Business Commons^™

Employing A Visual Representation Technique To Understand Undergraduates’ Perceptions Of Civic Engagement Across Countries, Sharon Feeney, John Hogan

Articles

Purpose – This paper aims to present an interpretation of freehand drawings produced by a sample of final year degree level learners in response to the question: “What is civic engagement”? The aim in using this approach, with final year degree learners from different countries, but pursuing the same degree, was to compare and contrast their understanding of civic engagement.

Design/methodology/approach – Learners completed their drawings and then discussed their drawings in small groups. All of their drawings were initially examined quantitatively before a sample of six drawings were selected for in-depth qualitative examination.

Findings – Using learner-generated drawings enables …

Entrepreneurial Process Studies Using Insider Action Research: Opportunities & Challenges For Entrepreneurship Scholarship, Kisito Futonge Nzembayie, Anthony Paul Buckley

Articles

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of adopting Insider Action Research (IAR) in entrepreneurial process studies. It employs a critical reflexive and narrative approach in examining our own lived experience in a real-time digital entrepreneurial journey spanning three years while triangulating it with experiential knowledge in another role as dissertation supervisors. Our live case illustrates that IAR, when it combines reflective practice, cooperative inquiry and design science, represents a suitable but under-exploited methodology for entrepreneurship scholarship. We build on this knowledge to offer a model for incorporating this methodology in entrepreneurship research and education. Consequently, we contribute towards responding …

What Do Professional Drivers Think About Their Profession? An Examination Of Factors Contributing To The Driver Shortage, Chao Ji Hyland, Declan Allen

Articles

A shortage of qualified and available professional drivers in the Freight, Transport, Distribution and Logistics (FTDL) sector is becoming an area of increasing concern in Ireland, and across the European mainland. This paper applies a two-stage research approach to address the issues causing the driver shortage and to analyse contributing factors. The findings reveal that remuneration and salaries are detrimental to recruitment and retention. While driver wellbeing in terms of physical and mental health is a major issue, little support is provided for training and education. There is a relationship between a driver’s age group and job satisfaction, and between …

The Dark Side Of Engaging With Social Networking Sites (Sns), Eileen O'Donnell, Liam O'Donnell

Books/Book Chapters

Although engagement with the deep or dark web may seem to some to be intimating or possibly threat- ening, the surface web similarly presents users with challenges which may also be detrimental to one’s peace of mind or health. This paper reviews the dark side of engaging with the surface web through the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS), the issues discussed in this paper will also be relevant to users’ engagement with the deep and dark web. While SNS have the potential to impact positively on ado- lescent’s health and well-being, the use of SNS has the potential for …

Democratizing Policy Debates: Experts, Media & Public Involvement In The Discourses Of Economy, Brendan K. O'Rourke, John Hogan, Joseph K. Fitzgerald

Other

No abstract provided.

Incentivizing And Re-Engaging Lapsed Health Club Members, Teresa Hurley, Corinne Faure, Seamus Kelly

Articles

Purpose – This quantitative research paper examined factors influencing re-engagement intentions and re-engagement behavior of lapsed health club members and identified which sales promotion incentives are most effective in re-engaging this lapsed member market. While previous studies examined reengagement intentions and re-engagement behavior in isolation, no research could be located which examined both simultaneously and the impact of promotion incentives in the health and fitness industry.

Design/methodology/approach – Study A (mail survey) examined re-engagement intentions of one hundred lapsed members of a medium size suburban health club. Study B (an experimental field study) measured actual true re-engagement behavior using price …

American Option Pricing: Optimal Lattice Models And Multidimensional Efficiency Tests, Qianru Shang, Brian Byrne

Articles

We introduce a set of lattice techniques to the Leisen‐Reimer and Tian binomial models with a view to accelerating computation time and improving accuracy of American Option valuation. A level of accuracy and efficiency combined can be achieved that surpass commonly used analytical analogues. We compare these efficient lattice models with analytical formulae for pricing different groups of options according to the deepness of American quality and moneyness. Our results reveal that counter to received wisdom, lattices constructs produce greater speed and accuracy for all option categories relative to the best performing closed form American analogues.

