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Achieving sustainable development in the twenty‐first century will be won or lost in the world's urban settlements, informed adaptation of existing stock is vital. Local Authorities are encouraging adaptation to reduce building related carbon emissions. The City of Melbourne aims to retrofit 1,200 central business district (CBD) properties by 2020 to become carbon neutral. As Australian cities date from the early 1800s and the adaptation of buildings is not as entrenched as in Europe, there is a pressing need for greater knowledge of what happens to buildings over time. The purpose of this study is to examine building adaptation from 1998 to 2008. This paper concentrates on the question; what is the pattern of adaptation within premium grade office buildings over time?

Using the Melbourne CBD as a case study, the research analysed all commercial building adaptations. After a uni‐variate statistical analysis of all premium office adaptations, two case studies were selected and profiled to discover what happened to them during the period and to ascertain what may be learned as a result to inform future adaptation strategies and policies.

This research has established that there is a high rate of adaptations to existing commercial buildings which leads to the disposal of functional and serviceable fixtures and fittings to landfill sites. This practice results in the unnecessary loss of embodied carbon which compromises efforts to deliver carbon neutrality in its widest sense. In the short term we need to learn to take advantage of existing behaviour patterns in respect of adaptation and to learn how buildings adapt and to incentivise the needed behavioural changes.

The selection of case studies allowed an examination of the data at a deeper level, though it is acknowledged that the depth does not equal that achieved in a purely qualitative approach whereby stakeholders are interviewed or surveyed directly and this is a limitation of the approach.

This research is based on an analysis of all adaptation activity within a distinct geographical area over an extended period of time. The analysis shows what does happen to a defined sector of the stock; in this case premium office property and highlights the types and patterns of adaptation as buildings evolve through their lifecycles.

This study aims to understand the expectations of elderly bank customers with mobile banking services and to measure its impact on their long-term satisfaction and continued intention. The study is based on two theories, expectations-confirmation theory (ECT) and hedonic adaptation theory.

A self-administered longitudinal survey was completed with a sample of 208 elder customers who do not use mobile banking services. Latent growth curve modelling approach was used to determine the change in their post-adoption experience over four time points.

Results of the study confirm that the use of mobile banking services prolongs the duration of customer satisfaction and continued intention level, post-adoption, reinforcing the hedonic adaptation theory.

Mobile banking services are going to be a significant component of the multichannel banking agenda. But it might be interesting to review other digital channels of banking services. The key contribution of this study is that it measures the expectation-confirmation link of elderly customers with mobile banking services. The study sheds light on factors that positively influence customer inclination and adoption of multichannel banking services in the long run, which is important for the commercial success of such channels.

The study highlights the importance of elder customers' pre-expectations, related dimensions which are important for post-adoption experiences of mobile banking services to improve customers' satisfaction and continued intention in the long run. This is crucial for the commercial success of banks.

This is the first such study that used the expectation confirmation model (ECT) and related it with hedonic adaptation theory to assess elderly customer's post-adoption satisfaction and continued usage of mobile banking services over time.

Adaptation is often seen as a key competitive advantage for outsourcing vendors. Outsourcing research has often assumed that vendor capabilities are static. However, as a result of uncertainties and/or changes in the client environment, vendors need to be able to adapt their outsourcing capabilities. The aim of our research is to compare two contrasting outsourcing approaches and illustrate how an adaptive approach may deliver better results for clients in the long term.

The paper uses a combination of literature and case study research. A retrospective case study approach was adopted, using interviews, observations and analysis of reports. Two case studies utilizing contrasting clients approaches were investigated and compared. In one of the case studies, the client reorganized activities first and then outsourced them, while in the other, the client did the reverse – outsourced first and then reorganized.

The findings indicate that reorganizing first and outsourcing afterwards contributes to a more controlled implementation, which results in a more defined and stable set of vendor outsourcing capabilities that contributed to short-term success. In contrast, outsourcing first and reorganizing later demonstrates a less controlled redesign of the client’s organizational structure, which requires a malleable set of outsourcing capabilities to accommodate future change. The latter strategic manoeuver results in an extended adaptation period, as some capabilities need to be developed over time. However, it may improve success over time as subsequent changes in the client environment can be catered for in a better way.

