Search results

This study used the industry-oriented capstone course to increase the employability of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) students in technological university.

In this study, EECS students were selected and divided into groups, and the non-equivalent pretest–posttest quasi-experimental research method was adopted.

Industry-oriented capstone courses can improve students' employability, especially general ability, behaviour and attitude.

The results of this study and many other studies show that capstone courses are helpful for the soft skills of students.

This study provides evidence that industry-oriented capstone courses can improve EECS students' employability.

Disruptive technologies often disrupt the careers of middle-skilled workers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate career transition strategies of middle-skilled workers that partially continue or expand their careers under the condition of disruptive technologies.

This paper established a conceptual framework of career transition strategies for middle-skilled workers by integrating the existing studies of disruptive technologies, technological trajectory transition, boundaryless and protean careers, and careers as repositories of knowledge.

The authors proposed three types of career transition strategies to partially prolong middle-skilled workers’ careers, namely, industry-oriented transition strategy which refers to a transfer to other occupations in the original industry, technology-oriented transition strategy which refers to a transfer to occupations with original technical skills in other industries, and comprehensive transition strategy which refers to a transfer to other occupations in the related industries. Further, this paper discusses the external conditions and individual competencies for each career transition strategy, and timing for implementing a career transition strategy from the perspective of the technology life cycle.

This paper focused on sustainable careers of middle-skilled workers under the condition of disruptive technologies, which received very little attention from the current literature. The findings also suggested for middle-skilled workers to develop a sustainable or long-term career in the current era of many disruptive technologies. The findings may also imply on how firms and government should contribute to help workers on handling scenarios of technological disruption.

The purpose of this paper is to define critical design and evaluation factors of business models (BM) for mobile network operators (MNOs) in general, and more specifically for mobile data services.

This paper follows a qualitative approach. Aiming to identify critical design factors for mobile BMs, this research, as a part of larger research, examines three real-life cases related to mobile data service BM design and engineering. These cases are Orange Business Services (OBS); Apple’s iPhone services and applications, and NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service.

In this paper, the authors provide a framework for designing and developing Market-Aligned, Cohesive, Dynamic, Explicit, and Unique BMs with Fitting Network-Mode, which, if adopted by MNOs, would ensure their long-term success by improving the sustainability and innovation capabilities of their BMs. These critical design factors address different spheres of the mobile business: “Cohesion” and “Explicitness” are operator-oriented, whereas “Market-Alignment,” “Dynamicity,” “Uniqueness,” and “Fitting Network-Mode” are industry-oriented.

Although the paper provides in-depth analysis of three case studies in the context of mobile telecommunications, the authors cannot claim that the developed framework can be generalized to all services in the mobile telecommunications industry. Further validation through empirical testing is preferred and this could be done in future research.

The developed framework is of value to MNOs as it provides them with a holistic approach for designing and also evaluating successful BMs over time. This is because the developed framework defines critical design factors for BMs in the contexts of their environments.

The domain of BMs is still emerging within the field of information systems. The majority of prior studies either tackled the issue of BM definition or provided taxonomies and classifications of this concept. The originality of this paper comes from the fact that it takes further steps in developing the concept by providing a comprehensive framework which encapsulates critical design and evaluation factors of mobile BMs.

This paper discusses the design of a problem‐based learning approach that seeks to embed industrial knowledge in the enterprise resource planning (ERP)‐related curriculum of universities. It describes a project that is developing a business reference model for public administration. This reference model is to be implemented in the leading ERP system SAP R/3. Teaching cases are developed through collaboration between universities and industry. The paper argues that this approach is in alignment with the recommendations of key curriculum documents and educational approaches.

This study explores a pedagogical approach to teaching students a collaborative information delivery process in the context of BIM. The objectives were to understand how students approach this complex, open-ended problem of planning their collaborative process and then identify strategies for improving their process through a plan-do-check-act cycle and reflecting on the applicability of industry standards.

The authors present a longitudinal case study based on qualitative data from the 3 consecutive years of teaching a senior undergraduate course in a construction engineering program.

The findings offer a rich picture of how students approached this collaborative process and emphasize the complex nature of teaching BIM as information management process. The authors present instances of how students made sense of BIM standards through applied experience. The findings also demonstrate the value of an outcome-based approach whereby knowledge is gained through an iterative plan-do-check-act cycle. Here, the BEP and model deliverables served only as vehicles to test and apply a range of skills by making them more explicit.

The research contributes to the literature on mechanisms that support students in planning, managing and improving collaborative information strategies in a BIM context. Specifically, the authors illustrate a tension in how to pedagogically deploy industry-oriented process planning methods to establish relevance for students in order to effectively engage in interdisciplinary teams.

