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In the following theoretical article, the author generates a theory of Leadership Pedagogy and its connection to Creative Arts Education.

The article analyzes Leadership Theory across three pillars: Socio-relational, Cognitive and Creative, and how these areas underscore thoughtful and caring pedagogy and inclusive teaching in undergraduate education.

Drawing on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the article advocates for a flexible, multifaceted approach to curricular design rooted in theoretical pluralism, prioritizing interdisciplinary methods to bridge theory and practice in Creative Arts Education.

The article concludes with implications for future research and collaboration connecting Leadership Studies and the Arts.

Service design is a multidisciplinary approach that plays a key role in fostering service innovation. However, the lack of a comprehensive understanding of its multiple perspectives hampers this potential to be realized. Through an activity theory lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine core areas that inform service design, identifying shared concerns and complementary contributions.

The study involved a literature review in two stages, followed by a qualitative study based on selected focus groups. The first literature review identified core areas that contribute to service design. Based on this identification, the second literature review examined 135 references suggested by 13 world-leading researchers in this field. These references were qualitatively analyzed using the NVivo software. Results were validated and complemented by six multidisciplinary focus groups with service research centers in five countries.

Six core areas were identified and characterized as contributing to service design: service research, design, marketing, operations management, information systems and interaction design. Data analysis shows the various goals, objects, approaches and outcomes that multidisciplinary perspectives bring to service design, supporting them to enable service innovation.

This paper supports service design teams to better communicate and collaborate by providing an in-depth understanding of the multiple contributions they can integrate to create the conditions for new service.

This paper identifies and examines the core areas that inform service design, their shared concerns, complementarities and how they contribute to foster new forms of value co-creation, building a common ground to advance this approach and leverage its impact on service innovation.

Lean Thinking is an operation management discipline which aims to identify, map and analyse the activities forming a process to detect “value waste” and outline the most effective flow of activities to execute in sequence. Process mapping is often developed in lean projects through the use of the Value Stream Map (VSM). Like many other management tools, the VSM adopts a static and non-systemic perspective in the representation of an organizational process. This may result in the implementation of Lean projects inconsistent with the overall organizational long-term strategy, thus leading to dysfunctional performance. In order to overcome this limit, the paper suggests combining VSM with System Dynamics (SD) modelling.

The paper is based on a review of the literature on VSM. This review is matched with an analysis of SD modelling principles aimed at explaining the practical and theoretical contribution of this approach to operation and strategic management practices. An illustrative case study is then provided to explore the practical implications of the proposed approach.

Our results show that SD modelling provides robust methodological support to VSM and Lean Thinking due to its inner characteristics, namely: simulation, systemic view, explicit link between system structure and behaviour and effective visual representation.

This research proposes a novel approach to design VSMs aimed at fostering a strategic perspective in Lean Thinking applications. Such an approach connects two fields of research and practice – i.e. VSM and SD modelling – which have traditionally been kept separated or, at least, partially combined for specific organizational sub-systems, thereby neglecting a broader strategic view of the entire process system.

To better understand the reality of living with the diseases and conditions that its drugs and therapies are developed to treat, the Novartis leadership determined a need for more meaningful insights into patients’ lives. They sought to develop a systematic, creative methodology – informed by the psychology of insightful rather than analytical thinking – to properly integrate and deploy the research commissioned into its day-to-day business decision-making. For it is well established that better understanding of the patient reality drives both compliance and adherence “beyond the pill”. The purpose of this paper is to bring the novel methodology of creativity to a wider audience and ensure that many others – notably in patient advocacy organizations – can benefit from this approach.

A core team of Insight and Analytics and Patient Engagement leads from various therapeutic area teams worked in partnership with a psychologist and practitioner in the field of insightful thinking, to develop an effective methodology that could reliably surface and articulate genuine patient insights. This methodology – the i4i Insights Discovery™ process – was developed, piloted, refined and codified in 2020 and implemented across the company in 2021–2022. It uses a combination of convergent and divergent thinking techniques – human rather than artificial intelligence, combining diverse research outputs – to understand patients’ lives better. With enhanced understanding, the insights then shape educational and behavioral strategies to drive adherence and compliance.

