Search results

Although information technology (IT) governance and IT capability have been extensively examined, the impact of IT governance mechanisms on IT-enabled dynamic capability (ITDC) with moderators has received less attention. This study investigates how the impact of IT governance mechanisms on firm performance is achieved through an ITDC through the moderating role of IT governance decentralization and a turbulent environment.

This study extends from the traditional view of IT capabilities and integrates dynamic capability theory to propose that IT governance is vital for the ITDC. Path analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and moderation analysis were performed using partial least squares (Smart PLS 3.0) as the data analysis methods. This study empirically tests the proposed mediated moderation model by using data collected from 254 firms in China to test the hypotheses.

Significant and impactful relationships are found in the model that includes turbulent environment moderating effects. Contrary to expectations, IT governance decentralization is also significant but not very strong.

This study’s findings have implications for investigating IT governance, IT-enabled capabilities and moderators. Accordingly, this study has implications for board and executive management to capitalize on dynamic IT capability, to keep pace with the challenges and turbulent conditions associated with business needs and for the productivity paradox in the context of Chinese firms.

This country-specific research study theoretically contributes to the IT governance, dynamic capabilities and turbulent environment in the information systems literature and proposes many practical guides to the board and executive management of companies in the Chinese context.

Relationship management evolves with dynamic and complex environments of megaprojects. However, studies on the longitudinal measurement of relationship management performance for each stakeholder in dynamic and complex project environments are lacking. The purpose of this research is to propose an NK-network evolution model to evaluate stakeholder performance on relationship management in the development of megaprojects.

The model input includes the stakeholder-associated issues and stakeholders' relational strategies, the co-effects of which determine the internal effects of relationship management in megaprojects. The model processing simulates the stakeholder performance of relationship management under the dynamic and complex nature of megaprojects. The NK model shows the dynamic stakeholder interactions on relationship management, whereas the network model presents the complex stakeholder structures of the relationships between stakeholders and relevant issues. The model output is the evolution graph to reveal the weak stakeholder performance on relationship management in the timeline of the project duration.

The research finding reveals that all stakeholders experience the plunge of stakeholder performance of relationship management at the decision-making moment of the planning stage. Construction, environmental and pressure groups may experience the hardship of relationship management at the start of the construction stage. The government is likely to suffer difficulties in relationship management in the late construction stage. Local industry groups would face challenges in relationship management in the middle of the construction stage and handover stage.

The research provides a useful approach to measuring weak moments of relationship management for each stakeholder in various project phases, considering the dynamic and complex environments of megaprojects. The proposed model extends the current knowledge body on how to make project stakeholder analysis by modelling dynamic and complex environments of megaprojects, with bridging the knowledge domains of evolution modeling techniques and network methods.

With the increasing demands of industrial applications, it is imperative for robots to accomplish good contact-interaction with dynamic environments. Hence, the purpose of this research is to propose an adaptive fractional-order admittance control scheme to realize a robot–environment contact with high accuracy, small overshoot and fast response.

Fractional calculus is introduced to reconstruct the classical admittance model in this control scheme, which can more accurately describe the complex physical relationship between position and force in the interaction process of the robot–environment. In this control scheme, the pre-PID controller and fuzzy controller are adopted to improve the system force tracking performance in highly dynamic unknown environments, and the fuzzy controller is used to improve the trajectory, transient and steady-state response by adjusting the pre-PID integration gain online. Furthermore, the stability and robustness of this control algorithm are theoretically and experimentally demonstrated.

The excellent force tracking performance of the proposed control algorithm is verified by constructing highly dynamic unstructured environments through simulations and experiments. In simulations and experiments, the proposed control algorithm shows satisfactory force tracking performance with the advantages of fast response speed, little overshoot and strong robustness.

The control scheme is practical and simple in the actual industrial and medical scenarios, which requires accurate force control by the robot.

A new fractional-order admittance controller is proposed and verified by experiments in this research, which achieves excellent force tracking performance in dynamic unknown environments.

Resource allocation is challenged by dynamic environments where changes are frequent. The purpose of this paper is to identify resource allocation challenges and practices in service units that perform both project and non-project activities in dynamic environments. Its goal is to show that top-down mechanisms of project resource allocation need to be replaced by or supplemented with mechanisms that are more flexible.

A qualitative comparative case study was conducted in two service units of two project-based firms. The main source of data consisted of semi-structured interviews with 17 service managers and staff members.