In this paper, the authors argue that teaching students how to plan, design and enact effective BIM collaboration information delivery is firmly nested within pedagogical management and communication skills. The authors illustrate with examples how students make sense of BIM approaches by making them concrete and meaningful to their own experience.

Due to rapid technological evolution driven by display manufacturers, the television (TV) market of flat panel displays has been fast growing with the advancement of digital technologies in broadcasting service. Recently, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) successfully penetrated into the large-size TV market, catching up with light-emitting diode (LED)-liquid-crystal display (LCD). This paper aims to investigate the market penetration of OLED technologies by determining their technology adoption rates based on a diffusion model.

Through the rapid evolution of information and communication technology, as well as a flood of data from diverse sources such as research awards, journals, patents, business press, newspaper and Internet social media, data mining, text mining, tech mining and database tomography have become practical techniques for assisting the forecaster to identify early signs of technological change. The information extracted from a variety of sources can be used in a technology diffusion model, such as Fisher-Pry where emerging technologies supplant older ones. This paper uses a comparison-based prediction method to forecast the adoption and diffusion of next-generation OLED technologies by mining journal and patent databases.

In recent years, there has been a drastic reduction of patents related to LCD technologies, which suggests that next-generation OLED technology is penetrating the TV market. A strong industry adoption for OLED has been found. A high level of maturity is expected by 2026.

For OLED technologies that are closely tied to industrial applications such as electronic display devices, it may be better to use more industry-oriented data mining, such as patents, market data, trade shows, number of companies or startups, etc. The Fisher-Pry model does not address the level of sales for each technology. Therefore, the comparison between the Bass model and the Fisher-Pry model would be useful to investigate the market trends of OLED TVs further. Another step for forecasting could include using industry experts and a Delphi model for forecasting (and further validation).

Fisher-Pry growth curves for journal publications and patents follow the expected sequence. Specially, journal publications and patents growth curves are close for OLED technologies, indicating a strong industry adoption.

This article reviews an approach used to structure technical material into a large number of single theme topics, or modules. A course is a collection of modules. A key feature of a module is that it can be presented in 50 minutes, and is supported by a design specification, typeset notes, a series of slides for presentation using computer projection, a tutorial, assessment questions, and a Web page. Templates support the creation of the module specification, notes, presentation, tutorial and assessment material, Web support page, and the aggregation of module notes into a set of course notes. The modular structure relies entirely on an integrated application of software technology for word processing, typesetting and the creation of computer presentations, and generation and maintenance of Web pages to support a description of the modules and marketing of industry‐oriented courses within an ISO 9001 certified quality management system.

Measuring or monitoring supply chain performance reveals the gap between planning and execution and helps companies to identify potential problems and areas for improvement. However, it is recognized that developing key performance indicators (KPIs), or metrics, is very challenging and a set of practical guidelines is not readily available for companies and supply chain management (SCM) practitioners. This paper seeks to offer a practical approach to performance measurement and to present a list of essential KPIs.

This paper offers insights from industry in the area of supply chain performance measurement and a practical approach to developing performance metrics.

The experience from, and the review of, industry standards and best practices in supply chain performance measurement suggest that “less is better” as to developing performance metrics. Companies should focus on only a small list of KPIs which are critical for their operations management, customer service, and financial viability. Potential KPIs should be developed for each of the supply chain operations‐reference (SCOR) model's four meta‐processes (plan, source, make, and delivery) and need to be hierarchically grouped such as primary and secondary metrics.

The paper offers a background of why performance measurement is necessary for SCM success, pragmatic guidelines for designing and implementing performance metrics, and critical KPIs with the definition, examples, and computation mechanism.

Despite the importance of performance measurement for successful SCM, many companies wonder how to put performance metrics in place and make them work in practice. This paper offers an industry‐oriented, practical approach to performance measurement in SCM contexts and proposes key performance metrics which can be easily adapted for different businesses.

The report of the Metals Information Review Committee contains two recommendations relating to referral. The first, classed as a Principal Recommendation, was to the effect that a pilot referral centre for metals information should be established at the Metals Society and funded by the Department of Industry. The second, listed among the Other Recommendations, was that the British Library Research & Development Department should investigate the effectiveness of current informal referral practices, including the role of referral in technology transfer. It noted that the project should include consideration of whether there should be a national referral system for science and technology, or whether smaller, subject or industry‐oriented services are more appropriate. According to the report, this recommendation was based on the finding that ‘the referral function is a basic component in effective access to and availability of information, independent of improving bibliographic control and information dissemination. It provides a key to maximising the usefulness of existing resources of knowledge and information’.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.