Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present findings derived from research work carried out by a team of six university lecturers who are members of a teaching quality improvement network. The aim is to increase the motivation of the lecturers involved, so that better performance can be achieved, and the teaching‐learning process enriched.

Three complementary performance measures are used: students' active participation; lecturers' personal reflections; and lecturer peer‐to‐peer assessment.

These tools have provided the teaching staff with information about their strengths and weaknesses, as a consequence of which they have learned to deploy their skills inside the classroom and prepare their subjects more effectively. In this way, it is shown that the public teaching system can assess the potential of its human resources, and increase their motivation.

From an institutional point of view, performance quality assessment practices can also help to design training and development programmes that adapt the individual needs identified to the educational goals of today's universities.

This is the first article to apply a machine learning approach to the analysis of time on market on real estate markets.

The random survival forest approach is introduced to the real estate market. The most important predictors of time on market are revealed and it is analyzed how the survival probability of residential rental apartments responds to these major characteristics.

Results show that price, living area, construction year, year of listing and the distances to the next hairdresser, bakery and city center have the greatest impact on the marketing time of residential apartments. The time on market for an apartment in Munich is lowest at a price of 750 € per month, an area of 60 m2, built in 1985 and is in a range of 200–400 meters from the important amenities.

The findings might be interesting for private and institutional investors to derive real estate investment decisions and implications for portfolio management strategies and ultimately to minimize cash-flow failure.

Although machine learning algorithms have been applied frequently on the real estate market for the analysis of prices, its application for examining time on market is completely novel. This is the first paper to apply a machine learning approach to survival analysis on the real estate market.

Adolescent violence towards parents (AVTP) has damaging impacts on family relationships, however, little is known about the characteristics of the families in which it occurs. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize current knowledge of the AVTP characteristics to help to inform the development of more effective community responses.

The paper opted for a Rapid Evidence Assessment taking an ecological approach to organize current knowledge about the characteristics of both victims and perpetrators of AVTP. It synthesized 20 empirical studies identified from a systemic review of published literature.

The assessment concludes that adolescents who perpetrate AVTP typically experience high levels of comorbid mental health concerns, drug and alcohol use, anger difficulties and trauma. The victims (parents) are characterized as having strained relationships with other family members and trauma profiles.

Policy and practice responses should be tailored to systemically address needs in the identified areas. This review further illustrates the limitations of current knowledge, highlighting inconsistencies in both definitions and findings, particularly related to key characteristics.

This paper is the first of its kind to systemically search this literature and only include the most rigorously designed studies. It adds value to the developing field of AVTP by providing the scaffolding of the characteristics of families who have been impacted.

In recent years there has been a significant acceleration in the market growth of social impact investing. Policy makers, regulatory bodies and national decision-makers should base their decision-making processes on multiple criteria. These criteria are, by nature, imprecise, ambiguous and uncertain. The purpose of this paper is to provide decision-makers with a mathematical tool which aids them in their decision-making processes identifying the degree of appropriateness of less developed countries in terms of potential success of investment in vaccination campaigns.

In this work, the authors have developed a decision-making tool within the framework of multiple criteria decision making and Fuzzy Logic, which aims to aid decision-makers for vaccinations campaigns in less developed countries. In particular, the authors have proposed a Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution-based method which is able to work in fuzzy environment in order to assess and rank countries based on their fuzzy degree of appropriateness for impact investing in vaccines.

The impact investing market provides capital from private sources to address many pressing global challenges such as access to basic services as health. Governments have, therefore, an essential role in supporting the development of this market by improving the risk/return profile of investments through access to credit facilities, tax credits or subsidies or defining the regulation of the supply of investments, provision of technical assistance to investing private companies and co-financing. The proposed framework permits funding decision making taking into account the degree of preparedness and adequacy for impact investing in vaccines of the selected countries.

