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Agent-based modeling has proven effective in increasing the understanding of complex systems, including social-economical systems. Agoal of modeling complex systems is to distill the system into simple agents with phenotypes guided by simple rules. The model then displays the emergent behavior of these agents interacting with each other and their environment. An agent-based model of innovation and its place in a global economy or ecosystem is presented. The model utilizes simple agents to represent innovating entities such as large corporations and small companies. The results produced by this model reveal the dynamics of innovation and its role in a global economy. The results indicate a large need for partnership in innovation for those entities working within rapidly changing domains. Domains, such as high technology, have constantly changing market expectations, which force innovating entities to seek external sources of assistance to meet these expectations in a timely enough fashion so as to incur benefit.

This study aims to provide a qualitative in-depth account of the status and experience of food insecurity for Syrian refugee households in Toronto and Saskatoon, Canada. The study considers the range of geographic, socio-economic, cultural and gendered components shaping and determining the barriers and management of food insecurity.

The study included 54 semi-structured interviews with refugee families in Toronto and Saskatoon who resettled in Canada after November 2015. In addition, 15 semi-structured in-person or telephone interviews were conducted with settlement and support agencies to measure their capacity to respond to issues of food insecurity for Syrian refugees.

Syrian refugees reported experiencing food insecurity as part of the broader resettlement journey, including in the transitional phase of refuge and in each settlement context in Canada. Income status in Canada was reported as a key barrier to food security. Low-income barriers to food security were experienced and shaped by factors including food affordability, physical access and availability and the extent of familial or other support networks including sponsorship relationships. Participants also reported how managing food insecurity contributed to the intensification of gender expectations.

The analysis reveals food insecurity as both an income and non-income based concern for refugees during the process of resettlement. The study also highlights the importance of considering variations between primary barriers to food security identified by Syrian families and key informants as critical to the development of strategies designed to mitigate the impacts of resettlement on food security.

Problem specification is a key front-end step in the innovation process. This paper aims to introduce ‘purpose-context’ – a conceptual framework to systematically explore problem-specification across mapped contexts. The framework’s logic is operationalized by the inherent structure of language – its syntax/grammar, which enables the systematic exploration of problem-specification. The method showcases two approaches to structurally explore the vast textual databases available to us today for problem-specification in innovation science, thereby furthering the pursuit of innovation through its foundational elements.

The conceptualization of the purpose-context framework was guided by logic and the scholarship of integration applied to bodies of work including innovation, design and linguistics. Further, the key elements of the conceptual framework were unpacked and structured using the syntax of language. Two approaches to operationalize the method were developed to illustrate the systematicity of the process. The construct was then validated by using it to systematically specify problems in the technical context of Raman spectroscopy and in the socio-technical context of international development. Overall, this paper is a work of relational scholarship of integration that bridges academic-practitioner gaps.

The purpose-context framework is well-suited for application in the innovation process with applicability across several abstraction levels. One key contribution is the recognition that a broader problem-specification exercise covering one-one, one-many, many-one, many-many problem-context mappings expands the range of potential solutions (innovations) to address the problem-space. Additionally, the work finds that it is possible to provide structure to the cognitive elements of the innovation process by drawing inspiration from the structure inherent in other cognitive processes such as language (e.g., parts-of-speech, phrase composition). Drawing from language is particularly appropriate as language mediates communication in any collective pursuit of the innovation process and furthermore because a large amount of information exists in textual form. Finally, this paper finds that there is merit in approaching innovation science from its foundational elements – i.e. data, information and knowledge.

While the purpose-context framework is broadly applicable, the methodical approach to provide structure to the front-end cognitive process is ‘one’ fruitful approach. We suspect other approaches exist.

The purpose-context framework is simple in its framing yet provides innovators, scholars and thought leaders, the ability to specify the problem space with greater coverage and precision. Further, in the solution-space, it provides them the ability to choose the breadth of solution scope (e.g. targeted solution addressing a single problem, targeted solution addressing a set of problems, the combination of solutions addressing a single problem and combination of solutions addressing a combination of problems). In addition, by pairing the creative front-end innovation process with machine power, this study provides a formal method to scale-up the coverage of creativity (and potentially that of solutions to those problems) and reduces the chances of missed/blind-spots in problem-specification. Finally, evaluating purpose-contexts leads to ‘capability-contexts’ – a capability-oriented viewpoint informing capability development decisions such as the focus of R&D programs and related resource allocation decisions.

The paper uses logic to connect multiple bodies of research with a goal to provide systematicity to problem-specification – problem-specification, which is an under-addressed part of the innovation process. The use of data to systematically explore problem-space lends it systematicity (repeatability and measurability) and is therefore, valuable to innovation science. The proof-of-concept demonstrates the conversion of concept into a method for practical application.