This study shows that resource allocation is not necessarily a top-down process at all, and the practices are context-dependent. Two more flexible approaches are revealed – hybrid resource allocation and bottom-up resource allocation – as examples of managing resource allocation in service units that engage in projects under uncertain conditions. The results of the analysis highlight prioritisation and adapting to change and delay as the main issues that managers face in allocating resources to different types of projects and service activities in dynamic environments.

The two target companies chosen for the qualitative research design limit the analysis to project-based firms in a business-to-business context. Further, the viewpoint of the service unit is central to the study. Studying project resource allocation in different organisational contexts and uncovering the perspectives of product development and delivery units would offer promising directions for future research.

The study reveals that in dynamic project settings such as service organisations, top-down mechanisms of resource allocation need to be accompanied by other, more flexible approaches to ensure the sufficient resourcing of projects and related services in dynamic environments. Companies need to establish practices for resource allocation changes that are caused by re-prioritising tasks and accommodating changes and delays in their project and service activities.

Compared to a top-down perspective taken in previous research, the study proposes a more flexible approach for resource allocation in constantly changing environments with different project and service activities. Previous studies have focussed on resource competition between projects, placing project managers in the central role for resource allocation. By contrast, this study discusses hybrid and bottom-up resource allocation, both of which involve broader personnel engagement in resource allocation tasks, drawing on the experience of all employees.

The motion control of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) is a challenge in the industry of automation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a fuzzy inference system (FIS) based on sensory information for solving the navigation challenge of UGV in cluttered and dynamic environments.

The representation of the dynamic environment is a key element for the operational field and for the testing of the robotic navigation system. If dynamic obstacles move randomly in the operation field, the navigation problem becomes more complicated due to the coordination of the elements for accurate navigation and collision-free path within the environmental representations. This paper considers the construction of the FIS, which consists of two controllers. The first controller uses three sensors based on the obstacles distances from the front, right and left. The second controller employs the angle difference between the heading of the vehicle and the targeted angle to obtain the optimal route based on the environment and reach the desired destination with minimal running power and delay. The proposed design shows an efficient navigation strategy that overcomes the current navigation challenges in dynamic environments.

Experimental analyses are conducted for three different scenarios to investigate the validation and effectiveness of the introduced controllers based on the FIS. The reported simulation results are obtained using MATLAB software package. The results show that the controllers of the FIS consistently perform the manoeuvring task and manage the route plan efficiently, even in a complex environment that is populated with dynamic obstacles. The paper demonstrates that the destination was reached optimally using the shortest free route.

The paper represents efforts toward building a dynamic environment filled with dynamic obstacles that move at various speeds and directions. The methodology of designing the FIS is accomplished to guide the UGV to the desired destination while avoiding collisions with obstacles. However, the methodology is approached using two-dimensional analyses. Hence, the paper suggests several extensions and variations to develop a three-dimensional strategy for further improvement.

This paper presents the design of a FIS and its characterizations in dynamic environments, specifically for obstacles that move at different velocities. This facilitates an improved functionality of the operation of UGV.

The purpose of this study is to review the literature of enterprise capability, which comprises the three dimensions of operational, dynamic and improvisational capabilities, and analyze their differences. Through this review, the authors aim to enrich the enterprise capability theory and provide some directions for entrepreneurial practice in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

The study is based on a systematic review of the literature on enterprise capability as it relates to entrepreneurial firms, following the content analysis approach as described in Gaur and Kumar (2018).

The authors’ conceptual model compares the capability levels of startups and mature enterprises and presents a model for the dynamic evolution of the capability levels of enterprises. In doing so, this study enriches the enterprise capability theory and lays the theoretical foundation for the follow-up empirical research. The authors also provide guidance for entrepreneurial practice in the face of VUCA.

In recent years, scholars have begun to explore the issue of enterprise capability in the field of entrepreneurship. However, because of different research perspectives, one lacks clarity on the concept and dimensions of enterprise capability. The capability theory is relatively weak in guiding the practice of enterprises; enterprises lack effective response strategies in a changing environment, and the failure rate of startups is high. This study aims to develop a deeper understanding of enterprise capability.

Building on resource dependence theory and the dynamic institution-based view, this paper examines the influence of government affiliations on firm product innovation in a dynamic institutional environment.

Using unique panel data of Chinese manufacturing firms covering a period of 12 years (1998–2009) with 2,564,547 firm-year observations, this study chooses the panel Tobit model with random effects to explore the influence of government affiliations on firm product innovation, followed by an analysis to test the moderation effects of dynamic institutional environments.

