Search results

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature of blended learning by practically implementing best practices in employee training.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an organization had modified its training procedures over the course of three years to improve employee and organizational outcomes. Employee candidates who were onboarded into sales positions during the years 2019–2021 were given the opportunity to learn the content in an online format and subsequently evaluated prior to their in-person training and final evaluation to provide them with a self-paced blended learning experience. Both evaluation scores, along with the length it took to complete the trainings, were used to determine the trainings effectiveness and efficiency respectively.

The findings for the study showed that the organization was successfully able to improve upon the efficiency of the training by reducing training length and the effectiveness by improving employee outcomes.

The study’s design was limited to the probation process, which resulted in issues drawing conclusions for employee outcomes that were relevant to their long-term organizational success. This emphasizes the importance of comprehensive investigations for future practical studies.

The findings allow for the improvement of blended learning models within real-world organizational contexts that provide organizations with the opportunity to improve employee outcomes while reducing time costs.

This study provides data from applied blended learning procedures that were validated using empirical findings, which contributes to the practicality of blended learning in workplace training.

Innovation is the combination of idea generation and idea implementation. Sourcing relevant and credible external knowledge is critical for individuals to generate new feasible ideas and reduce the uncertainty of implementation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of knowledge sourcing on employee’s innovations behavior.

The data were collected by paper-based survey in four Chinese companies’ R&D departments and consisted of 569 valid responses. Structure equitation modeling method was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that knowledge sourcing, which is formatively conceptualized by tacit knowledge sourcing and explicit knowledge sourcing, significantly influences employee’s innovation behavior. In particular, the direct effect of knowledge sourcing is fully mediated by task-efficacy. Furthermore, the effects of knowledge sourcing are contingent upon information transparency.

This study not only contributes to knowledge sourcing literature by investigating knowledge sourcing from idea generation and idea implementation perspectives, but also is of importance to knowledge management research by demonstrating the moderating effects of information transparency.

The purpose of this article is to design and make fabrics with colorful melange yarns spun by a three-channel rotor spinning machine.

The three-channel digital rotor-spun machine controls the blending proportion by adjusting the feeding of three-primary color fiber slivers online, so that a piece of colorful yarn presents a variety of colors along the longitudinal direction where constant yarn linear density can be produced flexibly. Various fabric patterns can be produced by three-channel rotor-spun colorful melange yarn with different periods of color.

The fabric, made by the rotor-spun colorful melange yarn, is rich in color, clear in layers, soft in the hand and has a hazy three-dimensional effect. The product is environmentally friendly and saves energy.

An innovative idea to develop various colorful fabrics is proposed by combining their pattern with colorful melange yarn produced by a three-channel rotor spinning machine.

To dilute the financial difficulties in agricultural production and operation, the Chinese government has actively explored and developed rural supply chain finance (RSCF) service systems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and analyze the performance of RSCF systems in China.

To evaluate the performance of RSCF systems in China, this study proposes a two-stage data envelopment analysis model. Compared with other models, the model proposed in this study considers not only the technical gap between RSCF systems but also the maximization of intermediate output to conform to the practice of RSCF.

Based on the empirical analysis, this study draws the following four conclusions. First, the overall efficiency of China's RSCF systems is low, and there remains great potential for improvement. Second, the technology gap ratio index score and meta-frontier efficiency of RSCF systems in Central China are the lowest in all regions, indicating that the technical level of RSCF systems in Central China is the lowest. Third, the relationship between rural residents' disposable income and the efficiency of RSCF systems is U-shaped, and the efficiency of RSCF systems in the high-income group is far greater than that of other income groups. Finally, the main reason for the lack of efficiency in RSCF seems to lie in management and technology.

This study divides all RSCF systems into four types according to management potential and technical potential, and recommend corresponding improvement suggestions for different kinds of RSCF systems.

This paper aims to present a novel robotic system for airport pavement inspection tasks.

The cloud-edge-terminal-based distributed architecture is designed for the proposed robotic system. Then, the following three major parts are designed and deployed, respectively: Terminal: the wheeled-robot-based data collection system. Edge: remote monitoring and data analysis system. Cloud: shared database center of the inspection data and knowledge.

Validation and application results show that the proposed system satisfies the demands of automated airport pavement inspection tasks and saves the cost of manpower and time.

