly and the savings accrued from the drop in provisioning for parameters that users place less emphasis in an innovation.

Achieving Supply Chain Integration Using Rfid Technology: The Case Of Emerging Intelligent B-To-B E-Commerce Processes In A Living Laboratory, S. Fosso Wamba

Dr Samuel Fosso Wamba

Purpose: Despite the high operational and strategic potentials of RFID technology, very little studies have been conducted about its role as enabler of supply chain integration to achieve high-level operational efficiency. Therefore, this study is an initial effort towards bridging the existing knowledge gap in the literature. Design/methodology: This exploratory research was conducted in one retail supply chain. A multi-method approach combining a longitudinal real-life case study and a methodology integrating several steps, including a “Living Laboratory” strategy was used and involved all members of a product line to analyze in terms of their contributing activities and their interface with …

Cognitive Processes In Object-Oriented Requirements Engineering Practice: Analogical Reasoning And Mental Modelling, Linda Dawson

Associate Professor Linda Dawson

This paper presents a background in cognitive processes such as problem solving and analogical reasoning for considering modeling from an object-oriented perspective within the domain of requirements engineering. The paper then describes a research project and the findings from a set of four cases which examine professional practice from perspective of cognitive modeling for object-oriented requirements engineering. In these studies, it was found that the analysts routinely built models in their minds and refined them before committing them to paper or communicating these models to others. The studies also showed that objectoriented analysts depend on analogical reasoning where they use …

Designing Is Service Strategy: An Information Acceleration Approach, Tim Coltman

Tim Coltman

Information technology-based innovation involves considerable risk requiring insight and foresight; yet our understanding of the way in which managers develop the insight to support new breakthrough applications is limited and remains obscured by high levels of technical and market uncertainty. This paper applies discrete choice analysis to support improved empirical explanation of how and why decisions are made in information systems. A new experimental method based on information acceleration is also applied to improve prediction of alternative IS service strategies. Both explanation and prediction are important to IS research and these two methods complement each other in behaviourally sound ways. …

Uncovering Europe’S Best Goalscorers From The 2009-2010 Season, Joel Oberstone

Joel Oberstone

The search for great goalscorers in football has been traditionally tunnel-visioned. Prestigious individual football awards, such as the Golden Boot and the Ballon d’Or, are almost automatically given to the player with the highest goal count. Simple. Nothing usually complicated about this selection process. Except, this one-dimensional approach may be missing some less-then-obvious gems of goalscoring by not considering the overall contributions a player makes to his team’s offensive performance as indicated by more subtle measures.

The contributions made during the 2009-2010 season by the 20 leading goal scorers from each of the six most prestigious football leagues in Europe—the …

China–Us Scientific Collaboration In Nanotechnology: Patterns And Dynamics, Li Tang, Philip Shapira

Li Tang

This paper examines the rapid growth of China in the field of nanotechnology and the rise of collaboration between China and the US in this emerging domain. Chinese scientific papers in nanotechnology are analyzed to indicate overall trends, leading fields and the most prolific institutions. Patterns of China–US nanotechnology paper co-authorship are examined over the period 1990–2009, with an analysis of how these patterns have changed over time. The paper combines bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We find rapid development in the number of China–US co-authored nanotechnology papers as well as structural changes in array of collaborative nanotechnology sub-fields. Implications …

Worldcat Quality: An Oclc Report, Karen S. Calhoun, Glenn Patton

Karen S Calhoun

This report describes OCLC's steps to make it easier to find items in WorldCat and get them from OCLC member libraries. It begins with a review of WorldCat's unprecedented growth since 2008--growth which has challenged OCLC's programs for managing duplicate entries and library location (holdings) information. OCLC's 2010 implementation of new duplication detection and resolution (DDR) software helped; however, WorldCat quality needs to be further strengthened. The authors describe a special project—GLIMIR—and other WorldCat quality improvement projects intended to improve the clustering of WorldCat records and holdings for the same work, thus reducing the complexity of search result displays and …