Co-Authoring Strategies In Business Research, Deirdre Mcquillan (Ed)

Books/Book Chapters

students to help assist their peers along the academic writing journey. This handbook addresses co-authoring strategies in business research. The students are discovering much to debate about co-authoring in academic writing. While co-authoring has shown to lead to higher research output and productivity for researchers, there are challenges. Not least ensuring a fair contribution of each author can be expected in an ethical approach. Recognising different co-authoring strategies is very helpful before embarking on a co-writing exercise. Strategic approaches to co-authoring might be because of multidisciplinary expertise that can speed up the socially constructed process of developing a paper. It …

How Principal Investigators’ Commercial Experience Influences Technology Transfer And Market Impacts, James Cunningham, Brendan Dolan, Matthias Menter, Conor O'Kane, Paul O'Reilly

Articles

Businesses can benefit from university–industry collaborations, yet they rarely take full advantage of them. Scientists who serve as principal investigators (PIs) act as the nucleus of university–industry collaborations and partner with industry to cocreate value. We conducted a case study of PIs at publicly funded research universities, institutes, and organizations in Ireland to explore how having commercial experience influences how PIs approach technology transfer and how they develop new business models, products, and services. We learned that PIs’ prior commercial experience influences how they approach their research, project work, and project selection and affects how they commercialize knowledge and outputs …

Community Engagement At Technological University Dublin: Report On Piloting The Tefce Toolbox., Emma O'Brien, Thomas M. Cooney, Ninoslav Šćukanec Schmidt

Reports

Traditionally, the three central roles identified for higher education are frequently listed as learning and teaching, research and scholarship and engagement with society. Within Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) we have recognised that these roles are interconnected and should not be approached in isolation and should not remain in silos. Rather, these areas should be integrated and embedded across core university activities. In doing so, community engagement becomes a real way of engaging students, faculty and community partners in areas of mutual interest and concern. For the student, it develops understanding, an opportunity for application, and a range of learning …

Zechipc: Time Series Interpolation Method Based On Lebesgue Sampling, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Matthieu Bellucci, Brian Mac Namee

Books/Book Chapters

In this paper, we present an interpolation method based on Lebesgue sampling that could help to develop systems based time series more efficiently. Our methods can transmit times series, frequently used in health monitoring, with the same level of accuracy but using much fewer data. Our method is based in Lebesgue sampling, which collects information depending on the values of the signal (e.g. the signal output is sampled when it crosses specific limits). Lebesgue sampling contains additional information about the shape of the signal in-between two sampled points. Using this information would allow generating an interpolated signal closer to the …

Valve Health Identification Using Sensors And Machine Learning Methods, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Wood, Galway Technology Park, Parkmore, Galway, Ireland, Brian Mac Namee

Books/Book Chapters

Predictive maintenance models attempt to identify developing issues with industrial equipment before they become critical. In this paper, we describe both supervised and unsupervised approaches to predictive maintenance for subsea valves in the oil and gas industry. The supervised approach is appropriate for valves for which a long history of operation along with manual assessments of the state of the valves exists, while the unsupervised approach is suitable to address the cold start problem when new valves, for which we do not have an operational history, come online.

For the supervised prediction problem, we attempt to distinguish between healthy and …

Unconditional Quantile Regression Analysis Of Uk Inbound Tourist Expenditures, Abhijit Sharma, Richard Woodward, Stefano Grillini

Articles

Using International Passenger Survey (2017) data, this paper employs unconditional quantile regression (UQR) to analyse the determinants of tourist expenditure amongst inbound tourists to the United Kingdom. UQR allows us to estimate heterogeneous effects at any quantile of the distribution of the dependent variable. It overcomes the econometric limitations of ordinary least squares and quantile regression based estimates typically used to investigate tourism expenditures. However, our results reveal that the effects of our explanatory variables change across the distribution of tourist expenditure. This has important implications for those tasked with devising policies to enhance the UK’s tourist flows and expenditures.

Active Learning In Accounting And The Impact On Student Engagement, Daniel King

Conference papers

This paper reports on a range of active learning and online strategies that were introduced into an introductory accounting module. Up until recently the traditional lecture format, where students sit passively and the lecturer delivers the lecture, has been the dominant format in higher education. However, research has shown that formats which provide students with a more active and engaged learning environment result in deeper learning The active learning strategies discussed in this paper were based around an "Active Learning Exercise" where students worked in a cooperative group environment. Before, during and after the "Active Learning Exercise" an additional range …

Knowledge Management In The Pharmaceutical Industry: Between Academic Research And Industry Regulations, Ahmed Ramy, Mohamed Af Ragab, Amr Arisha

Articles

The pharmaceutical sector is one of the pillars of the world’s economy. A significant proportion of its value lies in intellectual assets generated through continuous innovation and lengthy development cycles within a strictly regulated environment. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap between knowledge management (KM) as an expanding academic discipline in the pharmaceutical industry and at the same time a growing regulatory expectation. A systematic review of 137 refereed KM articles revealed six empirical research themes in the pharmaceutical industry. In a subsequent step, the discovered themes and subthemes were compared with the extant regulatory expectations …

