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By using the lens of effectuation and causation, this paper aims at exploring how the team is formed in high-tech academic spinoffs, by looking specifically at decisional heuristics in an academic context. Indeed, the team composition is a critical issue for the subsequent growth of the academic new venture: on the one hand, the scientific-centred knowledge of the academic entrepreneurs is one of the main elements that lay the foundation for the new venture; on the other hand, it has been widely recognized that the lack of market-related knowledge and experience often has detrimental effects on performance. Decisive is then to explore how team decisions pertaining to the team formation process are taken.

A qualitative methodology based on multiple case studies is adopted under an abductive approach.

Results shed light on how decisions pertaining to team formation are taken by academic entrepreneurs and with what effects on team composition, a fundamental element to foster the growth of academic new ventures. Specifically, this study derives some propositions about the adoption of effectuation and causation in the team formation process, their occurrence and sequence in the light of the scientific context in which academic new ventures spin out and the effects on the team composition.

This study contributes to the debate on academic entrepreneurs’ decisional heuristic and the use of effectuation or causation in the early stages of an academic new venture, by focusing on the team formation process. This study specifically considers three temporal micro-phases – the selection of founders before inception, the appointment of top management teams, and the integration of early employees after the inception – and whether the academic context influences the decisional heuristics. Managerial implications are also derived.

This paper aims to propose an integrated methodology for evaluating academic spin-offs (ASOs) for supporting both the development phase and performance evaluation. The ASOs have peculiar characteristics compared to other start-up companies and the debate on their evaluation is still open.

The proposed methodology, adopting a lean approach, faces the typical problems that characterize the growth of an ASO: the excessive attention to the technological aspects with respect to the commercial and managerial ones; and the need for evaluation systems that try to evaluate all risk areas and to highlight any misalignment. The methodology was built also starting from the results of an Erasmus + research project, co-funded by the European Commission, called spin-off lean acceleration.

The methodology proposes to monitor the main risk areas (market, technological, implementation, governance and financial). For each of these areas, at first, a framework and a checklist are proposed for supporting the qualitative assessment of the potential of each areas. In the second part, a set of metrics for monitoring the performances and to understand if the spinoff is developing in the right direction is proposed. Moreover, the methodology was applied to the spin-offs at the University of Calabria (Italy), and the paper reports the first results obtained.

A new canvas model (lean acceleration canvas), more specific and suited to the context of ASOs, was developed and tested. A lean approach has been adopted also for understanding the weakness of traditional methods. The proposed methodology could be used by the technology transfer offices in their institutional activity of supporting ASOs.

This exploratory study examined informal learning opportunities that exist within student organizations. The researchers specifically isolated academic organizations and the interactions between students and faculty that may occur in this context. Findings indicate that 81% of participants experienced interactions with faculty within the context of their academic organizations and students who hold leadership positions are more likely to experience interactions with faculty compared to general members. The results suggest that informal learning opportunities do exist and can be identified by using the Informal and Incidental Learning Model (Marsick & Watkins, 2001). By identifying these opportunities leadership educators can design purposeful activities within student organizations to better promote development and growth.

Jean-François Richard is the Director of Marketing for Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), a major organizer of sporting events in Europe, including the Tour de France: in this interview, we learn more about the Tour de France and the different events organized by ASO.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a scheme that allows users to interactively explore relations between entities in knowledge bases (KBs). KBs store a wide range of knowledge about real-world entities in a structured form as (subject, predicate, object). Although it is possible to query entities and relations among entities by specifying appropriate query expressions of SPARQL or keyword queries, the structure and the vocabulary are complicated, and it is hard for non-expert users to get the desired information. For this reason, many researchers have proposed faceted search interfaces for KBs. Nevertheless, existing ones are designed for finding entities and are insufficient for finding relations.

To this problem, the authors propose a novel “relation facet” to find relations between entities. To generate it, they applied clustering on predicates for grouping those predicates that are connected to common objects. Having generated clusters of predicates, the authors generated a facet according to the result. Specifically, they proposed to use a couple of clustering algorithms, namely, agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) and CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor decomposition which is one of the tensor decomposition methods.

The authors experimentally show test the performance of clustering methods and found that AHC performs better than tensor decomposition. Besides, the authors conducted a user study and show that their proposed scheme performs better than existing ones in the task of searching relations.

The authors propose a relation-oriented faceted search method for KBs that allows users to explore relations between entities. As far as the authors know, this is the first method to focus on the exploration of relations between entities.

Different countries have responded to the pandemic with distinct domestic and international travel restrictions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the stringency of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) countermeasures in Japan against their G20 cohorts. Primary data were monitored at a ski resort in Kyushu regarding the social acceptance of initial COVID-19 countermeasures, ranging from hygiene and local “lockdowns” to border control measures.

The stringency of the COVID-19 countermeasures was examined using data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) and triangulated with the early stage social acceptance of survey respondents in Aso Kuju National Park in February 2020 that consisted of 165 valid Japanese language questionnaires.

An one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) identified significant differences in social acceptance for countermeasures, with more-concerned respondents agreeing more strongly with “low-tech” health protocols, such as washing hands (M = 3.7) or wearing a mask (3.4). More concerned visitors were significantly more likely to modify their travel plans (2.9) or cancel their trip altogether (2.7). Male day trippers were less likely to be concerned by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper's originality is derived from a triangulation of the stringency of Japan's initial COVID-19 countermeasures via a combination of comparison with G20 cohorts and social acceptance of domestic snowboarders and skiers. Moreover, by shining a light on the trade-off between public health and human rights, the paper provides a current review of the ethical dimension of a travel restriction debate that is often overlooked in the ongoing pandemic.

A handful of models and measures currently exist for the purpose of assessing student capacity for leading social change. Ample research suggests that students of different racial and gender identity groups exhibit various understandings, motivations, and behaviors related to social engagement and transformation, yet few studies take into consideration the potential for diverse students to interpret social-change-related survey scale items differently. Using a critical quantitative approach, this study compares factor loading patterns of the Social Issues Advocacy Scale (SIAS; Nilsson, et al., 2011) across eight race/gender subgroups to test the extent to which the factor structure remains invariant. Findings suggest that intersections of race and gender do influence how scale items cluster together. This study lends support for critical quantitative research designs that examine social phenomena using a specific-group approach, and calls for scholars to consider the cultural validity of scales used to measure capacity for social justice leadership.

This paper explores Lean Six Sigma principles and the DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) methodology to propose a new Lean Six Sigma 4.0 (LSS 4.0) framework for employee occupational exams and address the real-world issue of high-variability exams that may arise.

This study uses mixed methods, combining qualitative and quantitative data collection. A detailed case study assesses the impact of LSS interventions on the exam management process and tests the applicability of the proposed LSS 4.0 framework for employee occupational exams.

The results reveal that changing the health service supplier in the explored organization caused a substantial raise in occupational exams, leading to increased costs. By using syntactic interoperability, lean, six sigma and DMAIC approaches, improvements were identified, addressing process deviations and information requirements. Implementing corrective actions improved the exam process, reducing the number of exams and associated expenses.

It is important to acknowledge certain limitations, such as the specific context of the case study and the exclusion of certain exam categories.

The practical implications of this research are substantial, providing organizations with valuable managerial insights into improving efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring regulatory compliance while managing occupational exams.

This study fills a research gap by applying LSS 4.0 to occupational exam management, offering a practical framework for organizations. It contributes to the existing knowledge base by addressing a relatively novel context and providing a detailed roadmap for process optimization.