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Issues surrounding knowledge management, knowledge transfer and learning within organisations challenge continuity and resilience in the face of changing environments. While initiatives are principally applied within large organisations, there is scope to assess how the processes are handled within small and medium enterprises and consider how they might be enhanced. This paper aims to present an evaluation of practice within an evolving software development unit to determine what has been learned and how the knowledge acquired has been used to further organisational development. These results provide the basis for the design and implementation of a proposed support tool to enhance professional practice.

A small software development unit which has successfully delivered bespoke systems since its establishment a number of years ago was selected for analysis. In-depth interviews were carried out with each member of the unit to elicit an understanding of individual and collective development. Interview data were recorded and transcribed and subjected to qualitative analysis to identify key themes underpinning knowledge acquisition and utilisation. Samples of project documentation were scrutinised to corroborate interview data. After analysing the data, a focus-group meeting was held to validate the results and to generate further insights into learning within the unit.

Qualitative analysis of the data revealed key changes in thinking and practice within the unit, as well as insight into the development of individual and collective contextual knowledge, tacit understanding and learning. This analysis informed the proposal of a bespoke, lightweight, Web-based system to support knowledge capture and organisational learning. This approach has the potential to promote resilience and enhance practice in similar small or start-up enterprises.

Purposeful sampling was used in selecting a small software development unit. This enabled in-depth interviewing of all six members of the organisation. This offered a rich environment from which to derive awareness and understanding of individual and collective knowledge acquisition and learning. Focussing on a single small enterprise limits the extent to which the findings can be generalised. However, the research provides evidence of effective practice and learning and has identified themes for the development of a support tool. This approach can be extended to similar domains to advance research into their learning and development.

Results of the work undertaken so far have generated promising foundations for the proposed support tool. This offers software developers a potentially useful system within which they can reflect upon, and record, key learning events affecting technical, managerial and professional practice.

Small enterprises have limited resources to support organisational learning. The qualitative research undertaken so far has yielded valuable insight into the successful development of a single software development unit. The construction of a support tool to enhance knowledge acquisition and learning has the capacity to consolidate valuable, and potentially scarce, expertise. It also has the potential to facilitate further research to determine how the prototype might be extended or revised to improve its contribution to the unit’s development.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a prototype system to demonstrate the potential benefits of deploying mobile technology to enhance asset maintenance processes in a small food manufacturing plant.

Design, development and deployment of a solution using open-source resources aimed at demonstrating improved asset maintenance functionality to principal stakeholders in a food manufacturing plant.

The development of a prototype system supporting user interaction via a mobile phone demonstrates the potential benefits of more flexible data capture and improved information management which offer clear advantages over the limitations imposed by a stand-alone terminal.

The solution was developed as a prototype. In this respect it serves to illustrate system benefits but more work is needed to extend system functionality.

Issues concerning data security and questions surrounding a suitable deployment platform would need to be addressed in deploying this technology.

The research demonstrates that mobile technology can successfully be utilised to enhance asset maintenance in a small manufacturing plant by improving data capture and information management. These initiatives are likely to be of interest to other SMEs seeking to enhance asset maintenance processes.

The purpose of this paper is to trace debates between state and federal governments, and community stakeholders, leading to the establishment and abolition of the first attempt at a university for Western Sydney, established as Chifley University Interim Council.

The historical analysis draws from published papers, oral history accounts, and original documents in archives of the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney.

Higher education reform in the 1980s in Australia was fought out as an extension of broader issues such as “States rights”, the rising political power of peri‐urban regions, long‐standing tensions between state and Commonwealth bureaucracies, and the vested interests of existing tertiary education and community groups.

This is the only existing study of attempts to found Chifley University, and one of the few available studies which take a social and contextual approach to understanding the critical reforms of the 1980s leading up to the Dawkins Reforms of 1988‐1990.

The authors wanted to create a Web-based system of templates to enhance knowledge capture and organizational learning for small and start-up practices.

The researchers studied a software team which had been created by staff and students at a university computing department. The analysis of the team’s behaviour was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with one manager and five software developers. Based on the interviews, they proposed the bespoke system.

The project templates take advantage of the knowledge and information already contained in support tools like GitLab, ActiveCollab, and Sentry. There are links to relevant documentation and components of these tools. But the templates go much further by storing detailed comments about the critical learning from projects, including the psychological insights gained from dealing with clients. The researchers felt this would help to make tacit knowledge more explicit.

Despite the large economic importance of SMEs, they tend to lack knowledge management (KM) and organisational learning (OL) resources. As a result, much of their tacit knowledge cannot be shared easily. The concepts of KM and OL are especially relevant in the software industry, which is knowledge-intensive and generates intellectual capital as its principal asset. The researchers believe that integrating KM into the development cycle will improve system development.

The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe (2006, p. 388) writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.

This paper aims to examine the role of personality in how people respond to sexual appeals in advertising. The impact of three traits (extraversion, neuroticism and openness) was tested.

A mixed‐factor experimental design was used. Gender, level of sexual appeal (manipulated over two levels) and participants' standing on each of the three personality trait scales were the between‐subjects factors. Relevance of the product to the appeal, which was also manipulated over two levels, was the within‐subjects factor. The sample comprised 156 undergraduate students, and each student was randomly assigned to either a mild appeals or an overt appeals condition.

The results show that levels of extraversion and openness directly affect responses to advertisements as measured with attitude towards the advertisement.

Recommendations are made, including that overt sexual appeals should not be used on a target audience of “introverts”, or people who are characterised as quiet, shy and reserved.

This research extends existing work on the effect of individual differences on consumers' reactions to advertising and is the first to show that personality traits affect responses to sexual appeals.

International trade shows have increased in importance for the promotion of goods and services overseas. Relatively little is known about participation by firms in these shows. The International Marketing and Purchasing Group′s interaction model is an appropriate analytical tool for investigating trade shows in international marketing strategy. Explains why the interaction model is useful in this context and provides directions for research about international trade shows. Also suggests managerial implications for developing international trade show strategy.

The term “strategic thinking” is a relatively recent addition to the lexicon of marketing concepts. Its popularity arises from increasing discontent with highly formalized marketing planning approaches that replace creativity with paperwork and Jock executives into a dangerously predictable repertoire of strategic options. Despite the frequent call for strategic thinking to augment the marketing planning process, there is woefully little written on the subject. It would seem that the admonition to THINK emphasized by the late Thomas Watson at IBM is not enough. Rather, strategic thinking requires a perspective on what to think about. The properties of games, which we will describe, provide a valuable insight into what an executive should consider when asked to think strategically regarding a marketing problem or opportunity. These properties form the basis for the game theory approaches in decision analysis where mathematics is the dominant feature. Unfortunately, the impenetrable language of mathematics has obscured the fundamental properties of games so that marketing executives cannot readily use them in a corporate setting. We will look here at these fundamental game properties and see what insights they offer for strategic marketing thinking and formulating competitive strategy.

This paper aims to explore market dynamics and strategic issues that contribute to a late entrant's success in achieving market leadership in the prescription (Rx) and over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets. In the Rx market, consumers must receive physicians' approval before purchasing the product. In the OTC market, consumers make the final drug choice.

Data on sales (both Rx and OTC) and direct‐to‐consumer advertising expenditures for nine gastrointestinal drug products were obtained covering a 17‐year period. Ordinary least squares regression was employed.

The findings show that late‐market entrants, despite existing challenges, can become market leaders. This applies to both the Rx and OTC markets, via varying mechanisms.

This study is unique in demonstrating the differential mechanism in achieving market success for late entrants in the Rx and OTC markets.