Search results

The study aims to investigate whether and how digital transformation, in terms of digital collaboration, joint efforts with internal/external partners to achieve common goals and the adoption of digital tools supporting this practice, affect social innovation capital in the context of small innovative enterprises (SIEs).

The research hypotheses derived from the analysis of the literature, evaluating how sharing resources, sharing intensity and digital patterns affect the collective capacity of SIEs to innovate, were investigated by applying multiple regression analysis. Data were retrieved from a sample of Italian SIEs through an online survey.

The main findings suggest that the propensity to spread resources and the sharing intensity positively affect the collective capacity of SIEs to innovate. Also, the effect of resources sharing on collective innovation increases as more digital patterns are used as tools. The connection is weaker for the intensity of resources sharing.

The study is conducted on Italian SIEs, a particular cluster of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It would be interesting to compare and contrast the results of an analysis of a large sample of international companies, of different sizes and belonging to digital and non-digital sectors.

The results enrich the existing literature on social innovation capital, by clarifying its competitive benefits on the characteristic context of the SIEs and underlining the mediating role of the digital patterns.

In introducing e-reserves as an added service of the De La Salle University (DLSU) libraries, the purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices of handling e-reserves and its legal implications as one of the factors that might affect the introduction, development and implementation of such service.

Four universities were considered based from the 2013 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) university rankings in Asia. Only one academic library was maintaining an e-reserve system. It was consulted to know more about their e-reserve practices.

The paper recommends to prepare the relevant e-reserve guidelines before it fully operates. Moreover, the Libraries should also collaborate with the office handling learning management systems so as to decide on how to manage the e-reserves. A needs assessment survey for faculty members is also being prepared so as to solicit responses from the teaching faculty if e-reserves is possible for DLSU to be established.

The paper attempts to document the existing e-reserve system in Philippine academic libraries.

The purpose of this study was to analyse institutional strategy documents relating to technology-enhanced learning.

In total, 84 documents were sampled from 71 leading higher education institutions (HEIs), identified through the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings 2018. Qualitative content analysis with a directed approach was used to analyse the strategy documents. The specific theory used was disruptive innovation. The use of “innovation”, or variants thereof, was counted in each document. Ten case studies from the sample were used for content analysis.

Technology-enhanced learning-related strategy documents are conservative, advocating the more efficient use of existing technologies, or the incremental enhancement of existing technologies, but not transformation through technology.

By evaluating the extent to which selected institutional strategies engage with innovation in technology-enhanced learning, this study argues HEIs advocate sustaining innovation or efficiency innovation to a greater extent than disruptive innovation.

Academic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and regional biases and so forth. This research work is intended to enhance creditability of the ranking process by using the objective indicators based on publicly verifiable data sources.

The proposed ranking methodology – OpenRank – drives the objective indicators from two well-known publicly verifiable data repositories: the ArnetMiner and DBpedia.

The resultant academic ranking reflects common tendencies of the international academic rankings published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (SRC), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). Evaluation of the proposed methodology advocates its effectiveness and quick reproducibility with low cost of data collection.

Implementation of the OpenRank methodology faced the issue of availability of the quality data. In future, accuracy of the academic rankings can be improved further by employing more relevant public data sources like the Microsoft Academic Graph, millions of graduate's profiles available in the LinkedIn repositories and the bibliographic data maintained by Association for Computing Machinery and Scopus and so forth.

The suggested use of open data sources would offer new dimensions to evaluate academic performance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and having comprehensive understanding of the catalyst factors in the higher education.

The research work highlighted the need of a purposely built, publicly verifiable electronic data source for performance evaluation of the global HEIs. Availability of such a global database would help in better academic planning, monitoring and analysis. Definitely, more transparent, reliable and less controversial academic rankings can be generated by employing the aspired data source.

We suggested a satisfying solution for improvement of the HEIs' ranking process by making the following contributions: (1) enhancing creditability of the ranking results by merely employing the objective performance indicators extracted from the publicly verifiable data sources, (2) developing an academic ranking methodology based on the objective indicators using two well-known data repositories, the DBpedia and ArnetMiner and (3) demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology on the real data sources.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the internal and external factors related to the disclosure of environmental information in universities which reflect the actions carried out in these universities.

Taking as reference the first 200 universities in the Shanghai ranking, several factors associated with the degree of environmental information disclosure in universities – governance dimension, the relationship and participation of stakeholders, position and prestige as signs of the quality of the institution and cultural concern in the university’s country for the environment – are analysed.

The results obtained show that the size of the leadership team, stakeholder participation, the position of the university in rankings and cultural concern in the university’s country for the environment are determining factors in the university’s environmental actions and, consequently, in their disclosure. Other factors – such as the size of the university, the level of self-financing and financial autonomy – do not affect the disclosure of environmental information.

Scant research exists on the environmental commitments of universities; this paper aims to fill that gap. Their role as the main channel of research and as instructors of future professionals makes them points of reference in society. Research on university ranking has traditionally focussed on teaching and research results, but environmental issues are becoming increasingly important. This paper enumerates the factors that influence the dissemination of environmental information in the most prestigious universities. This research also provides an original approach by considering not only top-down but also bottom-up strategies through communication channels and the incidence of cultural factors.