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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the entrepreneur in the knowledge transfer (KT) process of a start-up enterprise and the ways that role should change during the development phase to ensure mid-term business survival and growth.

An in-depth, qualitative case study of Birra Flea, an Italian Craft Brewery, is presented and analysed using Liyanage et al.’s (2009) framework to identify the key components of the KT process, including relevant knowledge, key actors, transfer steps and the criteria for assessing its effectiveness and success.

The entrepreneur played a fundamental and crucial role in the start-up process, acting as a selective and passionate broker for the KT process. As Birra Flea matures and moves into the development phase, the role of the entrepreneur as KT’s champion needs to be integrated and distributed throughout the organisation, with the entrepreneur serving as a performance controller.

This study enriches the knowledge management literature by applying a framework designed to provide a general description of KT, with some modifications, to a single case study to demonstrate its effectiveness in differentiating types of knowledge and outlining how KT can be configured to support essential business functions in an SME.

The analysis systematises the KT mechanisms that govern the start-up phase of an award-winning SME, with suggestions for how to manage KT during the development phase. Seldom are practitioners given insight into the mechanics of a successful SME start-up; this analysis serves as a practical guide for those wishing to implement effective KT strategies to emulate Birra Flea’s success.

The world’s economy thrives on SMEs, yet many fail as start-ups before they even have a chance to reach the development phase, presenting a motivation to study the early stages of SMEs. This study addresses that gap with an in-depth theoretical analysis of successful, effective KT processes in an SME, along with practical implications to enhance the knowledge, experience and skills of the actors that sustain these vital economic enterprises.

Evaluating primary care for children has not before been undertaken on a national level, and only infrequently on an international level, an adult-focused perspective is the norm. The Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) project explored the evaluation of quality of primary care for children in a nationally comparable way, which recognises the influence of all components of child well-being and well-becoming. Using adult-focused metrics fails to account for children’s physical and psycho-social development at different ages, differences in health and non-health determinants, patterns of disease and risk factors and the stages of the life course. To do this, we attempted to identify comparable measures of child health in the European Union and European Economic Area countries, we aimed to perform a structural equation modelling technique to identify causal effects of certain policies or procedures in children’s primary care and we aimed to identify and interrogate large datasets for key tracer conditions. We found that the creation of comparative data for children and child health services remains a low priority in Europe, and the largely unmet need for indicators covering all the healthcare dimensions hampers development of evidence-based policy. In terms of the MOCHA project objective of appraising models of child primary health care, the results of this specific work show that the means of appraisal of system and service quality are not yet agreed or mature, as well as having inadequate data to fuel them.

The paper aims to clearly differentiate knowledge sharing (KS) and knowledge transfer (KT) besides exemplifying their interconnections to minimize the current confusions in the knowledge management (KM) literature.

An extensive literature review method was used to analyse relevant literature on both KS and KT to clearly delineate their differences and their interconnections.

The paper found that KS is a subset of KT (using personalization strategy), whereas KT as a whole is a broader concept, if compared with KS. However, KS is not one of the immediate processes involved in KT (using codification strategy). The processes involved in KS and KT differ according to the strategy used (in KT) and perspective chosen (in KS). Other findings include KS (unidirectional) as reflective concept (viewed so far), whereas KS (bidirectional), KT (personalization) and KT (codification) as formative concepts.

The findings of this paper were based on the review of selected relevant articles only.

The paper will minimize the current confusions in the KM literature and will assist future researches on both KS and KT to ensure what these concepts entail to avoid construct underrepresentation.

As compared to previous attempts, the present paper has shown the interconnections between KS and KT, as well as the differences based on the two perspectives of KS (unidirectional/bidirectional) and the two strategies of KT (personalization/codification), and such effort is new in the literature.

This study aims to identify effective strategies and practices for higher education institutions (HEIs) to enhance their knowledge recipients’ knowledge absorptive capacity.

Questionnaire surveys and interviews were conducted to examine the effectiveness of a knowledge transfer (KT) project and these were administered by HEIs in Hong Kong. Pre- and post-test questionnaire surveys with t-tests were used to evaluate changes in the knowledge absorptive capacity of 1,014 participants from 20 schools. Qualitative interviews were conducted to investigate school leaders’ perception of the effectiveness of the KT strategies.

Results revealed significant differences between the pre- and post-tests in all the elements of absorptive capacity. The processes of knowledge acquisition, contextualisation, internalisation and externalisation in a closed-loop mechanism were identified as effective KT strategies. Conducting training programmes, workshops, consultations, work-based studies and presentation seminars were found to be effective KT practices to support the recipients in acquiring, contextualising, internalising and externalising knowledge.

HEIs should provide consultative support to recipients by conducting work-based studies and presentations to enhance their knowledge absorptive capacities.

This study contributes empirical evidence to validate the application of Liyanage et al.’s (2009) KT model to HEIs’ KT model for the purpose of designing KT activities and enhancing the absorption capacities of the recipients. This research contributes an empirical closed-loop KT model, effective KT strategies and practices for HEIs to support their knowledge recipients so that they can internalise the acquired knowledge.