At a time of tightening budgets and demands to deliver enhanced impact from research budgets, i4i Insights Discovery™ has enabled Novartis teams to turn existing research outputs into profound and useful understandings of what it means to live with specific diseases and develop evidence-based patient engagement strategies; insight-driven decision-making around the lifecycle of any compound. i4i Insights Discovery™ has been applied across Novartis’s diverse areas of expertise, from heart disease to cancer, from organ transplantation to dermatology, from food allergy to ophthalmology.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process enables Novartis teams to gain deeper understanding of patients’ lives without the need to commission additional research; to do more with less. These insights enable cross-functional Novartis teams to develop better-informed strategies that better address the needs of patients and their care partners, of health-care professionals and health-care systems. The team creating the process is looking to make the i4i Insights Discovery™ approach a gold standard of insight discovery, both for pharma and health care and in other categories, too.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process is a practical, novel application of well-established principles in the psychology of insightful thinking to address a clear business imperative. By repurposing and reinterpreting existing research outputs using creative verbal and visual exercises, it delivers a more human and empathetic understanding of the patient reality. It moves teams from “So what?” – this is what the data mean – to “Now what?” – this is what we should do as a result.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an online faculty development pilot course on how to engage students online. A framework was used, referred to as the Trifecta of Student Engagement, for the design of the course. The Trifecta of Student Engagement proposes that students, in order to be fully engaged in a course, need to be engaged with their course content, with their peers and with their instructor. The course has three units of content that each correspond to the Trifecta of Student Engagement. This course has gone through one pilot with faculty and has impacted students and faculty positively.

An online faculty development course was piloted with eight faculty members across a range of disciplines who participated in the program. After taking the course, they had to apply the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to a course they taught and share what they did via written report, webinar, or web presentation. This study summarized the faculty participants’ written reports and presentations as well as provided a qualitative evaluation on the impact this course had on students and faculty.

After faculty applied the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to courses taught, faculty saw an improvement in student engagement, satisfaction, learning and achievement. Three faculty surveyed students to determine their engagement and satisfaction and found students to respond positively to the use of tools and activities for student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement. Two faculty examined student grades to determine if there were changes in student outcomes. One professor saw average grades increase by 11 percent. Another professor saw grades improve by 8 percent. She also found that student assessment of learning increased by 0.57. Both faculty attributed the improvement to the effectiveness of the teaching strategies employed.

This research is limited to the eight faculty who participated in the pilot. Some faculty used methods to attempt to measure the impacts of their teaching practices by surveying students and looking at student performance data. A second pilot is needed for additional faculty to take the course and apply the Trifecta of Engagement framework to generate more data for impact.

Institutions looking to create an online teaching professional development course for faculty can utilize the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework for their course design. Additionally, faculty can read about tools and strategies that they can immediately apply to create more student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement.

Faculty can be more intentional in how they engage students in their online course experience.

This paper adds to the literature on faculty development regarding student-centered teaching practices. Other institutions looking to create a faculty development course or program that utilizes a student-centered framework may find aspects of this paper useful for their own online teaching professional development initiatives.

Learning styles based education is becoming influential at higher education institutions around the world. Learning styles are characteristics of how students prefer to learn; they draw their origin from both biological and experiential conditions that make each student unique in the way he/she learns. An important first step in improving learning is to identify or assess students’ learning styles, and there are several instruments that can be used for this purpose. This is necessary for teachers and students who wish to improve learning and study strategies. Students who perform poorly in a conventional educational setting may suffer from a mismatch of learning and teaching styles; for example kinesthetic learners may not adapt to learning by listening or by reading. When we teach tactual and/or kinesthetic students by talking, they focus for only a brief amount of time and then wander off into their own thoughts and quickly forget (Burke & Dunn, 2002). We can improve students’ academic performance by providing them with alternative strategies and activities that respond to their learning style needs (Dunn & Dunn, 1993). In spring 2008, the learning styles of over 700 Zayed University students were assessed using the BE (Building Excellence) survey developed by Rundle & Dunn. The data collected is being analyzed with a view to making recommendations for teachers, students and parents to improve students’ learning. This paper represents the first in a series of publications on this subject; it reviews the survey process, and focuses on the nature and learning preferences of ZU students in perceptual elements (e.g. visual, auditory) and cognitive elements (e.g. Analytic-sequential (left-brain) vs. Global-simultaneous (right-brain) preferences).

This paper aims to identify the interaction of different intervention strategies implemented in Malaysia towards flattening the curve of COVID-19 cases. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many approaches were adopted and implemented by the Malaysian government. Some strategies gained quick wins but with negative unintended consequences after execution, whereas other strategies were slow to take effect. Learning from the previous strategies is pivotal to avoid repeating mistakes.

