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The purpose of this paper is to introduce applied improvisation (AI) as a tool for training humanitarian aid workers. AI incorporates principles and practices from improvisational theatre into facilitation and training. It is an excellent modality for training aid workers to deal with crisis and disaster scenarios where decision-making and collaboration under pressure are critical.

This paper provides a theoretical base for understanding skills needed in disaster response and provides a case for innovative training that goes beyond the current standard. AI principles, activities and case examples are provided. Interviews with development experts who have participated in AI training are excerpted to reveal the impact and promise of this methodology.

Different from typical training and games, which simulate potential crisis scenarios, AI works with participants in developing the skills necessary for success in disaster situations. The benefit is that workers are better prepared for the unexpected and unknown when they encounter it.

The current paper is based on author observation, experience and participant interviews. While AI is consistently transformative and successful, it would benefit from more rigorous and structured research to ground the findings more deeply in larger evidence based processes.

The authors offer specific activities, resources for many others and practical application of this modality for training purposes.

Its application has tremendous benefits in training for specific skills, in creating greater cohesion and satisfaction in work units and breaking down culture and language barriers.

This work is original in introducing these training methods to humanitarian aid contexts in general, and disaster preparedness and response in particular.

The perception and communication of risk for organizations are highly topical and difficult to address in higher education (HE) due to its complexity and variety of structures, processes and identities. The omnipresence of managerialism in HE currently also impacts organizational innovation. This is interrogated in terms of the form and effect of innovation and improvization (Cunha, Neves, Clegg, & Rego, 2015). The development of tools to manage risk perception is discussed alongside perceptions of risk and their potential management through agile processes to enable a university-wide collaboration across services to enable a unified and streamlined proactive management of risk and its corollaries of loss.

The focus of this chapter is on the daily management of operational risks in higher education institutions (HEIs). It considers the causes and impact of drift and competitiveness in organizational processes and their impact on organizational efficiency. This chapter will consider risk perception and contract management across HEIs.

This chapter suggests a perspective on dealing with the future as dealing with uncertainty, which necessitates an alteration of the current learning paradigm and the adoption of a model that, not only accommodates, but also anticipates and embraces diversity, variety, and differences in knowledge. It calls for a model that moves beyond pre-determined content and learned solutions to seeding creativity and cultivating improvization. It approaches education as lifelong learning, as necessarily transformative, creative and authentic. It posits that dealing with the uncertainties of the future requires the acquisition of skills of mitigation and improvization that anticipate, not only mitigate; but to acquire the ability to see and create opportunities out of uncertainty. It endeavors to explore the ways by which higher education can address the need for facing the uncertainties of the future and the complexity of the sustainability challenges.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care.

A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied.

The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication.

This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care.

The aim of this paper is threefold: to provide a framework for a better understanding of the relationship between creativity, knowledge creation/sharing, and organizational change; to define the key elements at individual and collective level that may contribute to the development of organizational spaces that favour a climate for creativity and knowledge creation as precondition of “emergent change”; and to contribute to the development of a multi-perspective approach to creativity and knowledge creation in twenty-first century organizations.

The paper begins with a review of the emergent non-linear change theories and the change-related processes of knowledge creation. It uses the metaphor of dance to explore the relationship between emergent change and knowledge creation and sharing, and identifies the main factors that may impact this relationship.

The authors' framework suggests that the identified factors act as precondition to emergent change. These factors are critical for change management in organizations operating in today's chaotic environment.

The authors' framework suggests that the identified factors act as precondition to emergent change. These factors are critical for change management in modern organizations. The authors propose guidelines and provide examples how to manage work spaces and facilitate the organizational dance.

Even though the academic literature already offers some evidence about the role and the centrality of spontaneous change, this paper provides a systematic, multi-perspective approach to the understanding and management of social, cultural and individual characteristics of bottom-up organizational change, focusing on its fundamental aspects of creativity and knowledge creation.

The two main purposes of this paper are: first, the development of a new optimization algorithm called GHSACO by incorporating the global-best harmony search (GHS) which is a stochastic optimization algorithm recently developed, with the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Second, design of a new indirect adaptive recurrent fuzzy-neural controller (IARFNNC) for uncertain nonlinear systems using the developed optimization method (GHSACO) and the concept of the supervisory controller.