Impact investing can play a key role in the reduction of immunization gap offering suitable strategies for both, governments and private investors for the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, in order to make good financial decisions managers should take into account not only health, income, education and other social criteria but also the degree of basic preparedness of the countries in order to ensure the success of the immunization campaigns which means taking into account availability of basic infrastructures, access to electricity, political stability among other criteria.

However, in order to make good financial decisions managers should take into account not only health, income, education and other social criteria but also the degree of basic preparedness of the countries in order to ensure the success of the immunization campaigns which means taking into account availability of basic infrastructures, access to electricity, political stability among other criteria.

The proposed model will allow public and private decision makers to make better investment decisions in terms of effectiveness as the provided ranking of countries candidates for the investments is more realistic and takes into account more decision dimensions.

Success and business reputation depend upon the quality of products where product quality depends upon the capability of a process, yield value and sigma score, etc. Poor quality of ceiling fan and mass rejection from quality check resulted in an alarming amount of cost for rework. As a result, the fulfillment of the production target was getting difficult day by day. The main purpose of this research is to identify the crucial causes for humming noise of ceiling fans and control it to a tolerable level so that maximum quality can be achieved.

The poor quality of ceiling fans was determined from the Pareto analysis of the define, measure, analyze, improve and control model which was humming noise during running and further actions were undertaken regarding the reduction of the humming noise. Project charter was formed before initiating the measure phase to study the suppliers, inputs, processes, outputs and customers diagram with process parameters and existing noise data were collected from random samples to determine the rolled throughput yield (94.95% existing) and existing sigma score which value of 3.14 and also the poor value (1.05) of process potential index implied that the process condition was below standard (<1.33) and need to be improved badly. Then root causes analysis and relationship diagram was prepared to identify the possible causes and with the design of experiments and correlation analysis, it was clear that the air gap between the stator and rotor was the main culprit behind the humming noise.

The minimum value of air gap was determined from boxplot analysis which was 0.2 mm–0.225 mm and the corresponding mean, the minimum and maximum value of sound level in dB (37.5–40.3 dB) for 0.225 mm air gap with the watt consumption (83 w) from the hypothesis test for the corresponding air gap. Finally, the updated sigma score and process capability analysis were performed with control charts to show the comparison after applying the DMAIC-six sigma methodology. The final sigma score was 5.1 which indicates a significant improvement of the process with the capability of saving US$23,438/year caused by the poor quality of ceiling fans.

Only quantitative values of the causes behind the humming noise were possible to identify. Other trivial many causes elimination might improve the sigma score closer to 6.00. The final sigma score that was achieved from this research was sustainable.

A structural approach with proper data analysis and application of various tools to detect the actual cause behind the humming noise of ceiling fans with numerical value has not been found in any literature. This research study can be a valuable asset for ceiling fan mass producers.

This paper aims to study competencies between two groups of professionals: employees in innovative companies and entrepreneurs. Therefore the following questions arise: Are these two types of competences the same? Do innovative companies demand an entrepreneurial profile? Are entrepreneurs' companies spontaneously innovative?

This paper analyses personal competences in two different groups of professionals. On one hand the authors work the common characteristics among successful entrepreneurs; on the other, they study the competences that innovative companies demand of their employees. The authors study if there is an overlap between both types of competences, considering that the areas in common may represent a training opportunity for both the entrepreneurs and organizations seeking innovation.

The authors find that innovative organizations value six characteristics in their employees, which are related to entrepreneurs' characteristics and describe individuals within the organization that are able to work in teams, are committed to their work, seek information and new opportunities, and are able to take risks in innovative ventures. However, there are characteristics that entrepreneurs have and that organizations that want to be innovative are not seeking. If employees had these characteristics, they would allow them to be persistent despite difficulties. Finally, the authors find that there is a competence that innovative organizations need but entrepreneurs may not have, which is having previous experience in the field.

The paper shows that the individual competencies that characterize the entrepreneur are also found in innovative organizations.

