Servitization transformation:drivers, benefit and barriers

The study described in this paper has set out to build the evidence base underpinning servitization transformation. We applied a Delphi research methodology from 33 senior executives, in 28 different sized organisations, from a cross section of British industry. Our findings focus on servitization: (1) drivers, (2) benefit (3) barriers. The four findings are presented to contribute to our understanding of the transformation processes that manufacturers to compete through servitization.

‘Death talk’, ‘loss talk’ and identification in the process of ageing

In this paper, we examine the injunction issued by the prominent politician, broadcaster and older people's advocate, Baroness Joan Bakewell, to engage in ‘death talk’. We see positive ethical potential in this injunction, insofar as it serves as a call to confront more directly the prospects of death and dying, thereby releasing creative energies with which to change our outlook on life and ageing more generally. However, when set against a culture that valorises choice, independence and control, the positive ethical potential of such injunctions is invariably thwarted. We illustrate this with reference to one of Bakewell's interventions in a debate on scientific innovation and population ageing. In examining the context of her intervention, we affirm her intuition about its positive ethical potential, but we also point to an ambivalence that accompanies the formulation of the injunction – one that ultimately blunts the force and significance of her intuition. We suggest that Gilleard and Higgs' idea of the third age/fourth age dialectic, combined with the psycho-analytic concepts of fantasy and mourning, allow us to express this intuition better. In particular, we argue that the expression ‘loss talk’ (rather than ‘death talk’) better captures the ethical negotiations that should ultimately underpin the transformation processes associated with ageing, and that our theoretical contextualisation of her remarks can help us see this more clearly. In this view, deteriorations in our physical and mental capacities are best understood as involving changes in how we see ourselves, i.e. in our identifications, and so what is at stake are losses of identity and the conditions under which we can engage in new processes of identification.

Organizations driving positive social change:a review and an integrative framework of change processes

Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC – the transformational processes to advance societal well-being – which is fragmented across different streams of research in management and related disciplines. Focusing on the mechanisms at play in how organizations and their projects affect change in targets outside of organizational boundaries, we 1) clarify the nature of PSC as a process, 2) develop an integrative framework that specifies two distinct PSC strategies, 3) take stock of and offer a categorization scheme for change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices, and 4) outline opportunities for future research. Our conceptual framework differentiates between surface- and deep-level PSC strategies understood as distinct combinations of change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices. These strategies differ in the nature and speed of transformation experienced by the targets of change projects and the resulting quality (pervasiveness and durability), timing, and reach of social impact. Our findings provide a solid base for integrating and advancing knowledge across the largely disparate streams of management research on Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Entrepreneurship, and Base of the Pyramid, and open up important new avenues for future research on organizing for PSC and on unpacking PSC processes.

Building team-based working:a practical guide to organizational transformation

Building Team-based Working is designed for use by managers and consultants who are introducing team-based working into organizations. The book synthesizes knowledge about how to build team-based organizations, focusing particularly on the psychological and social processes that can facilitate or obstruct successful teamwork. Rather than advise managers on how to build effective teams, as most books in this area tend to do, this book instead focuses on how to build organizations structured around teams. The text is divided into six sections describing the six main stages of developing team-based working in an organization. The chapters follow a common structure. Each one opens with a summary of the aims and activities relevant to that stage and concludes with a selection of appropriate support materials and tools. These materials can also be downloaded from the CD accompanying the text. The advice given is based on evidence gathered by the authors over 20 years of practical management experience, research work in organizations, and consultancy across the public, manufacturing and service sectors.

Studies on the generalisation of Gaussian processes and Bayesian neural networks

The assessment of the reliability of systems which learn from data is a key issue to investigate thoroughly before the actual application of information processing techniques to real-world problems. Over the recent years Gaussian processes and Bayesian neural networks have come to the fore and in this thesis their generalisation capabilities are analysed from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Upper and lower bounds on the learning curve of Gaussian processes are investigated in order to estimate the amount of data required to guarantee a certain level of generalisation performance. In this thesis we analyse the effects on the bounds and the learning curve induced by the smoothness of stochastic processes described by four different covariance functions. We also explain the early, linearly-decreasing behaviour of the curves and we investigate the asymptotic behaviour of the upper bounds. The effect of the noise and the characteristic lengthscale of the stochastic process on the tightness of the bounds are also discussed. The analysis is supported by several numerical simulations. The generalisation error of a Gaussian process is affected by the dimension of the input vector and may be decreased by input-variable reduction techniques. In conventional approaches to Gaussian process regression, the positive definite matrix estimating the distance between input points is often taken diagonal. In this thesis we show that a general distance matrix is able to estimate the effective dimensionality of the regression problem as well as to discover the linear transformation from the manifest variables to the hidden-feature space, with a significant reduction of the input dimension. Numerical simulations confirm the significant superiority of the general distance matrix with respect to the diagonal one.In the thesis we also present an empirical investigation of the generalisation errors of neural networks trained by two Bayesian algorithms, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method and the evidence framework; the neural networks have been trained on the task of labelling segmented outdoor images.