Rethinking Research Methods In Operations And Supply Chain Management, Roberto Sarmiento, Garvan Whelan, Jan Sprenger

Practitioner Journals

A few years ago, a group of Operations Management scholars (MacCarthy et al. 2013) authored a thought-provoking paper entitled ‘The same old methodologies? Perspectives on OM research in the post-lean age’. Noting that the OM field is, by its very nature, close to practice and that the world is changing economically, technologically, politically and socially, they follow up with a pointed question (934): ‘Are our OM research methods fit for purpose for the new age?’ Amongst their many interesting views and opinions, they conclude that the OM profession must not make assertions regarding the supremacy of qualitative empirical studies over …

Supporting Academic Synergies Through Co-Evolution Of Teaching And Research Excellence From Evidence-Based Practice., Roisin Donnelly, Deirdre Mcquillan

Papers, presentations and other resources

Ireland’s first Technological University(TU) came into existence in January2019, mergingthree existinghigher education institutions. This work is set in the context of thisnew TU, and explores how teaching, learning and educational research can co-evolve to generate synergies supported by evidence-based practice of the core activity sets of the lecturer. In thedisciplinarydomain ofBusiness Education, theHead of Learning Development and Head ofResearch haveidentified thebenefits of aligningaspects oftheir work in supporting academic staff to plan and undertake structured inquiry into their teaching. This is predicated on our belief that the range of work involved in supporting teaching and research are not mutually exclusive. Having …

Supporting People From Marginalised Communities Into Employment, Thomas M. Cooney

Reports

Diversity means hiring difference rather than choosing the people whom you find ‘comfortable’ and who mirror your own experience and background. It means working against conscious and unconscious bias, educating yourself and proactively finding merit in people different to you. Inclusion means recognising intersectional identities – the sum of the whole person – that greatly improve the workplace with the different perspectives they bring to an organisation. You recognise the value of that person, equal to all others who work for and with you, and you treat them as equal in all respects. This is all more than box ticking …

Recognising The Place Of Food Tourism In Ireland: An Autoethnographic Perspective, John D. Mulcahy

Doctoral

This is an autoethnographic account, utilising prior publications, of my role in positioning food as a critical ingredient in Ireland’s tourism policy and strategy since 2009. As the architect and instigator of this project, my priorities were threefold: first, working from the ground up identifying local activists across the food tourism landscape to create an active and vibrant network; second, providing thought leadership for food tourism; and third, encouraging and funding others to conduct and disseminate similar research. I have chosen six book chapters, published as a result of my advocacy strategy, for this PhD by prior publication. They are …

Conducting And Analysing Semi-Structured Interviews: A Study Of Open Innovation In Food Firms In Ireland., Anushree Priyadarshini

Articles

This case study examines the use of semi-structured interviews that I used in my PhD research as a method to explore open innovation in food firms in Ireland. Literature in the field highlights that exploring innovation and the extent to which firms are open and collaborative with people outside of their organizations in conducting innovation requires detailed understanding of the concept in its natural settings. To interpret or make sense of the phenomena in terms of the meaning managers bring to it, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with managers in Ireland’s largest indigenous industry, the food and beverage sector. Demonstrating …

Corporate Governance, Measurement Of, Maeve O'Connell, Anne Marie Ward

Articles

The increased focus on good governance and the development of best practice guidelines, often supported by legislation, has been in response to corporate scandals, such as Enron and Worldcom in the early 2000s, and the 2008 banking crisis. Good governance is increasingly recognised as a process where the ‘best practices' of yesterday become the standard practices of today. This increased focus has also coincided with a worldwide movement for corporate reporting on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues and a growing demand within the investment industry for investment products that are socially responsible (Benn and Dunphy 2013). Sustainable development …

Analytical Framework And Student Perceptions: Assessing The Quality Of Doctoral Education In Accounting In Ireland, Anne Marie Ward, Louise Gorman, Niamh M. Brennan

Articles

To examine the quality of doctoral education in accounting in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Ireland, we develop an analytical framework from the relevant literature and the principles of quality doctoral education included in the Higher Education Authority’s (HEA) National Framework for Doctoral Education (NFDE). Our analytical framework identifies 16 measurable indicators of quality doctoral education classified into four dimensions: context, inputs, processes and outcomes. Compliance with the quality indicators is verified by coding HEI websites and prospectuses. Deeper insights on the indicators of quality doctoral education are obtained from semi-structured interviews with accounting doctoral students. Our findings shed valuable …