The novel optimization method introduces a novel improvization process, which is different from that of the GHS in the following aspects: a modified harmony memory representation and conception. The use of a global random switching mechanism to monitor the choice between the ACO and GHS. An additional memory consideration selection rule using the ACO random proportional transition rule with a pheromone trail update mechanism. The developed optimization method is applied for parametric optimization of all recurrent fuzzy neural networks adaptive controller parameters. In addition, in order to guarantee that the system states are confined to the safe region, a supervisory controller is incorporated into the IARFNNC global structure.

First, to analyze the performance of GHSACO method and shows its effectiveness, some benchmark functions with different dimensions are used. Simulation results demonstrate that it can find significantly better solutions when compared with the Harmony Search (HS), GHS, improved HS (IHS) and conventional ACO algorithm. In addition, simulation results obtained using an example of nonlinear system shows clearly the feasibility and the applicability of the proposed control method and the superiority of the GHSACO method compared to the HS, its variants, particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithms applied to the same problem.

The proposed new GHS algorithm is more efficient than the original HS method and its most known variants IHS and GHS. The proposed control method is applicable to any uncertain nonlinear system belongs in the class of systems treated in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how entrepreneurial bricolage empowers smallholder commercial farming, from a family business perspective.

The study employed a multiple case study design to analyse entrepreneurial bricolage in smallholder commercial farming in Uganda. It used multiple data collection methods and applied content analytical tchniques to establish cross-case correlations, patterns and relationships to aid in theory development and testing.

The study shows that entrepreneurial bricolage empowers smallholder commercialization through resource reallocation, improvization and prioritization as interconnected, self-reinforcing bricolage processes in smallholder farming. It provides evidence of how smallholder farms may not enact institutional limits, and overcome constraints imposed by their resource environments. It further reveals that smallholder commercial farms can be construed as family businesses given the interconnected relationship between farming business, family and smallholder farm(er).

The study was conducted in smallholder farms hence results may be used cautiously in other sectors and economies where resource environments are not structurally defined. However, it provides lessons for family businesses in developed countries particularly the micro- and small businesses. It also renders smallholder farming as a lucrative area for family business research.

This study deepens our understanding of bricolage in smallholder farming and provides a springboard for scholarship in enhancing smallholder commercialization. It proposes a model for entrepreneurial bricolage in smallholder commercial farming.

The authors provide new quantitative evidence of the relationship between technologies and organizational design in the context of complex one-off products. The systems that produce complex, one-off products in mature, fragmented industries such as construction lack many of the typical organizational features that researchers have deemed critical to product development success (e.g., team familiarity, frequent communication, and strong leadership). In contrast, the complexity of these products requires a diverse knowledge base that is rarely found within a single firm. The one-off nature of construction’s products further requires improvization and development by a distributed network of highly specialized teams. And because the product is complex, significant innovations in the end product require systemic shifts in the product architecture. Riitta Katila, Raymond E. Levitt and Dana Sheffer use an original, hand-collected dataset of the design and construction of 112 energy-efficient “green” buildings in the United States, combined with in-depth fieldwork, to study these questions. A key conclusion is that the mature US construction industry, with its particularly fragmented supply chain, is not well suited to implementing “systemic innovations” that require coordination across trades or stages of the project. However, project integration across specialists with the highest levels of interdependence (i.e., craft, contract integration) mitigates the knowledge and coordination problems. There are implications for research on how technology shapes organizations (and particularly how organizations shape technology), and on the supply chain configuration strategies of firms in the construction industry as well as building owners who are seeking to build the best buildings possible within their budgets.

The concept of innovation should not be reduced to its technological dimension but encompasses the whole context of its deployment and implementation. Regardless of technology, an innovation may be successful or not depending on how well its implementation suits each single context. In the case of education, this consists, to a sizeable extent, in a communicational and interpersonal context. The hypothesis of this piece is that maintaining optimal communication between participants is a key factor of success of new online teaching methods. Given that in this regard, there are similarities between negotiating practice and teaching practice, it is worth examining whether good practices developed in online international negotiation are transferable to online teaching. The chapter identifies a number of practices from online negotiation that perform well in online teaching. It focuses on communicational aspects, mutual understanding (monitoring and optimization of understanding), motivation to listen, attention, active participation, and non-verbal communication. Online teaching and online negotiation share another common feature: some unresolved challenges are common to both disciplines. This should also be taken into account when migrating educational programmes online. The research is informed by the author's first-hand experience from practice in both international diplomatic negotiation and academic teaching.