The phenomenal growth of the hospitality sector has exponentially increased the quantities of food waste being added into the system. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that around one-third of the edible parts of the food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted globally. Along these lines, hospitality food waste represents a significant societal challenge. A review of literature suggests that majority of existing hospitality studies have primarily focused on management's role in reducing food waste and only a few studies have looked into consumer food waste behavior. This chapter also identifies key behavioral tools that support reduction in individual food waste behavior and provides a basis for future empirical investigations.

In addition to pioneering, empirical work on entry order increasingly addresses fast followers and laggards and the potential advantages they are able to capture. There is also a growing consensus in the academia, that current measures of firm performance used in the entry order literature to study these advantages are inadequate. This study analyzes the relationship between entry order and customer evaluations, which, depicting the performance of the firm's products in the market, are used as a proxy for firm performance.

The study is set in the digital camera industry, analyzing entries into each new technology level, in terms of the sensor resolution of compact and bridge cameras. The complete dataset consisted of 1,816 digital camera models introduced between January 1996 and December 2017. The data are analyzed using hierarchical multiple linear regression.

The study finds evidence of early-mover advantage for the compact product category. In the compact camera consumer market, both first-movers and fast followers outperform late movers. Furthermore, the difference in performance in comparison to laggards is greater for first-movers than for fast followers. However, in the bridge category which consists of a more heterogeneous set of products, no significant entry-order effects are detected.

The results clearly indicate that there exists an early mover advantage. Furthermore, the results are not consistent across different product categories within an industry; hence, caution needs to be exercised when analyzing industry dynamics and entry order effects. Finally, our novel conceptualization of firm performance measured as online customer evaluation add new opportunities to investigate firm success

While research on intergenerational service learning has focused on the benefits for the students, very few studies have focused on the older adults who are the recipients of the service learning. For the current study, we were interested in the benefits of service learning for both the college students and the older adults who participated in a service-learning course. Qualitative data were collected from both the students in a sociology of aging service-learning class and the older adults who participated as recipients of the service learning. Data from the students were collected via student journals and open-ended questionnaire responses written by the students. Data from the older adults were collected via interviews by the students as well as open-ended questionnaire responses written by the older adults. The following themes emerged as benefits to students: (1) a better understanding and less fear of aging; (2) a desire to learn more about older adults; (3) a desire to engage more with older adults. The themes for the benefits to the older adults included (1) improved social connections and companionship and (2) becoming family. We found that engaging in intergenerational service-learning courses is beneficial to all those who are involved.

Elazar’s typology of political cultures is examined. From his categorization of jurisdictions with aspects of 'moralistic' political cultures, five are selected: Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Connecticut, and France. Their recent political history is examined and it is demonstrated that these 'moralistic' type polities have abandoned policies which formerly condemned or at least contained legalized gambling. Instead each has responded to commercial pressures for expanded gambling. The reasons why ‘moralistic’ values in making decisions in this arena have been cast aside are examined. The reasons include an international cross-polity homogenization of political cultures, a blurring of the meaning of ‘moralistic’ in today’s politics, and above all, severe economic crises that take precedence over other values.

In this work, the authors show the performance of the proposed diploid scheme (a representation where each individual contains two genotypes) with respect to two dynamic optimization problems, while addressing drawbacks the authors have identified in previous works which compare diploid evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to standard EAs. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In the proposed diploid representation of EA, each individual possesses two copies of the genotype. In order to convert this pair of genotypes to a single phenotype, each genotype is individually evaluated in relation to the fitness function and the best genotype is presented as the phenotype. In order to provide a fair and objective comparison, the authors make sure to compare populations which contain the same amount of genetic information, where the only difference is the arrangement and interpretation of the information. The two representations are compared using two shifting fitness functions which change at regular intervals to displace the global optimum to a new position.

For small fitness landscapes the haploid (standard) and diploid algorithms perform comparably and are able to find the global optimum very quickly. However, as the search space increases, rediscovering the global optimum becomes more difficult and the diploid algorithm outperforms the haploid algorithm with respect to how fast it relocates the new optimum. Since both algorithms use the same amount of genetic information, it is only fair to conclude it is the unique arrangement of the diploid algorithm that allows it to explore the search space better.

The diploid representation presented here is novel in that instead of adopting a dominance scheme for each allele (value) in the vector of values that is the genotype, dominance is adopted across the entire genotype in relation to its homologue. As a result, this representation can be extended across any alphabet, for any optimization function.