Search results

A global crisis like that caused by the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the survival of any business, but especially of nascent entrepreneurs, due to their vulnerable situation. At this stage of entrepreneurship, information and communication technology capabilities (ICTCs) are critical skills that help entrepreneurs develop their new businesses, fostering economic adaptability to counteract adverse effects. This study advances knowledge of how nascent entrepreneurs react in an environment of global crisis.

The study analyzes a sample of 331 Spanish nascent entrepreneurs to determine the mediating effect of ICTCs on the relationship between the impact of a global crisis (e.g. COVID-19) and the firm’s strategic response.

The results suggest that crises influence adaptation and compensation strategies significantly and that ICTCs exert a total mediating effect on this relationship. The results do not, however, establish a clear relationship between the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and disengagement response, but rather a negative relationship, possibly influenced by government attempts to mitigate the pandemic’s economic consequences (economic aid to maintain the workforce, financial support for business model survival).

The COVID-19 crisis revealed ICT as a key technology for continuing business operations. This study analyzes how ICTCs affect nascent entrepreneurs’ strategies in crisis environments. Our analysis is important because these entrepreneurs have invested resources in their new project. We must determine their strategic response to crisis environments: adaptation, compensation or disengagement. The sample itself, collected during the pandemic, provides unique insights into the impact of the crisis on nascent business decisions.

像2019冠狀病毒病大流行等的全球危機一旦發生，各工商企業能否繼續生存必會受到威脅和影響。這影響以剛開始發展的創業者為甚，因為他們處於脆弱的處境。在這個創業階段，創業者必須擁有資訊與通訊科技能力，才能發展他們的新業務，他們亦需培養經濟上的適應能力，以能抵銷各種不利的影響。本研究擬就剛開始發展的創業者在全球危機發生時應如何應對進行探討，以增進我們對這課題的知識。

本研究分析一個涵蓋331名西班牙新生創業者的樣本，來鑒定資訊與通訊科技能力對全球危機 (如2019冠狀病毒病) 帶來的影響與企業戰略應對之間的關聯所起的中介效應。

研究結果似顯示，危機會顯著地影響企業的適應和賠償策略; 研究結果似乎也顯示，資訊與通訊科技能力會對這關聯 (全球危機所帶來的影響與企業戰略應對之間的關聯) 發揮極大的中介效應。但研究結果並沒有就2019冠狀病毒病危機的影響與脫離反應、建立明確的關聯。反之，研究結果似顯示兩者有一個負相關的關係，這可能是因為政府施行應對方法，以減輕大流行所帶來的經濟後果所致 (這些應對方法包括用以維持勞動力隊伍的經濟援助、和使商業模式能繼續生存的財政支援) 。

2019冠狀病毒病危機揭示了資訊與通訊科技是讓商業運作能繼續進行的關鍵技術。本研究分析資訊與通訊科技能力如何於危機發生時影響新生創業者的策略。我們的分析有其重要性，這是因為這些創業者把資源投入他們的新項目; 我們必須鑒定他們對危機所採取的戰略對策: 適應、賠償和脫離。取自大流行期間有關的樣本本身已能就危機如何影響新生創業者的商務決策、提供獨特的啟示。

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the status of poverty and its reduction by following the inclusive development approach. This study is designed to examine the benefits obtained from development programs, assess the government’s commitment to alleviating social inequality, and its impacts on the redistribution of wealth and poverty reduction.

To evaluate the implementation of the various development schemes and enhance grass-roots participation, a survey was carried out on 540 households, selected through multistage stratified sampling techniques in three different states of Punjab. The study employed an exploratory factor analysis on 21 independent variables to identify the key factors influencing poverty reduction subsequently followed by the binary logistic regression to access the sectoral impact of inclusiveness on poverty reduction in Punjab.

Exploratory Factor analysis extracted six key factors from the selected 21 variables, also called statements: “'Housing Development Resources”; “Human Capital Variables”; “Livelihood Essentials”, “Medical and Family Welfare Benefits”; “Receiving Educational Benefits”; and Social Security Benefits’. Binary logistic regression revealed that Housing Development Resources, Human Capital Variables, and Receiving Educational Facilities, significantly predict the likelihood of poverty reduction with inclusive growth in Punjab.

To provide basic amenities to rural people, increased people’s participation, decentralized planning, extended irrigation facilities, improved equipped facilities, and improved cultivation techniques are pivotal. The Indian Government has implemented several programs and projects to develop and support rural households. However, these schemes have faced many challenges such as rigidity, non-adaptability to local conditions, late disbursements of funds, reallocation of funds to unrelated expenditures by some states, embezzlement, and bribery demands. Hence, the findings indicate the presence of pseudo-inclusivity in Punjab’s growth.