Only two explorative case studies were performed, limiting confidence in the degree of generalization of the results. We plea for more research on the effect of context dependency as various contingencies may impact the adaptation of outsourcing capabilities; for example, the volatility of the client’s market or the stability of the technology concerned.

When a client applies a proactive manoeuver, reorganizing first and then applying outsourcing, the number of adaptive capabilities required of the outsourcing vendor is reduced, limiting the risk for the client in the short term. In the longer term, however, subsequent change requirements may be less well-accommodated.

Strategic manoeuvers within an outsourcing context have received limited attention in research. As far as we know, this is the first empirical research that investigates the benefits of vendors having adaptive capability.

Examines the concept of adaptation as it relates to the start‐up and survival of small businesses over time. Adaptation is approached as the making of appropriate adjustments to the business and its strategic focus, as the venture evolves from an initial idea to a successful business. It is proposed that adaptation has three relevant components: the firm’s capacity to adapt, how much it actually adapts, and the strategies it relies upon to adapt. A conceptual model and hypotheses are proposed, relating the entrepreneur, the organizational context and the external environment to these three components of adaptation, and relating the components of adaptation to performance. Results from a cross‐sectional survey of small business founder/owners suggest that characteristics of the entrepreneur and levels of environmental change are especially important determinants of the three components of adaptation, and that levels of and strategies for adapting are related to organizational performance. A number of implications are drawn from the findings and suggestions are made for ongoing research.

This paper aims to study the adaptation of low grade commercial buildings for sustainability in Melbourne. Informed adaptation of existing stock is imperative because the challenge of attaining sustainable development in the 21st century will be won or lost in urban areas. Local authorities promote adaptation to reduce building related energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The City of Melbourne aims to retrofit 1,200 central business district (CBD) properties before 2020 as part of their carbon-neutral city strategy. Australian cities date from the early 1800s to the present day and the concepts of adaptation and evolution of buildings and suburbs is not as well-developed or entrenched as in other continents. As such, there is a pressing need for greater knowledge and awareness of what happens to buildings over time.

This research examines all building adaptation from 1998 to 2008 within the Melbourne CBD. This paper concentrates on the question: what is the pattern of adaptation within low grade office buildings over time? Using the Melbourne CBD as a case study, the research analysed all commercial building adaptations in Melbourne. Here a range of office building types are selected and profiled to discover what happened to them during the period and to ascertain what may be learned as a result to inform future adaptation strategies and policies.

Adaptation of existing buildings is vital to deliver the emission reductions required to transition to carbon-neutral urban settlements. In the short-term, it is opportune to capitalise on existing behaviour patterns in respect of adaptation and to “learn how buildings learn”, rather than seek to instigate major changes in behaviour.

The researcher acknowledges that the depth of analysis for each individual case does not attain levels achieved through a purely qualitative approach to data collection and that this is a limitation of this method of data collection.

Examination of adaptation patterns showed that the events were similar regardless of age or location and typically involved multiple adaptations to separate areas within buildings such as office floors, lobbies and foyers. Such a pattern misses the opportunity to benefit from economies of scale or to incorporate more extensive adaptations to reduce environmental impact of the building as a whole.

The patterns of ownership and relatively short-term multiple tenancies compound the piecemeal approach to adaptations in this sector of the market. Moving forward, a more holistic approach is required to optimise adaptation and sustainability benefits and to minimise unnecessary waste.

A real danger is that numerous adaptations over time which may seem “sustainable” within the context of the one adaptation may not be sustainable in the context of the entire building over the whole lifecycle or the city over the long–term, and this is a challenge we must attend to.

This paper aims to clarify how affect-based adaptation can improve implicit recognition of playing style of individuals during game sessions. This study presents the “Rush for Gold” game using dynamic difficulty adjustment of tasks based on both player performance and affectation inferred through electrodermal activity and facial expressions of the player. The game applies linear regression for calculating playing styles to be applied for achieving a style-based adaptation in other educational video games.

The experimental procedure included subject selection, demonstration, informed consent procedure, two game sessions in random order – one without and another with affective adaptation control – and post-game self-report. The experiment was conducted with participation of 30 master students and university lecturers in informatics.

