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This study makes an integrated approach in identifying the factors affecting usage intention of mobile-based payment services. Such services are being marketed aggressively by cellular service providers and are different from usual mobile-based banking. The study incorporates prominent factors like the technical characteristics, technology-specific characteristics, user-specific characteristics, and task-specific characteristics and others from published literature. The purpose of this paper is to highlight those factors which have significant impact on the adoption of such service so that the adoption rate can be increased.

A nationwide primary survey was conducted using validated questionnaire requesting response for the factors obtained from published literature. In total, 196 respondents participated in the survey. Totally, 11 hypotheses were formulated and statistically tested for their significance in context to the study. Confirmatory study was on the significant factors and a model has been proposed.

The study finds that factors like perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, system quality, connectivity, discomfort, task-technology fit and structural assurance have significant impact on the usage intention of mobile money services whereas factors such as perceived monetary value, absorptive capacity and personal innovativeness have been found to be insignificant.

There have been no studies conducted which reported mobile-based transfer payment adoption issues where-in the transfer mechanism is independent of formal banking. The findings would be beneficial for service providers of mobile-based payment services to understand their subscribers and roll out value added services.

We develop a Bayesian approach for modeling brain activation and connectivity from functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) data. Our approach simultaneously estimates local hemodynamic response functions (HRFs) and activation parameters, as well as global effective and functional connectivity parameters. Existing methods assume identical HRFs across brain regions, which may lead to erroneous conclusions in inferring activation and connectivity patterns. Our approach addresses this limitation by estimating region-specific HRFs. Additionally, it enables neuroscientists to compare effective connectivity networks for different experimental conditions. Furthermore, the use of spike and slab priors on the connectivity parameters allows us to directly select significant effective connectivities in a given network.

We include a simulation study that demonstrates that, compared to the standard generalized linear model (GLM) approach, our model generally has higher power and lower type I error and bias than the GLM approach, and it also has the ability to capture condition-specific connectivities. We applied our approach to a dataset from a stroke study and found different effective connectivity patterns for task and rest conditions in certain brain regions of interest (ROIs).

Companies increasingly opt for co-creation by engaging customers in new product and service development processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the customer experience in co-creation situations and its determinants.

The conceptual framework addresses the customer experience in co-creation situations, and its individual and environmental determinants. To examine the degree to which these determinants affect the customer experience in co-creation situations, the author starts by proposing and testing a multidimensional co-creation experience scale (n=66). Next, the author employs an experiment to test the hypotheses (n=180).

Higher levels of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity positively affect different co-creation experience dimensions. The impact of these dimensions on the overall co-creation experience, however, differs according to customers’ expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Therefore, the author concludes that the expected co-creation benefits determine the importance of the level of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity for the co-creation experience.

This research generates a better understanding of the co-creation experience by providing insight into the co-creation experience dimensions and their relative importance for customers with different expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Additionally, this research addresses the implications of customer heterogeneity in terms of expected co-creation benefits for designing co-creation environments, thereby helping managers to generate more rewarding co-creation experiences for their customers.

Recent neuroscience research shows that two large-scale cortical networks are involved in organizational behavior. These two networks are naturally antagonistic – when one is active the other tends to be suppressed. The focus of the chapter is to apply the opposing-domains hypothesis to problems associated with: (1) trying to balance creative thinking and global processing with analytic reasoning and focused attention; (2) avoiding ethical dangers associated with an imbalance in task positive network (TPN) and default mode network (DMN) thinking; and (3) properly motivating and incentivizing employees so as not to lead to an imbalance between the TPN and DMN. We contend that the opposing-domains hypothesis can inform organizational and leadership theory in areas where single-dimensional dual-process models are inadequate.

The purpose of this paper is to make a unified approach in identifying the issues affecting usage intention of mobile-based payment services. The work aims to analyze the reduced factors from data obtained from a survey to highlight the influencers of usage intention mobile-based payment in an integrated manner by incorporating the technical characteristics, technology-specific characteristics, user-specific characteristics and task-specific characteristics.

A nationwide primary survey was conducted using validated questionnaire requesting response for 11 factors obtained from published literature. In all, 196 respondents participated in the survey in India. Valid responses were analyzed using Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM) model. The interactive GHSOM application was applied to automatically determine the filtering rules for clustering.

The hierarchical structure of clusters as obtained by applying GHSOM is mainly influenced by factors like innovativeness, discomfort, system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, task-fit, connectivity, absorptive capacity and structural assurance.

Increasing trend of online and mobile-based payment has been observed and reported by several studies in India. The frequency of online transactions by women have shown a steady increase over a short period of time. But the survey obtained higher percentage of data from males. Thus future researchers could focus on this aspect to study the influence of this rising trend on adoption of services like mobile-based payment. Trust and existence of physical institutions seem to affect the perception and usage intention. Future researchers may explore the influence of these two issues in situations where there has been some reported cases of breach of trust.

There has been very few studies conducted which reported mobile-based transfer payment adoption issues where-in the transfer mechanism is independent of formal banking. Also no other study adopted the GHSOM approach to analyze the data. The findings would be beneficial for service providers of mobile-based payment services to understand their subscribers and roll out value-added services.

Systems to support literature review (LR) and manuscript preparation tend to focus on only one or two of the tasks involved. The purpose of this paper is to describe an intervention framework that redesigns a particular set of tasks, allowing for interconnectivity between the tasks and providing appropriate user interface display features for each task in a prototype system.

