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The narrative below has been written to illustrate various difficulties which may arise, in regard to copyright, in the work of Aslib members. The events described are all imaginary and all names are fictitious.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of innovation management in the eighteenth century in the context of the search for precision time keeping in the watch making industry. In particular it looks at how knowledge was managed and transferred among interested stakeholders in the process.

The paper reviews the published horological literature on the subject and considers it within modern theories relating to the management of innovation.

This paper illustrates that personal contact and collaboration is important to the development of innovation. The paper highlights the importance of networking in the process of innovation and collaboration as a means to share and develop ideas. Collaboration with organisations working in adjacent technologies was found to be present and competition promoted by the incentive of financial reward was found to be a motivator factor for moving innovation forward.

This paper will be helpful to academics who study innovation history as well as current innovation management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In the early eighteenth century, an English carpenter and clock maker, John Harrison, was awarded a phenomenal sum of money – £15,000 – when he made a great scientific and technological breakthrough. Harrison invented the marine chronometer which determined ships' longitude at sea. The Longitude Prize was established after the likes of Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton had failed to come up with a solution. Recalling the story in the Harvard Business Review, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhari make the point that this is really an early example of what we now call crowdsourcing – getting ideas or creating new products and services by enlisting the help of a large body of people.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to present a precise comparison between a pre-determined time rules and the evaluation performed with the help of a manual chronometer using data from a line assembly in an automotive industry besieged in the state of Paraná, Brazil. Nowadays, it is possible to verify several tools of measurement of task times, some taking less time and causing less wear of the evaluator than others, but not being in accordance with the real conditions of the workers of a certain industry.

The developed paper has its methodology based on two methods of time analysis, one of them being an adaptation of the MODular Arrangement of Predeterminated Time Standard (MODAPTS) method – called MODAPTS 2. This method is used by the industry in analyzed in this work and the other through the use of simple manual timing, through the digital timer, of the stages developed in a workstation.

The study shows that for each operation analyzed, thus presenting a situation of minimum waste, it becomes possible to judge which reasons exist for the operator during manual timekeeping not to reach the optimum times generated by the system of pre-determined times and movements (PMTSs) questioned.

This study is conducted on an automotive enterprise in a period of confidentiality, which means that only a single workstation is able to be studied. This means that the comparison obtained between the time measurements methods used, and the evaluation of the MODAPTS is carried out with the best possible movements and gestures, disregarding then that the wastes can still be postulated to the whole assembly line.

With the automation in industry, where assemble tasks are usually developed manually, it is believed possible to discard the option of measuring task times in its classic and manual form, using a timer, yet during this process, there will be variables that may not be considered by pre-determined measurements methodologies. The work developed by this paper presents different variables that are not examined by the methods of PMTS, not frequently seen in the literature, as well as the difference that occurs between the measurement of times with stopwatch and the use of PMTS, which, in its original form, disregards the wastes that the operator has in their movements.

MR. R. A. Butler's remark about doubling our living standards within the next twenty‐five years has a secure place in contemporary political obiter dicta. It suffers from being the kind of comment that is remembered long after any qualifying context has been forgotten.

Activities such as making personal phone calls, surfing on the internet, booking personal appointments or chatting with colleagues may or may not deviate attentions from work. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine gender differences and motivations behind personal activities employees do at work, as well as individuals’ perception of the time they spend doing these activities.

Data were obtained from 35 individuals (M _age=37.06 years; SD=7.80) from a Portuguese information technology company through an ethnographic method including a five-day non-participant direct observation (n=175 observations) and a questionnaire with open-ended questions.

Results revealed that during a five-working-day period of eight hours per day, individuals spent around 58 minutes doing personal activities. During this time, individuals engaged mainly in socializing through conversation, internet use, smoking and taking coffee breaks. Results revealed that employees did not perceive the time they spent on non-work realted activities accurately, as the values of these perceptions were lower than the actual time. Moreover, through HLM, the findings showed that the time spent on conversation and internet use was moderated by the relationship between gender and the leisure vs home-related motivations associated with each personal activity developed at work.

This study contributes to the literature on human resource management because it reveals how employees often perceive the time they spend on non-work related activities performed at work inaccurately. This study highlights the importance of including individual motivations when studying gender differences and personal activities performed at work. The current research discusses implications for practitioners and outlines suggestions for future studies.

Under this heading are published monthly news of recent professional appointments, industrial developments and business changes, etc.

In this issue of Aslib Proceedings we are glad to be able to include papers from two of the series of winter meetings held in London by Aslib, papers given at the Annual General Meetings of the Northern and Scottish Branches, and three contributions to MEMBERS' FORUM.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the reader, who may have little or no knowledge of qualimetry, with first, an outline of the history and development of this relatively new scientific discipline, which deals with the methodology of and problems in the integral quantitative assessment of the quality of objects of any nature: things and processes, products of labour and products of nature, whether material or ideal, animate or inanimate, simple or complex, natural or man‐made, etc.; and second, the most common errors that occur in the design and application of quality assessment techniques, which result in the depreciation of findings obtained by these techniques, and methods for eliminating such errors.

The methodology used to obtain the results described in the paper is based on a deductive‐axiomatic approach and, occasionally, on expert judgements.

The findings presented in the paper can raise the research community's awareness of the great opportunities that the qualimetry toolbox offers them in addressing their problems; at the same time, they can help them to avoid many pitfalls.

The information found in the paper broadens the range of business problems and problem‐solving procedures that can make use of qualimetric techniques and approaches.

The vast majority of the readers of this journal will find information contained in this paper both novel and potentially useful.