This paper presents the cause, effect of and connection among the implemented COVID-19 intervention strategies using systems thinking through the development of a causal loop diagram. It enables the visualisation of how each implemented strategy interacted with each other and collectively decreased or increased the spread of COVID-19.

The results of this study suggested that it is not only essential to control the spread of COVID-19, but also to prevent the transmission of the virus. The Malaysian experience has demonstrated that both control and preventive strategies need to be in a state of equilibrium. Focusing only on one spectrum will throw off the balance, leaving COVID-19 infection to escalate rapidly.

The developed feedback loops provided policy makers with the understanding of the merits, pitfalls and dynamics of prior implemented intervention strategies before devising other effective intervention strategies to defuse the spread of COVID-19 and prepare the nation for recovery.

This paper aims to reveal the philanthropy landscape processes for dealing with disasters and examine the influence of lean thinking in managing philanthropy for disasters. It sought to leverage continuous improvement and maximise disaster response and humanitarian logistics efficiency.

A sequential quantitative, qualitative research methods strategy was utilised involving data collection with literary analysis and two sets of online surveys with 212 NGO staff members in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In addition, in-depth key informant interviews were conducted with 23 staff members at various management levels from these countries.

The study found that lean thinking had a positive, statistically valid influence at a 95% confidence level. Community incorporation, government support and collaboration with other philanthropic organisations were critical success factors. When lean thinking tools were applied (any tools), philanthropic organisations experienced waste reduction and value addition, where waste reduction accounted for 67% variation, and value-addition accounted for 58%, respectively. These were the same benefits experienced in other industries, thus, justifying lean thinking's applicability in the non-profit sector. Lean was most helpful about the communication and duplication of efforts challenges humanitarian or philanthropic organisations face when responding to a disaster.

The study equips leaders and philanthropic organisations with suggestions to manage and respond to disasters in a lean and effective manner. The study helps philanthropy leaders rethink their funding and response models to pursue lean policies catering to humanitarian organisations and the communities they serve.

The study closes significant gaps in the literature and practice by adopting a multi-sectoral lens that borrows from business and manufacturing tools into a non-profit context. It enables documentation of processes and logistical management by philanthropy organisations for continuous improvement and elimination of waste to ensure efficiency in the philanthropic role of alleviating the impact of disasters. The study also affirms the need for philanthropic organisations to incorporate community feedback, use lean tools to collaborate with other responding organisations and work closely with the local authorities to fulfil the government's supportive role: the primary source and executor in disaster response.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the components, structure and theoretical underpinnings of a cognitive remediation intervention that was delivered within a supported education program for mental health survivors.

In total, 21 participants enrolled in the course Strengthening Memory, Concentration and Learning (PREP 1033 at George Brown College (GBC)) with the diagnosis of depression, anxiety, PTSD, ED and substance use disorder were included in the research. After a baseline assessment, participants completed 14 week cognitive remediation training (CRT) protocol that included six essential components that were integrated and implemented within the course structure of the supported education program at GBC. This was followed by a post-training assessment.

Analysis of the participants’ performance on CRT protocol using computerized games showed little significant progress. However, the research found a positive change in the self-esteem of the participants that was statistically significant and the findings also aligned with the social and emotional learning framework.

One of the limitations in the research was the use of computer-assisted cognitive remediation in the form of the HappyNeuron software. The value and relevance of computer assisted needs are to be further examined. It seems that the implementation of the course that explicitly address cognitive challenges creates a supportive environment can be helpful.

Despite the mixed results and the few limitations associated with the CRT intervention reported in the research, the study offers reminders of the complexity of cognitive remediation and all the factors involved that need to be taken into consideration.

This research created explicit space for addressing some of the implicit assumptions about the cognitive abilities when in post-secondary education.

This work is based on author’s previous work on cognitive remediation research within the supported education setting.

The purpose was to describe the redesigning of an online course that utilized adult learning principles and a framework to engage students.

The methodology used is a first person account from the instructor point of view.

Findings indicate that the teaching strategies used encouraged student engagement in the course.

The research is limited to one course with less than 20 students.

Other online instructors can utilize teaching strategies used that promote engagement among students.

This course is an example of a highly engaging online course. This shows that online courses can be engaging and satisfying for students.

This paper adds to the body of literature on what teaching strategies encourage students to engage online. It connects theories with real life examples that others teaching online can implement.