This study presents experimental results concerning the impact of affective adaptation over playing style recognition, game session time, task’s effectiveness, efficiency and difficulty and, as well, player’s assessment of affectively adaptive gameplay obtained by an adaptation control panel embedded into the game and by post-game self-report.

The proposed adaptive game limits recognised styles to such based on the Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory model. Another limitation of the study is the relatively small number of participants constrained by the extended experimental procedure and the desktop game version.

The paper presents an original research on the effect of affect-based adaptation on a novel approach for implicit recognition of playing styles.

With rapid advances in wireless portable devices, ubiquitous computing seems becoming a reality everyday. The paper aims to explore the possibility of offering real‐time content adaptation on set of data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.

With different relative importance among the data sets, traffic control and discrimination with different operations on content adaptation are examined. Piggyback extension to users' preferences messages is proposed to smoothly enhance the active pervasive network infrastructure design.

Content adaptation is achieved transparently to both clients and server systems. Real‐time delivery services overcome stochastic network situations and abruptly changing bottleneck link bandwidth problem while retaining information integrity and preserving critical data at the best of the limit of an environment.

The paper explores real‐time content adaptation on data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.

This paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, to give some insight into competitive intelligence practices in a little‐explored area in the field of competitive intelligence: the higher education sector. Secondly, to find out more about the factors influencing competitive intelligence practices, since little research on this subject has been published.

The investigation used a mixed‐methods approach, including face‐to‐face, semi structured interviews with 47 university managers (degree coordinators, deans and vice‐rectors), followed by a semi‐structured questionnaire carried out with 400 degree coordinators and deans and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The interviews informed the questionnaire design.

The survey confirms the proposed framework's usefulness for analysing the enabler and inhibitor factors in an organisation for promoting efficient competitive intelligence practice and also gives some insight into which factors enable or inhibit the efficacy of competitive intelligence practices in Spanish universities.

The research focused on degree design adapted to the EHEA. A larger study designed to focus on other management areas in universities would provide a fuller picture of factors influencing competitive intelligence practices.

The findings indicate the areas where universities could plan actions to optimise intelligence activities, make the most of them and stand out from the rest.

This paper sets out a framework to describe factors related to intelligence function and cycle. In addition, the study reveals which indicators act as enablers or inhibitors for competitive intelligence practices and takes account of some of the particular features of the higher education sector.

This paper aims to advance an integrative perspective of dynamic relationality in negotiation research by providing a symbiotic solution to modeling the cultural adaptation process in intercultural negotiations.

Based on a solution-oriented symbiotic approach, the authors analyze negotiators’ combination strategy to propose the dynamic convergence of dyadic relational negotiation behavior (RNB) both as a descriptive framework and a prescriptive solution to behavioral congruence in intercultural negotiations. The authors use spreadsheet platform with artificial data input to simulate various RNB dynamics between negotiators.

The authors identify the research gap between the arelational, static paradigm in negotiation literature and the relational, dynamic reality in negotiation practices, develop a fourfold typology of the existing negotiation research and propose the construct of RNB. The authors simulate the dyadic dynamics of RNB in a symbiotic framework. Results illustrate varied dyadic patterns of convergent RNB dynamics, demonstrating the effectiveness of the symbiotic solution to achieving behavioral congruence under multiple conditions. Propositions are then presented to predict negotiators’ initial relational behavior, describe dyadic coevolution of RNB in intercultural negotiations and explicate the relevant chronic consequences regarding relational and economic capital.

This paper fills a significant knowledge gap in the extant cross-cultural negotiation literature by addressing dynamic behavioral adaptation through a relational lens. This symbiotic framework is both descriptive in its predictive capacity to simulate the complexity of non-linear negotiation environment, and prescriptive in its directive capacity to guide negotiators’ plan of action given each other’s observed behavior with a probability estimation.

An adaptive mesh refinement procedure that uses nodeless variables and quadratic interpolation functions is presented for analysing transient thermal problems. A temperature based finite element scheme with Crank‐Nicolson time marching is used to obtain the thermal solution. The strategies used for mesh adaptation, computing refinement indicators, and time marching are described. Examples in one and two dimensions are presented and comparisons are made with exact solutions. The effectiveness of this procedure for transient thermal analysis is reflected in good solution accuracy, reduction in number of elements used, and computational efficiency.