In today’s globalized and heavily industrialized economy, sustainability issues that negatively affect the human population and external environment are on the rise. This study aims to investigate a synergistic combination of supply chain management and quality management practices in strengthening the sustainability performance of Malaysian manufacturing firms.

A total sample of 177 usable surveys was collected. Given the contributions and acceptability of the artificial neural network (ANN) approach in evaluating the findings of this study, this study uses ANN to measure the relationship between each predictor (i.e. supply chain integration [SCI], quality leadership [QL], supplier focus [SF], customer focus (CF) and information sharing [IS]) and the dependent variable (i.e. sustainability performance). Via sensitivity analysis, the relative significance of each predictor variable is ranked based on the normalized importance value.

The sensitivity analysis indicates that CF has the greatest effect on sustainability performance (SP) with 100% normalized relative importance, followed by QL (75%), IS (61.5%), SF (57.3%) and SCI (46.7%).

The findings of this study have the potential to provide valuable guidance and insights that can help all manufacturing firms enhance their SP from the optimum combination of the selected SCQM practices with a focus on sustainability.

Sustainable production and manufacturing is an emerging concept for commercially successful performance. A question is how core asset processes should be streamlined to ensure performance quality and to portray their business roles within sustainability requirements. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue from asset operations and maintenance (O&M) perspective.

Issues discussed here are based on findings from a project launched during 2000‐2003 in Norway with major emphasis on performance integrity, consistency, and quality.

Through the findings of the original study, the paper elaborates on the important “Business – Production or Manufacturing asset – Operations and Maintenance” performance architecture in sustainable business environments.

The paper aims at stimulating production and manufacturing cluster to initiate joint R&D efforts to further explore and research this interesting and important subject matter that seems to be sensitive from socio‐economical viewpoint.

The paper provides a framework to explore and specify critical elements for a risk‐based industrial asset management practice in dynamic and complex settings of sustainable environments. This is critical for many commercial businesses with the ongoing debates on the proper balance between profits and fundamentals, and to develop effective performance measurements and auditing systems for asset O&M process to ensure integrity, consistency and quality in performance.

Many underlying issues regarding sustainability performance in production and manufacturing environments still remain ill‐defined. This paper clarifies how the emerging sustainable business concept can influence performance in industrial production and manufacturing assets, and how to outline a framework to streamline O&M performance.

Emergency shutdown (ESD) systems play a critical role in ensuring safety and availability of oil and gas production. The systems are operated in on-demand mode, and the detection and prediction of their failures is deemed challenging. The purpose of this paper is to develop a logical data-driven approach to enhance the understanding and detectability of ESD system failures.

The study was conducted in close collaboration with the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The study and analyses were supported by industrial data, failure data generated in a test facility in Norway and domain experts.

The paper demonstrated that there is a considerable potential to improve the decision process and to reduce the workload related to ESD systems by means of a logical data-driven approach. The results showed that the failure analysis process can be executed with more clarity and efficiency. Common cause failures could also be identified based on the suggested approach. The study further underlined the requirements regarding relevant data, new competence and technical supports in order to improve the current practice.

The paper leveraged the value of real-time data in identifying failures through mapping of the interrelationships between data, failure mechanisms and decisions. The failure analysis process was re-designed, and the understanding and decision making related to the system was improved as a result. The process developed for ESDs can further be adapted as a common practice for other low-demand systems.

The distant data centre-centric Internet of Things (IoT) systems face the latency issue especially in the real-time-based applications, such as augmented reality, traffic analytics and ambient assisted living. Recently, Fog computing models have been introduced to overcome the latency issue by using the proximity-based computational resources, such as the computers co-located with the cellular base station, grid router devices or computers in local business. However, the increasing users of Fog computing servers cause bottleneck issues and consequently the latency issue arises again. This paper aims to introduce the utilisation of Mist computing (Mist) model, which exploits the computational and networking resources from the devices at the very edge of the IoT networks.

This paper proposes a service-oriented mobile-embedded Platform as a Service (mePaaS) framework that allows the mobile device to provide a flexible platform for proximal users to offload their computational or networking program to mePaaS-based Mist computing node.

The prototype has been tested and performance has been evaluated on the real-world devices. The evaluation results have shown the promising nature of mePaaS.

The proposed framework supports resource-aware autonomous service configuration that can manage the availability of the functions provided by the Mist node based on the dynamically changing hardware resource availability. In addition, the framework also supports task distribution among a group of Mist nodes.

Most of the North Sea oil companies have recognized the need to adjust their management processes, including those concerned with operations and maintenance, to the changed and changing business conditions in industry at large, particularly due to the volatile oil price. This has been a rationale to review organizational operations and maintenance policies by many. This paper describes findings from a research study on operations and maintenance performance conducted in the emerging operating environment with close cooperation of leading oil and gas organizations in the Norwegian continental shelf. An attempt has been made to develop an architecture for effective management of operations and maintenance performance linking results to performance drivers. This has further been extended to apply the balanced scorecard concept. The papers emphasize on the value rather than the cost of operations and maintenance in the emerging business environment, and stresses that there is a need to move from a plant‐based policy to a more or less long‐term business‐oriented approach.