The study findings suggest that Chinese firms with higher-level government affiliations have a relatively high product innovation performance. It finds that this innovation stimulating effect is contingent on the dynamic nature of the institutional environment. To be specific, a high speed of institutional transition may depress the positive innovation effects of government affiliations, while a more synchronized transition speed of institutional components may enhance the positive innovation effects of firms' government affiliations.

This study adds to a better understanding of the drivers of product innovation in Chinese firms that are situated in environments that are characterized by institutional change, using and contributing to resource dependence theory and the dynamic institution-based view.

In the modern era of e-grocery, attended home delivery (AHD) has been identified as a crucial part of the last-mile delivery problem. This paper aims to deal with a real-life last-mile-delivery problem in the context of the Indian public distribution system (PDS). The authors identified two different environments for the said AHD problem and proposed two different approaches to address the issue under these problem settings.

In this study, the authors first consider the problem in a static environment and propose an iterated local search (ILS) integrated with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) meta-heuristic algorithm to obtain a routing solution. Thereafter, they extend the study in a dynamic environment where new delivery requests occur dynamically and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. For the dynamic case, multiple scenarios for the occurrence of delivery requests are considered to determine decisions regarding the opportunity to include a new request into the current solution.

By computational experiments, the authors show that the proposed approach performs significantly well for large size problem instances. They demonstrate the differences and advantages of the dynamic problem setting through a set of different scenarios. Also, they present a comparative analysis to show the benefits of adopting the algorithm in dynamic routing scenarios.

Future research may extend the scope of this study by incorporating stochastic delivery failure probabilities and customer behavior affecting the delivery response. Also, the present study does not take inventory policies at the depot into consideration. It will be of interest to see how the system performs under the uncertainty of supply from the depot. Despite the limitations, the authors believe that this study provides food for thought and encouragements for practitioners.

This study shows the benefits of adopting an AHD problem in a dynamic setting in terms of customer service as compared to a traditional static environment. The authors clearly demonstrate the differences and advantages of the dynamic problem setting through a set of different scenario analysis.

This paper investigates a real-life AHD problem faced by the Department of Food, Supply and Consumer Affairs, India. The findings of this study will be of particular interest to the policy-makers to build a more robust PDS in India.

The study is unique and highly relevant for real-world applications and can help build a more robust AHD system. Also, the proposed solution approaches to aid the problem in both static and dynamic routing scenarios will be of particular interest to practitioners.

To realize stable and precise localization in the dynamic environments, the authors propose a fast and robust visual odometry (VO) approach with a low-cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in this study.

The proposed VO incorporates the direct method with the indirect method to track the features and to optimize the camera pose. It initializes the positions of tracked pixels with the IMU information. Besides, the tracked pixels are refined by minimizing the photometric errors. Due to the small convergence radius of the indirect method, the dynamic pixels are rejected. Subsequently, the camera pose is optimized by minimizing the reprojection errors. The frames with little dynamic information are selected to create keyframes. Finally, the local bundle adjustment is performed to refine the poses of the keyframes and the positions of 3-D points.

The proposed VO approach is evaluated experimentally in dynamic environments with various motion types, suggesting that the proposed approach achieves more accurate and stable location than the conventional approach. Moreover, the proposed VO approach works well in the environments with the motion blur.

The proposed approach fuses the indirect method and the direct method with the IMU information, which improves the localization in dynamic environments significantly.

The highly unpredictable, complex, and dynamic business environment forces companies to innovate constantly. One organizational response to coping with environmental pressures is organizational ambidexterity, that is, the ability to pursue simultaneously the exploitation of existing capabilities and the exploration of new opportunities. It has an impact on the way of working, and consequently, organizations need to reevaluate their talent strategies. With this conceptual contribution, we first provide a fresh view on talent and talent management (TM) by suggesting an ambidextrous TM approach, including novel TM practices that have been rather neglected in the so far dominant traditional TM approach. It centers on the system-controlling element of an ambidextrous mindset. Second, in a theory-based framework, we explain how dynamic TM capabilities (hybrid, dual, and ambidextrous TM), which represent processes for deploying, developing, and shaping talent, can contribute to gaining competitive advantages in various ambidextrous structures reflecting the complexity and dynamism of and within human resource (HR) ecosystems. The authors advance the under-researched process perspective on TM by using the lenses of the HR ecosystems discussion, insights from a dynamic view on the person–environment fit, and dynamic capabilities. The authors conclude with a broad agenda for future research in TM in dynamic environments.