In the last years, the use of free-online instructional videos has gained popularity among educators and students. Its success is mainly based on the provision of fast and inexpensive access to educational contents which can be consulted at the own convenience of students, all over the world. Free-online platforms as YouTube offer access to more than ten million instructional videos. The purpose of this paper is to assess and rank the educational quality of free-online instructional videos from a multidimensional perspective.

In this paper, the authors propose a MCDM approach based on a compromise ranking method, VIKOR. The approach integrates a normalization process which is especially suitable for situations where the nature of the different decision-making criteria is such that it does not allow homogeneous aggregation.

With the proposed normalization approach, the initial valuations of the alternatives with respect to the criteria are transformed in order to reflect their similarity with a given reference point (ideal solution). The normalized data are then integrated in a VIKOR-based framework in order to obtain those mathematical videos closer to the ideal video from the instructors’ perspective.

The ranking of instructional videos based on their quality from an educational multidimensional perspective is a good example of a real decision-making problem where the nature of the criteria, qualitative and quantitative, implies heterogeneous data. The proposed IS-VIKOR approach overcomes some of the problems inherent to this real decision-making problem.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a heating system for the selective inhibition sintering (SIS) process that will produce uniform heat and minimize the polymer powder waste.

This research was conducted in two areas: the first was the production of uniform heat distribution. For this task, a lighting design software was used for the initial heater design. The result was then validated by thermal images, point‐by‐point temperature measurement, and physical part fabrication. The second area was the minimization of polymer powder waste. For this task, a finger‐based masking mechanism was designed, prototyped, and tested.

The lighting design software output illustrates that the square, crossed, and parallel patterns have very low variation and seem to be acceptable alternatives for the heating system pattern. Also, results show that the temperature variation for the ceramic heater is lower (therefore better) than the wire heater. Also, the study reveals that a finger‐based masking system design and prototype is very promising from the polymer powder waste‐saving standpoint.

Owing to the software limitation, radiation is the only source of heat transfer in this research (convection and conduction were not considered). Also, a limited number of patterns were examined for the heater design; this number can be expanded in future research.

A new design and development method has been proposed for the heating system for the SIS process that could lead to better heaters and waste‐reducing mechanisms for the SIS process and similar applications.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the philosophical changes which underpin research and practices in project management. This study is an attempt to challenge previous studies that have tried to explain this change in order to provide a better explanation.

The authors adopt a critical review research method to challenge previous explanations of the paradigm change and definition of communication. For this purpose, philosophical and social theories and concepts have been used.

This paper proposed changing the paradigm from modernism to postmodernism and the paradigm shift, which happens from postmodernism to participation, as a better explanation for the paradigmatic change in project management. Furthermore, the important role of communication has been illustrated in the participation paradigm.

For the first time in project management, the authors attempt to clarify the role of power in this paradigmatic shift, especially because this concept is an axial concept in postmodern philosophy and a neglected concept in project management literature. In addition, communicative action theory has been used with the aim of pursuing the influence of informal power in the participation paradigm and paving the way for confronting its emerging challenges in future studies.

An original systematic review of the academic literature on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the human resource management (HRM) domain is carried out to capture the current state-of-the-art and prepare an original research agenda for future studies.

Fifty-nine journal articles are selected based on a holistic search and quality evaluation criteria. By using content analysis and structural concept analysis, this study elucidates the extent and impact of AI application in HRM functions, which is followed by synthesizing a concept map that illustrates how the usage of various AI techniques aids HRM decision-making.

A comprehensive review of the AI-HRM domain’s existing literature is presented. A concept map is synthesized to present a taxonomical overview of the AI applications in HRM.

An original research agenda comprising relevant research questions is put forward to assist further developments in the AI-HRM domain. An indicative preliminary framework to help transition toward ethical AI is also presented.

This study contributes to the literature through a holistic discussion on the current state of the domain, the extent of AI application in HRM, and its current and perceived future impact on HRM functions. A preliminary ethical framework and an extensive future research agenda are developed to open new research avenues.