A near real-time water surface detection method based on HSV transformation of MODIS multi-Spectral time series data

In the face of global population growth and the uneven distribution of water supply, a better knowledge of the spatial and temporal distribution of surface water resources is critical. Remote sensing provides a synoptic view of ongoing processes, which addresses the intricate nature of water surfaces and allows an assessment of the pressures placed on aquatic ecosystems. However, the main challenge in identifying water surfaces from remotely sensed data is the high variability of spectral signatures, both in space and time. In the last 10 years only a few operational methods have been proposed to map or monitor surface water at continental or global scale, and each of them show limitations. The objective of this study is to develop and demonstrate the adequacy of a generic multi-temporal and multi-spectral image analysis method to detect water surfaces automatically, and to monitor them in near-real-time. The proposed approach, based on a transformation of the RGB color space into HSV, provides dynamic information at the continental scale. The validation of the algorithm showed very few omission errors and no commission errors. It demonstrates the ability of the proposed algorithm to perform as effectively as human interpretation of the images. The validation of the permanent water surface product with an independent dataset derived from high resolution imagery, showed an accuracy of 91.5% and few commission errors. Potential applications of the proposed method have been identified and discussed. The methodology that has been developed 27 is generic: it can be applied to sensors with similar bands with good reliability, and minimal effort. Moreover, this experiment at continental scale showed that the methodology is efficient for a large range of environmental conditions. Additional preliminary tests over other continents indicate that the proposed methodology could also be applied at the global scale without too many difficulties

The embodied nature of spatial perspective taking:embodied transformation versus sensorimotor interference

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and understand the world from their point of view. We propose that spatial perspective taking (SPT) could have developed from the physical alignment of perspectives. This would support the notion that others have put forward claiming that SPT is an embodied cognitive process. We investigated this issue by contrasting several accounts in terms of the assumed processes and the nature of the embodiment. In a series of four experiments we found substantial evidence that the transformations during SPT comprise large parts of the body schema, which we did not observe for object rotation. We further conclude that the embodiment of SPT is best conceptualised as the self-initiated emulation of a body movement, supporting the notion of endogenous motoric embodiment. Overall our results are much more in agreement with an ‘embodied’ transformation account than with the notion of sensorimotor interference. Finally we discuss our findings in terms of SPT as a possible evolutionary stepping stone towards more complex alignments of socio-cognitive perspectives.

The impact of ageing and gender on visual mental imagery processes:a study of performance on tasks from the Complete Visual Mental Imagery Battery (CVMIB)

In this study we aim to evaluate the impact of ageing and gender on different visual mental imagery processes. Two hundred and fifty-one participants (130 women and 121 men; age range = 18–77 years) were given an extensive neuropsychological battery including tasks probing the generation, maintenance, inspection, and transformation of visual mental images (Complete Visual Mental Imagery Battery, CVMIB). Our results show that all mental imagery processes with the exception of the maintenance are affected by ageing, suggesting that other deficits, such as working memory deficits, could account for this effect. However, the analysis of the transformation process, investigated in terms of mental rotation and mental folding skills, shows a steeper decline in mental rotation, suggesting that age could affect rigid transformations of objects and spare non-rigid transformations. Our study also adds to previous ones in showing gender differences favoring men across the lifespan in the transformation process, and, interestingly, it shows a steeper decline in men than in women in inspecting mental images, which could partially account for the mixed results about the effect of ageing on this specific process. We also discuss the possibility to introduce the CVMIB in clinical assessment in the context of theoretical models of mental imagery.

Modelling and linking transformations in EPCIS governing supply chain business processes

Supply chains comprise of complex processes spanning across multiple trading partners. The various operations involved generate large number of events that need to be integrated in order to enable internal and external traceability. Further, provenance of artifacts and agents involved in the supply chain operations is now a key traceability requirement. In this paper we propose a Semantic web/Linked data powered framework for the event based representation and analysis of supply chain activities governed by the EPCIS specification. We specifically show how a new EPCIS event type called "Transformation Event" can be semantically annotated using EEM - The EPCIS Event Model to generate linked data, that can be exploited for internal event based traceability in supply chains involving transformation of products. For integrating provenance with traceability, we propose a mapping from EEM to PROV-O. We exemplify our approach on an abstraction of the production processes that are part of the wine supply chain.