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The following article is a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Martin Buehler, Executive R & D Imagineer, at Walt Disney Imagineering. Dr Buehler is a global expert in robot manipulation and mobile robots and has led the innovative R & D and product development for some of the world’s top robot organizations. In this interview, Dr Buehler shares some of his personal and business experiences of his 25-year journey.

Dr Buehler studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and received the MSc and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Yale University, and after a PostDoc at MIT’s Leglab in locomotion, he became a professor at McGill University in 1991, with tenure since 1997. His research focused on dynamic grasping, direct drive motor control and legged robots. From 2003 to 2008, Dr Buehler was Director of Robotics at Boston Dynamics, and he was Director of Research at iRobot Corporation from 2008 to 2011. He served as VP and General Manager of Hospital Robots for Vecna Technologies from 2011 to 2013 and Senior Director of R & D and Director, R & D Center Munich for Covidien from 2013-2015.

Dr Buehler is best known in the academic world for his expertise in “intermittent dynamical” robotic tasks, such as dynamic manipulation and dynamically stable legged locomotion. His research led to multiple breakthroughs in legged robot projects like BigDog and RHex. In the corporate world, Buehler’s passion is to translate robotics technologies into successful product solutions. He does this by the implementation of key management strategies including Scrum and rapid and systematic experimental iteration. In addition to holding several patents, Dr Buehler is an Advisory Editorial Board member for the International Journal of Robotics Research and formerly served for ten years as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Field Robotics. Dr Buehler is a bestowed IEEE Fellow and was the recipient of the prestigious Robotics Industry Association’s 2012 Engelberger Award for Technology.

This paper reports the progress of, and results from, a major foresight and scenario planning exercise concerned with the future of real estate. The project first explored the general climate of change within which real estate decisions will have to be made. It then identified specific real estate opportunities and tested alternative strategies which might emerge as a result of that change. A further objective was to verify the use of foresight through scenario planning as a credible method of fostering a learning culture within the property professions and helping in the future proofing of current decision making.

This is a paper about the soft and hard drivers for English sub-national governance. It posits that the recurrence of claims for inter-urban linkages across the two distinct conurbations of the North-West of England have been bedevilled by entrenched differences in the leadership cultures of the city-regions.

It contrasts the highly localised forms of ‘soft power’ – or the ways in which leaders mobilise brands, plans and strategies to tell stories about place – arguing that there is a considerable divergence between the way that this symbolic capital has been deployed within and across the two city-regions. Whilst this is striking it is still true that ‘Hard powers’ – fiscal, legislative or regulatory mechanisms – are elusive for both Manchester and Liverpool notwithstanding recent moves towards combined authorities for both places. The only model of English urban governance with statutory powers covering transport, economic development and planning is located in Greater London, a legacy of the post-RDA institutional landscape in England.

This paper argues that it would be extraordinary if forms of leadership capable of meaningfully connecting the two cities cannot be found but that this must be seen within a sclerotic English context where there is a huge disconnect between desirable form and functions of urban governance, and the effect this has on regional economic performance. It concludes that local government austerity has had a negative effect on the sort of ‘soft power innovations’ necessary in both cities and that rhetorics of English localism have provided neither a propitious context for inter- nor intra-urban governance innovation.

This paper seeks to describe some of the ways in which collaborations within the city-regions of Manchester and Liverpool have been achieved, making the case that there have been divergent governance experiments which may hamper the aspiration for extensions beyond their border and for intra-urban leadership and governance which combines the two great cities and their areas of influence.

The author sets out the development of the Northern Powerhouse initiative since it was launched by George Osborne in 2014. The chapter reflects on where the policy initiative and programmes are now in 2019 as we await Brexit. The new Conservative Boris Johnson premiership in 2019 has backed Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester, and in advance of the major UK Spending Review after Brexit and the smaller towns have been promised investment funds. This chapter presents the wicked issues involved in seeking to address the North–South divide and re-balancing the UK at a time of increasing and deepening social and economic inequalities. The chapter calls for the strengthening of the Northern Powerhouse initiative due to its phenomenal brand. This requires greater collaboration between the public, private and voluntary sectors across the North of England to address the key strategic policy issues and yet there is no one organisation driving the Northern Powerhouse initiative. The author argues the Powerhouse may well be both underpowered and ungovernable and that Politicians and what she calls the Policy Qualgecrats, need more compelling Imagineers of the North, if we are to benefit and make more sense of this new pan-regional scale of governance and turn it into a real force for rebalancing the North as a whole.

This paper aims to examine a management control constructed by senior managers, a core value focused on sustainability, as it travels through time and space. The criticality of sustainable development suggests the need to understand the effects that core values have on organisational actions.

A case study methodology carried out at a multinational organisation is used. This analysis was informed by an actor-network theory which allowed placing the organisation’s sustainability focused core value at the centre of this research.

It was found that management control, in the form of a sustainability-focused core value, took on an active role in the case organisation. This enabled the opening of space and time that allowed actors to step forward and take action in relation to sustainable development. It is shown how the core value mobilised individual actors at specific points in time but did not enrol enough collective support to continue its travel. The resulting activities, though, provided a construction of sustainable development within the organisation more in line with traditional profit-seeking objectives rather than in relation to sustainability objectives, such as inter- and intra-generational equity.

These findings suggest possibilities for future research that examines the active role that management controls may take within sustainable development.

This paper shows the active role a management control, a sustainability focused core value, took within an organisation. This builds on the research that examines management control in relation to sustainability issues and sustainable development as well as the literature that examines core values.

In this chapter, the authors make the case that preserving and curating knowledge for the future involves more than changing methods and tactics or extending our current applications and technology to support knowledge capital. It means changing the way we think about the future. It means envisioning multiple futures where various elements may be known or unknown – a four-future quadrant. First, the authors explain what it means to think strategically in multiple known and unknown futures. Next, the chapter presents ideas for strategic thinking about future knowledge preservation and curation. Finally, the authors consider using the four futures to develop a flexible and relevant knowledge preservation and curation strategy.

Creativity can be one of the key drivers in business today. At the Walt Disney Company, creativity is not just a tool or a technique to increase productivity; it is the heart of the business. The creative process is practiced and nurtured at Disney, and the application of a similar approach could dramatically impact businesses in a multitude of industries.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.

To develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.

The relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.

From a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.

Landscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.

The novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

There is a lack of clarity about what constitutes Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) education and what the arts contribute. In this paper the authors discuss a distinct model, theorised from a five-year study of a particular, innovative STEAM education project (The Imagineerium), and developed by the researchers through working with primary school teachers in England within a second project (Teach-Make). The paper examines how teachers implemented this model, the Trowsdale art-making model for education (the TAME), and reflected on its value and positive impact on their planning and pedagogy.

The paper draws on two studies: firstly, a five-year, mixed methods, participative study of The Imagineerium and secondly a participative and collaborative qualitative study of Teach-Make.

Study of The Imagineerium showed strong positive educational outcomes for pupils and an appetite from teachers to translate the approach to the classroom. The Teach-Make project showed that with a clear curriculum model (the TAME) and professional development to improve teachers' planning and active pedagogical skills, they could design and deliver “imagineerium-like” schemes of work in their classrooms. Teachers reported a positive impact on both their own approach to supporting learning, as well as pupil progression and enjoyment.

The paper argues that the TAME, a consolidation of research evidence from The Imagineerium and developed through Teach-Make, offers both a distinctive and effective model for STEAM and broader education, one that is accessible to, valued by and manageable for teachers.