The proposed system provides a novel solution for the full process of airport pavement inspection. Compared with the traditional manual method, the robotic system can guarantee complete coverage and provide high-precision pavement inspection results with less time and labor costs.

Collaboration is a common phenomenon in human society. The best way of collaborations can make the group achieve the best interests. Because of the low cost and high repeatability of simulation, it is a good method to explore the best way of collaborations by means of simulation. The traditional simulation is difficult to adapt to the crowd intelligence network simulation, so the crowd collaborations simulation is proposed.

In this paper, the atomic swarm intelligence unit and collective swarm intelligence unit are proposed to represent the behavior of individuals and groups in physical space and the interaction between them.

To explore the best collaboration mode of the group, a framework of crowd collaborations simulation is proposed, which decomposes the big goal into the small goals by constructing the cooperation chain and analyzes the cooperation results and feeds them back to the next simulation.

Two kinds of swarm intelligence units are used to represent the simulated individuals in the group, and the pattern is used to represent individual behavior. It is suitable for the simulation of collaboration problems in various types and situations.

Without proper treatment, waste cooking oil (WCO) will bring serious environmental and health hazards, which can be effectively alleviated by converting it into biofuel. Subsidies from the government usually play a significant role in encouraging recycling activities and supporting sustainable supply chain. This paper aims to quantitatively investigate the incentive effects of government subsidies under asymmetric information.

This paper applies the principal–agent contract to compare the incentive effects of the two widely used subsidy modes (raw material price subsidy [MS] and finished product sale subsidy [FS]) in a management system which consists of the government and a bio-firm where the bio-firm’s conversion rate of the WCO remains as private information.

Results indicate that the two subsidy modes have the same performance under symmetric information, while under asymmetric information, the government always prefers the MS mode which is more environment-friendly. Besides, if the average conversion rate is large or the uncertainty level of the asymmetric information is moderate, the MS mode is Pareto-improving compared with the FS mode for the government and the high-type bio-firm. Only when the average conversion rate is small or the uncertainty level is very small/very large, the high-type bio-firm welcomes the FS mode.

Different from the existing literature, this paper applies the principal–agent contract into the WCO management system and quantitatively compares the two subsidy modes taking the practical problem of asymmetric information into consideration.

In today’s market, firms are riding on the wave of globalisation to enhance competitiveness through corporate collaboration in new product development (NPD). In joint NPD, huge amounts of information and knowledge are interchanged among business partners. However, industrial experience and past research have indicated that knowledge sharing among firms invite opportunism, that is, knowledge being leaked or misused by others. To determine the means to rectify the problems of opportunism in joint NPD, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of commitment and knowledge sharing on opportunism.

An online questionnaire survey was conducted to verify the research model with 312 valid responses from manufacturing firms. The survey data were analysed by structural equation modelling, and the findings were verified by follow-up interviews.

Contradictory to most studies, this study finds that knowledge sharing among committed business partners suppresses, rather than invites, opportunism.

This finding is new in the literature with strong managerial implication. Firms that hesitate to share their knowledge with others because of the fear of opportunism should commit more seriously to their business partners so that they could share knowledge for better NPD.

This study has reversed the sceptical belief of knowledge sharing leading to opportunism. This new belief will encourage corporate collaboration in joint NPD. However, for a comprehensive view on opportunism in inter-firm NPD, other governance mechanisms, that is, contract and trust, should also be studied in future research.

Studies in teacher research have seldom discussed the effects of writing publications and teachers’ views on it. This paper aims to examine how teachers in China regard the purpose of writing up research papers and its impact on their professional practice. It also investigates facilitating factors in preparing and writing publications.

This is a qualitative study which mainly analyses interview data gathered from 14 teachers, who have experience in writing publications, from three schools in Shanghai, China. Documentary analysis includes selected published journal papers and book chapters of the interviewees.

Findings show that teachers perceive producing publications as serving both an instrumental purpose of career advancement and a developmental purpose of enhancing their individual professional competency which in turn improves the quality of the teaching profession through knowledge transfer and knowledge transportation.

Contributing factors to help teachers to write include the provision of systematic training courses for teachers and the development of network and research partners.

Findings of this study help school leaders and teacher educators better their understanding of improving the quality of practice of teachers through equipping them with a “stance of inquiry”. Findings suggest ways to provide relevant support to enhance the writing capacity of teachers. More importantly, a revision of the existing teacher promotion system may make the practice of writing publications of more direct value to teachers’ daily practice.