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This study aims to build an integrated model for information technology (IT)/information system (IS) team exploration and exploitation innovation in the business-to-business (B2B) enterprise context by empirically investigating the mediating role of tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation and exploring the behavior approach of servant leaders for IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation.

The authors' analysis was supported by 182 enterprise-IT/IS teams (403 participants) in Taiwan. The authors used a questionnaire and Structural Equation Model (SEM)-SmartPLS to validate the development model. This study examines IT/IS exploration-exploitation innovation using a combination of quantitative survey research and qualitative case studies.

The specific roles of direct and mediating effects for two innovations of IT/IS team exploration and exploitation were investigated. The findings show a direct effect of knowledge creation (tacit and explicit) on IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation. Servant leader behavior positively influences tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation practices, IT/IS team exploration and exploitation. Moreover, knowledge creation (tacit and explicit) successfully mediates the correlation between servant leaders and IT/IS team innovations (for exploration and exploitation).

Managers, IT/IS consultants and enterprises at the executive level are suggested to encourage knowledge co-creation practices, both tacit and explicit to support their IT/IS team innovation. The greater the degree of explicit knowledge (i.e. socialization and internalization) and tacit knowledge creation (i.e. externalization and combination), the greater will be the opportunities for meeting the enterprise-IT/IS team exploration and exploitation innovation goals. The project manager may follow servant leadership behavior to promote effective knowledge co-creation process on the IT/IS team.

This effort contributes to greater and new understanding of how ambidexterity capability, tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation (mediators) and servant leaders for IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation in the B2B enterprise context and new foundations for future studies on a cross-enterprise IT/IS team. This research is also the first empirical effort to understand how a servant perspective leadership contributes through the knowledge co-creation process for IT/IS exploration-exploitation innovation.

In the continuing endeavour to work towards ever better management, experience plays a crucial role. We learn from success, but we can learn much more from failure. Further, it is far better and cheaper when we learn from other people′s failures rather than our own. This monograph assesses the requirements of project management in relation to industrial projects, illustrating the factors that can result in failure by means of a series of case studies of completed and abandoned projects worldwide that have failed in one way or another. The key roles played by project planning and project cost control in meeting and overcoming the practical problems in the management of industrial projects are examined in detail. In conclusion the lessons that can be learned are evaluated and presented, so that we may listen and learn – if only we will.

In the continuing endeavour to work towards ever better management, the project manager has a crucial role to play. This monograph assesses the requirements of project management in terms of training and experience, demonstrates what sort of person the project manager should be, and also the role that should be played by the project team. In order to illustrate the manner in which the essential qualities in both the project manager and his team are displayed in action a number of completed projects worldwide are reviewed. Both successful projects and disastrous projects are used to demonstrate the way in which the problems encountered in real life can be met and overcome. In conclusion both the prospects and the problems that the future may hold for the project manager are assessed.

The role of social science in the curriculum of technical institutions of higher learning has always represented a series of tradeoff challenges and opportunities. Recently, issues to be addressed by those developing curricula for this audience have received increased attention. The difficulties that social and physical scientists have had collaborating on research projects have also been a matter of increasing attention and concern. Hence, to enrich this discussion we will offer a historical case study covering a 35-year (so far) experiment at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in which both organizational and educational issues had to be addressed as faculty members of both backgrounds worked with technical students on educational projects dealing with social issues.

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that most decision makers are not only concerned with the financial implications of information technology/system (IT/IS) projects, but they are also concerned with other objectives such as competitive advantage, market share and future growth. Nowadays, multi‐criteria decision‐making methods are gaining importance due to their inherent ability to judge different alternative scenarios for possible selection of the best alternative. This paper provides a decision‐making framework for senior executives when selecting innovative IT/IS projects. The proposed framework is based on the multi‐criteria utility theory (MCUT) combined with information economics principles to select IT/IS project(s) based on “business value” and “risk” criteria. MCUT has the advantage of taking into consideration the decision maker’s preferences in the form of utility functions defined over a set of tangible and intangible criteria. To illustrate the application of the proposed framework, a hypothetical case study is provided, where input elicited from four engineering professionals is used to develop utility functions for a predefined set of selection criteria.

This paper aims to examine how social and environmental issues were accounted for and traded off within decision-making for Australia’s largest seawater desalination plant. This is done through an investigation of disclosures contained within key publicly available documents pertaining to the project.

The study deploys content analysis to initially identify relevant disclosures. Themes and subthemes are based on definitions of social and environmental accounting adapted from prior research. Relevant information was used to develop “silent accounts” to identify and analyse accountability issues in the case.

It was found that a number of claims made throughout reporting were unsupported or insufficiently explained. At the same time, it is found that various forms of basic measurements used to describe social and environmental issues conveyed the rationale of decision makers. It is concluded that many of the claims were asserted rather than evidenced; yet, the manner and context of their presentation gave them the appearance of being incontestable truths. Further, it is argued that the portrayal of social and environmental issues through measurable means is emblematic of values associated with contemporary neoliberal and public sector reforms.

The findings and conclusions of this study are contextually bound and therefore limited to this case.

This paper illustrates problems with the reporting of non-financial information and strengthens our understanding of the use of “silent accounting”. It illustrates the value of this approach to research examining accounting and accountability issues.

The findings contribute to the literature on social and environmental accounting by providing unique empirical analysis of non-financial disclosures within publicly available reporting.

Leading organizations do not stop at the gathering and analysis of performance data; rather, these organizations use performance measurement to stimulate improvement efforts and successfully translate strategy into action. In other words, they use performance measurement for managing their organizations. The most commonly used performance evaluation tool, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has been used extensively in the manufacturing, government, banking, retail, insurance and financial services sectors. This paper looks at potential applications and benefits of using the BSC as a framework to evaluate the performance improvement resulting from IT/IS implementation by a construction organization. The paper firstly seeks to adapt the original BSC concept to construction and then attempts to develop a performance measurement framework in the form of a tiered “Construct IT” BSC. The developed framework allows for the measurement of IT/IS performance at three different decision‐making tiers (i.e., project, business unit and enterprise tiers). At each tier, a group of performance indicators are used to describe key aspects of activities that occur frequently enough to warrant meaningful measurement and comparison. The proposed framework applies the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and multi‐attribute utility theory (MAUT) to facilitate aggregating the obtained diverse performance measurements, thus giving rise to an overall IT/IS performance improvement measure (score) at each decision‐making tier. To illustrate the application of the proposed framework, a project tier example is provided.

Practical and useful guidance is given to those undertaking management research; and advice is given on how to manage the practicalities of the research project. Particular emphasis is placed on applied and action research culminating in implementation of findings within an organisational setting. A description of the aims of management research is followed by advice on the selection of a research subject and the importance of the planning stage. Details of the processes involved in gathering the relevant information; its careful analysis; and the presentation of the findings in a readable, structured and coherent form are presented. Finally, suggestions on how to implement the research findings within an organisation are offered, as well as advice on the publication of results.