Stakeholder Engagement And The Future Of Irish Public–Private Partnerships, Gail Sheppard, Matthias Beck

Articles

Building on recent works that stress the importance of stakeholder engagement in partnerships, we propose a novel benchmarking framework for the evaluation of public–private partnerships. This framework describes mutuality and the preservation of organisational identity as the ideal characteristics of partnerships because they, in turn, encourage stakeholder support for public–private partnerships. Applying this framework to infrastructure public–private partnerships in Ireland, we note that mutual accountability has been weakened following the financial crisis. Meanwhile, con-sultation with clients such as key public–private partnership stakeholders, which would help articulate organisational identities, remains patchy across the education, justice
and health public–private partnership that we …

Risk Management And Hedging Approaches In Energy Markets, Jim Hanly

Articles

Energy based assets are showing increased susceptibility to volatility arising out of geo-political, economic, climate and technological events. Given the economic importance of energy products, their market participants need to be able to access efficient strategies to effectively manage their exposures and reduce price risk. This chapter will outline the key futures based hedging approaches that have been developed for managing energy price risk and evaluate their effectiveness. A key element of this analysis will be the breadth of assets considered. These include Crude and Refined Oil products, Natural Gas, and wholesale Electricity markets. We find significant differences in the …

The Capm, National Stock Market Betas, And Macroeconomic Covariates: A Global Analysis, Michael Curran, Adnan Velic

Articles

Using global data on aggregate stock markets, this paper finds that the capital asset pricing model fares much better than suggested previously. At shorter time horizons, our results also show that the positive risk-reward relation can collapse during times of high volatility. Compared to other countries, we retrieve evidence of lower systematic risks across frontier equity portfolios. We find that countries characterized by higher levels of openness, exchange rate volatility, and larger economic size are exposed to higher systematic covariances with the world stock market. Conversely, we obtain an inverse link between international reserves and systematic risks in national equity.

Entrepreneuring After 50: The Liminal Identity Transitions Of Older Emergent Entrepreneurs, Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Lucia Sell-Trujillo, Paul Donnelly

Articles

Entrepreneurship has been proposed as a solution to extending working lives. However, little is known about how older (50+) entrepreneurs manage their personal transitions into entrepreneurship. In this paper, we propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity paradoxes that older entrepreneurs experience during their transition into entrepreneurship and how they manage it. We use a qualitative study conducted over 14 months in the United Kingdom. Our analysis shows how older entrepreneurs confront identity paradoxes, interruptions and identity polarization in their attempts to shift from older identities and activity patterns into new ones. The entrepreneurs who …

Sme Manager Skills And Practices Survey (2020), Deirdre Mcquillan, Thomas M. Cooney, Ciara Nolan, Osa Godwin Osaghae, Wael Rashwan, Lorraine Sweeney

Research Instruments

Survey questions for assessing manager skills and practices in Small to Medium Enterprises under the Improving management development standards in SMEs in Ireland. A project funded by the European Union via the Directorate General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM) - No SRSS/C2019/051

Leading The Way: Investing In Management Development For Sme Productivity And Growth: Appendices, Expert Group On Future Skills Needs, Deirdre Mcquillan, Thomas Cooney, Ciara Nolan, Osa Godwin Osaghae, Lorraine Sweeney, Wale Rashwan

Reports

No abstract provided.

Leading The Way: Investing In Management Development For Sme Productivity And Growth: Report By The Expert Group On Future Skills Needs, Expert Group On Future Skill Needs, Deirdre Mcquillan, Thomas M. Cooney, Ciara Nolan, Osa Godwin Osaghae, Lorraine Sweeney, Wael Rashwan

Reports

The vision set out for this project is to support and enable a fresh approach to growth for SMEs in Ireland where management development is a key strategic priority for SMEs to drive productivity, sustainability, competitiveness and growth, and prepare for the future of work. This research, carried out between October 2019 and March 2020, identifies 7 key findings outlined in the report.

The Role Of Project Coordinators In European Commission Framework Programme Projects, James A. Cunningham, Paul O'Reilly, Daire Hooper, Daniel Nepelski, Vincent Van Roy

Reports

Programme Research and Innovation projects, a purposeful sample of European Framework Programme (FP) Project Coordinators (PC). The objective is to identify the practices and activities of PCs leading EU FP projects and to understand their impact on innovation outcomes. The survey findings confirm the lynchpin role of PCs in the European FP R&I projects. Their role clearly extends significantly beyond that identified in the Horizon 2020 User Guide which sees the PC as “the main contact point between the consortium and the Commission for a particular grant”. The PC is far more than simply “the proposal initiator in the submission …