A user evaluation study was conducted on the prototype system. The system supports the three tasks: building a reading list (RL) of research papers, finding similar papers based on a set of papers and shortlisting papers from the final RL for inclusion in manuscript based on article type. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers, participated in the evaluation study. They had to select one of the provided 43 topics and execute the tasks offered by the system. Three questionnaires were provided for evaluating the tasks and system. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on the collected evaluation data.

Task redesign aspects had a positive impact in user evaluation for the second task of finding similar papers while improvement was found to be required for the first and third tasks. The tasks interconnectivity features seed basket and RL were helpful for the participants in conveniently searching for papers within the system. Two of the four proposed informational display features, namely, information cue labels and shared co-relations were the most preferred features of the system. Student user group found the task recommendations and the overall system to be more useful and effective than the staff group.

This study validates the importance of interconnected task design and novel informational display features in accentuating task-based recommendations for LR and manuscript preparatory tasks. The potential for improvement in recommendations was shown through the task redesign exercise where new requirements for the tasks were identified. The resultant prototype system helps in bridging the gap between novices and experts in terms of LR skills.

This paper provides an insight into how companies faced with hypercompetitive environments are leveraging their globally dispersed knowledge resources through far‐flung teams. Far‐flung teams are virtual teams that are multi‐unit/multi‐organizational, multi‐functional, globally dispersed and conduct their interdependent activities mainly through electronic media with minimal or no face‐to‐face interactions. A multi‐phase multi‐method study of 55 successful far‐flung teams. The first phase followed a highly successful far‐flung team over a period of ten months. The second phase involved survey participation from members of several far‐flung teams in multiple companies across multiple industries. Distinct communication and knowledge sharing norms emerge in successfuly far‐flung teams. Four different types of IT support are required for task coordination, external connectivity, distributed cognition and interactivity. The communication and knowledge sharing norms that emerged can be used to test impact on failure/success of other far‐flung teams. The impact of each of the four disctinct types of IT support has to be taken into account when studying far‐flung teams. Teams have to achieve a strategic fit between task characteristics, team composition and information technology support to overcome the barriers to knowledge sharing and successful creation of new knowledge in extreme environments faced by far‐flung teams. This paper takes an extensive multi‐methodology empirical approach to exploring successful far‐flung teams. It provides a theoretical model for future research on far‐flung teams.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on results of recent research about the self‐organisation (SO) of communities that aim to regenerate and/or improve their sustainability, also to reflect upon methodological and epistemological issues related to the application of complexity approaches to support SO in communities and in general, social enterprises.

The paper summarises recent research findings on SO and self‐transformation in communities using a combination of complexity approaches. It describes the methodological framework used to conduct action research about the self‐transformation and learning of a European eco‐community and reflects about the approaches used and lessons learned.

This research confirms the complementarity between two approaches to complexity management: the viable systems model from S. Beer, a pioneering approach to managing complexity in institutions, and complex adaptive systems, a more recent approach to deal with SO in organisations. Mapping the organisational dynamics and the structural changes decided by the community members shows interesting insights about emergence and SO. This is a state‐of‐the‐art research on multi‐methodological approaches to support complexity management in organisations.

As in many action research projects, early findings are limited to one particular organisation. Nevertheless, the theoretical frameworks of the broader research are useful for a wide variety of organisations, both in terms of guiding organisational transformations and supporting networking management of networks collaborating to create more sustainable evolutionary pathways.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for assessing the vulnerability of projects to crises. The study seeks to clarify the cascade effects of disruptions leading to project crises and to improve project robustness against crises from a systems perspective.

A framework for assessing project vulnerability to crises is developed using complex network theory. The framework includes network representation of project systems, analyzing project network topology, simulating the cascade of unexpected disruptions and assessing project vulnerability. Use of the framework is then illustrated by applying it to a case study of a construction project.

Project network topology plays a critical role in resisting crises. By increasing the resilience of the critical tasks and adjusting the structure of a project, the complexity and vulnerability of the project can be reduced, which in turn decreases the occurrence of crises.

The proposed framework is used in a case study. Further studies of its application to projects in diverse industries would be beneficial to enhance the robustness of the results.

Project crises can threaten the survival of a project and endanger the organization’s security. The proposed framework helps prevent and mitigate project crises by protecting critical tasks and blocking the diffusion path from a systems perspective.

This paper presents a novel framework based on complex network theory to assess project vulnerability, which provides a systemic understanding of the cascade of disruptions that lead to project crises.

Research into the autonomous use of MP3 audio recorders by students in UK higher education demonstrated that students were innovative in their autonomous use of the devices. They used them to capture learning conversations from formal and informal situations to personalise and enhance their learning. However, today smartphones and other smart devices have replaced the necessity for students to carry multiple mobile devices including MP3 recorders. This chapter builds upon the earlier work and presents a small qualitative study into how students are autonomously using their smart devices to support their learning. The research explores the hypothesis that students are being innovative in the ways in which they are using their smart devices to support their formal and informal learning. The study involved five students who own smart devices who were invited to discuss their ownership of smartphone and tablet technologies and the ways they used them in their studies. The students first completed a short questionnaire and were then interviewed in small groups. The results agree with previous research into student use of smart devices and describe autonomous engagement facilitated by personally owned smart technologies. The study identifies continuous patterns of pervasive engagement by students and concludes that more thought should be given to disruptive innovation, digital literacy and employability.