The study’s uniqueness lies in its focus on selected districts of Punjab and also its application of exploratory factor analysis and binary logistic regression to construct a statistical model from the selected variables.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the contradictions inherent to balconies. Despite the attention given to these architectural elements on that moment, there is a knowledge gap concerning the preferences and expectations of the inhabitants in relation to them. For this reason, this paper aims to conduct a critical literature review of the publications about the inhabitants’ perceptions of balconies in order to identify the most relevant criteria to consider during the design process.

The analysis was based on the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) criteria (technical, functional and behavioural).

The results highlighted the relevance of the behavioural criteria for the valorisation of the balconies by the inhabitants and presented indications to the research about these liminal spaces and the design practice of housing buildings.

According to the authors’ best knowledge, this study represents the more holistic study of the kind.

The adoption of emerging technologies is critical to enhance construction industry performance. Previous studies have shown that the Nigerian construction industry (NCI) is slow to adopt digital technologies and faces performance issues. As a result, this study aims to investigate and model the barriers to adopting digital twin (DT) technology in the NCI with the view to provide stakeholders with adequate information on the multifaceted nature of DT barriers and provide strategies to improve DT adoption.

The study adopts a qualitative and quantitative approach to achieve the overall aim of the study. The qualitative approach included a scoping review used to identify barriers to DT adoption from the literature. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire was administered to 246 construction professionals in the NCI. This was followed by critical analysis using mean ranking and standard deviation, Kruskal–Wallis, factor analysis and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The exploratory factor analysis revealed four categories of barriers to DT adoption in the NCI: “technological and investment”, “data management and government”, “project and human resources” and “digital transformation”. The PLS-SEM results revealed the causal relationships of four barriers categories and their concomitant effects on DT adoption in the NCI. The top three barrier categories that require critical attention in order of significance are: technological and investment (ß = 0.655), data management and government (ß = 0.313) and project and human resources (ß = 0.194). Digital transformation (ß = −0.046) has the least significance. Overall, all the barriers’ categories were accepted at a significance level of p < 0.05.

The practical implications include guiding policymakers and practitioners in making informed decisions to address the identified barriers to DT adoption in the NCI. The findings may also be applicable to other developing countries in Africa and beyond. By implementing effective policies and stakeholder guidelines, the NCI can advance technologically and enhance its competitiveness to execute advanced construction projects.

This research contributes to the construction industry by shedding light on the barriers to DT adoption and their intricate interconnections within the NCI context. It is also the first study in NCI context to present the level of DT awareness and explore the concomitant effects of the barriers.

In order to determine whether the factors affecting office worker well-being are location dependent, this exploratory study analyses the relative importance of different “building well-being” factors for prime office workers in two leading but environmentally contrastive real estate markets: London and Hong Kong.

This paper adopts a mixed methods sequential explanatory design (follow-up explanations model), consisting of three phases: an exploratory phase to refine the building well-being factors, a quantitative phase utilising a questionnaire to assess the relative importance of these building well-being factors (N = 281: London = 171; Hong Kong = 110), followed by a final phase of follow-up interviews with respondents to explore the reasons behind the significant differences observed in the quantitative phase (N = 13: London = 7; Hong Kong = 6).

While London and Hong Kong share some highly-ranking factors in common, significant differences in importance are observed for 17 of the 31 identified factors as a result of contrasting physical, economic, and cultural environments.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of the built environment on well-being, to the authors’ knowledge there has been no previous research investigating how building well-being demands may vary systematically across geographies. Understanding these differences has important implications for interpreting building well-being research, effective business operations, real estate investment, building certification scheme design, and governance of the built environment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions, experiences and behaviors of women entrepreneurs and industry professionals in raising finance for women-led businesses and associated problems faced by the women entrepreneurs.

This qualitative research adopts a narrative inquiry strategy. In-depth interviews are used to collect data from women entrepreneurs and women industry professionals in Pakistan. NVivo qualitative data analysis software is used to organize, analyze and find insights in the qualitative data.

This research finds that women entrepreneurs struggle to secure financing for their businesses, and most of them have not been successful in obtaining loans from banks. Women entrepreneurs have relied on various sources of funding, including microfinance banks, grants, personal finance and family members. Some of the barriers to finance attainment for women entrepreneurs include sociocultural inhibitions, lack of awareness and limited information dissemination by financial institutions. Women professionals suggest that entrepreneurs should maintain a bank account, have proper documentation and show dedication to their business to improve their chances of obtaining financing.

This research provides theoretical contributions and methodological advancements in the study of financial inclusion for women-owned businesses in Pakistan. This research raises awareness about the difficulties women entrepreneurs face when trying to obtain credit from banks and other financial institutions and provides policy recommendations to inform the government about financial inclusion policies and financing policies for women entrepreneurs. Overall, this research contributes to the literature on financial access and access to finance for women-owned businesses in developing countries.

Based on the vulnerable group theory and theory of discouraged borrower, this paper has two important theoretical and practical implications. First, the findings of this study reveal that the financial services are indifferent to women, and there is a denial of women being vulnerable in the financial system, hence requiring a major policy shift to not portray women as vulnerable, as they will rationally feel risky and prefer to opt out of the financial system. Second, the findings suggest that the issue of access to finance for women is not in the financial services but in the women's capabilities and awareness. Therefore, a policy shift is suggested from “financial services for women” to “capability and awareness of women” to avail and access the current services.

This paper aims to review the elements of facilities condition index (FCI) as one of the most widely used metrics for describing the physical condition of facilities and as a measure of financial indicator related to maintenance activity. This research will benefit future studies that focus on implementation of FCI and encourage the best practice when assessing the physical condition to evaluate the performance of facilities as well as to plan for maintenance action to be taken and financial implication involved based on the findings from FCI.

A total of 33 studies from 2012 to 2022 were identified and extracted from four academic databased, named Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Mendeley. These published studies were selected because it matches with the inclusion requirements for research question, “What are the elements of facilities condition index discussed in the literature from 2012 to 2022?”. To answer the research question, the studies in ATLAS.ti were grouped into five major themes based on the codes and categories found.

This paper presents the findings of a thematic analysis of the current literature discussed about FCI. A total of 33 studies from 2012 to 2022 were identified and extracted from four academic databased, named Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Mendeley. A themed review was conducted, and five themes were identified as elements of FCI, which are named as follows: “Condition Assessment”, “Deferred Maintenance”, “Facilities Performance”, “Financial and Fund Allocation” and “Decision Making”.

This paper fulfils the fundamental elements on current FCI practices as well as intended to highlight existing practices that are essential to evaluate facilities performance and planning for maintenance strategies.

Construction projects, and particularly highway infrastructures, are known to be major contributors to the socio-economic growth of developing countries. However, these types of projects are infamous for being highly risky due to the interplay of numerous risk factors. This study aims to explore the key risk factors impacting on the performance of highway infrastructure projects in Nigeria from the contextual viewpoint of key industry stakeholders.

Qualitative data was collected using semi-structured interviews. Specifically, 17 in-depth expert interviews were conducted with experienced stakeholders in the highway sector of the Nigerian construction industry. The collected data was transcribed and analysed using an established coding framework (grounded on case study approach, principles of thematic analysis and saliency analysis).

Overall, 17 key risks were identified from the data analysis process, and 6 risks were recognised as the most significant, based on the combination of prevalence of occurrence and significance of the coded information. The six top risks were: change in government, corruption, cost of construction materials, inflation, project funding issues and construction project delay. However, the first two of these risks (change in government and corruption) are politically related, which is specific and unique to the setting of Nigeria and thus might be seen as discouraging indicators that could have an impact on attracting foreign investors/contractors to Nigeria.

The study addressed the gap related with identifying context-specific risk factors impeding the performance of highway projects in Nigeria from the viewpoints of industry experts. It is expected that the findings will provide a better insight into the various risk factors and thus aid relevant policymakers to provide context-specific mitigating strategies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected around 216 countries and territories worldwide and more than 2000 cities in India, alone. The smart cities mission (SCM) in India started in 2015 and 100 smart cities were selected to be initiated with a total project cost of INR 2031.72 billion. Smart city strategies play an important role in implementing the measures adopted by the government such as the issuance of social distancing regulations and other COVID-19 mitigation strategies. However, there is no research reported on the role of smart cities strategies in managing the COVID-19 outbreak in developing countries.

This paper aims to address the research gap in smart cities, technology and healthcare management through a review of the literature and primary data collected using semi-structured interviews.

Each city is unique and has different challenges, the study revealed six key findings on how smart cities in India managed the COVID-19 outbreak. They used: Integrated Command and Control Centres, Artificial Intelligence and Innovative Application-based Solutions, Smart Waste Management Solutions, Smart Healthcare Management, Smart Data Management and Smart Surveillance.

This paper contributes to informing policymakers of key lessons learnt from the management of COVID-19 in developing countries like India from a smart cities’ perspective. This paper draws on the six Cs for the implications directed to leaders and decision-makers to rethink and act on COVID-19. The six Cs are: Crisis management leadership, Credible communication, Collaboration, Creative governance, Capturing knowledge and Capacity building.