Customer Integration during Innovation Development: An Exploratory Study in the Logistics Service Industry

Previous research has shown that though customer integration during innovation development can enhance companies' innovation performance, it can also harm innovativeness. A possible reason for these contradicting findings is that innovation development is a dynamic process that requires different tasks. Thus, a more fine‐grained picture of how customer‐oriented companies engage in customer integration throughout the entire innovation development process is necessary. This article contributes to the innovation and marketing literature by providing insights into how companies co‐create knowledge about customer needs relevant for innovation development. Using a multiple case study design, this study examines four substantive cases that illustrate the activities logistics service providers undertake to integrate customers during the process of idea generation, development and implementation. The results show that companies focus on both proactive and reactive customer integration during idea generation and implementation but refrain from reactive customer integration during development.     

An Exploratory Study: Supporting Collaborative Multimedia Systems Design

Multimedia systems design generally requires a collaborative effort from a group of designers with a variety of backgrounds and tasks, such as content experts, instructional designers, media specialists, users, and so forth. However, currently available design tools on the market are mainly designed for a single user. Tools intended to support a collaborative design process should coordinate independent activities of individual designers.This research investigated support for work groups engaged in designing multimedia systems. Specifically, it discussed a new collaborative design environment, called the KMS (Knowledge Management System)-based design environment, in which multimedia designers could share their design knowledge freely. Through two experimental groups, the research investigated impacts of the KMS-based design environment on their collaborative design activities (knowledge creating, knowledge securing, knowledge distributing, and knowledge retrieving activities). The research findings showed that the KMS-based design environment was a promising environment for collaborative multimedia systems design. More specifically, the research findings indicated that the KMS-based design environment supported creating, securing, and retrieving knowledge, but it did not support distributing knowledge. In addition, the research found that the social interactions between group members played important roles in the success of the collaborative multimedia systems design and that the KMS-based design environment did not support the socialization of group members. Furthermore, the research found that the inability of the KMS-based design environment to support the socialization was linked to its low performance level in supporting the knowledge distributing activity. The research explored the desired features of a collaborative support tool for multimedia systems design.     

An Exploratory Study of Database Integration Processes

One of the central problems of database integration is schema matching, that is, the identification of similar data elements in two or more databases or other data sources. Existing definitions of "similarity" in this context vary greatly. As a result, schema matching has given rise to a large number of heuristics software tools. However, the empirical understanding of this process in humans is very limited so that little guidance can be offered to the further development of heuristics and tools. This paper presents an exploratory process tracing study of the similarity judgement process in humans. The similarity judgements of 12 data integration professionals on a range of integration problems are recorded and analyzed. Implications for future empirical and applied research in this area are discussed.     

Supporting Radical Front End Innovation: Perceived Key Factors of Pharmaceutical Innovation

This article explores how radical front end innovation is supported in pharmaceutical companies. The empirical field is an explorative case study of front end innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, with an in‐depth case study of the Danish pharmaceutical company, H. Lundbeck A/S, and explorative studies of seven European and American pharmaceutical companies. We aim to show how pharmaceutical innovation is unique in terms of front end innovation (FEI) and what this implies for effective management and organization of radical pharmaceutical FEI. The value added and the contribution of this article to the existing FEI literature is therefore in the specificity of the empirical setting in which the issue is investigated.     

Creativity for Engineering Plant Design: An Exploratory Study

A pilot study of creativity enhancement techniques took place within a large engineering firm in the UK. Exploratory interviews were carried out with professionals in the areas of creativity, mechanical design engineering and management in order to identify informally acquired skills of successful design practice.¹ Engineers participated in an introductory one day training programme applying creative techniques to real design problems from the heavy industrial engineering field. Initial feedback on the programme was recorded in addition to impact studies which took place after a ten-week interval. The impact of the programme was reported during the course of interviews which were complemented with the completion of detailed questionnaires. Results suggest that traditional training programmes for such professionals may need to be modified to become more user-friendly.     

用户兴趣导向的探索式知识发现研究

提出了一个基于定向原子规则的非精确关联规则挖掘算法ARA,以支持用户兴趣导向的探索式知识发现。ARA算法采用一个两层的Hash表结构对数据库事务中与定向原子规则对应的项进行计数。复合规则通过频繁的原子规则前件项组合和支持度和置信度的估算得到。ARA只需一次数据库扫描。实验结果表明ARA算法的速度快,消耗的内存少,非常适合大型数据库和响应速度要求高的数据挖掘环境。     

Blended Learning to Increase Student Satisfaction: An Exploratory Study

Undergraduate nursing research courses are often difficult to teach due to the challenging content and lack of student satisfaction. To address this issue, two nursing instructors and a librarian embedded online discussions into an accelerated format, introductory nursing research course. The study was conducted over two semesters with two different instructors. The researchers investigated if using the blended learning strategy of discussion boards enhanced the learning experience and tested their theory with two measures: a weekly qualitative questionnaire and a post-study survey. Results suggested that asynchronous online discussions increased student satisfaction in introductory nursing research course work.     

Enhancing Discontinuous Innovation through Knowledge Combination: The Case of an Exploratory Unit within an Established Automotive Firm

The literature on innovation management underlines the necessity to separate the exploratory unit that builds new businesses on the basis of radical innovation from the exploitation unit that emphasizes continuous improvement. However, little research focuses on the exploratory unit in itself: the very nature of its activity, its composition, etc. The aim of this article is to analyse the exploratory unit in mobilizing results highlighted by research on organizational creativity. It is argued that in order to enhance discontinuous innovation, knowledge combination should occur and be facilitated in the exploratory unit. Hence, the research question is what organizational design at a fine‐grained level and creativity processes are likely to enhance knowledge combination and thus discontinuous innovation? Based on an in‐depth study of an exploratory unit created in an established multidivisional firm pursuing the development of discontinuous innovation and which generated several actual breakthroughs, we highlighted four key factors that enhanced knowledge combination: (i) the definition of the scope of the unit, (ii) the composition of the unit and the dual roles of its members, (iii) the boundary objects that supported the interactions between these members during the creativity process, and (iv) the arenas where new knowledge was further created.     

Modelling the Likelihood of Software Process Improvement: An Exploratory Study

Software process assessments have become big business worldwide. They can be a powerful tool for initiating and sustaining software process improvement (SPI). However, SPI programs sometimes fail. Moreover there still are very few systematic empirical investigations about the conditions under which SPI initiatives vary in their outcomes. In this paper we present the results of a study of factors that influence the success of SPI. The data come from a sample survey of organizations that have performed assessments based on the capability maturity model for software, and was conducted from 1 to 3 years after the assessments (sufficient time had passed for changes to have taken place). The results consist of a multivariate model of the conditions (e.g., how the improvement efforts are organized and funded) that can explain the successes and failures of SPI efforts. The model is constructed using a classification tree algorithm. It identifies the most important factors that affect the outcome of SPI efforts, and describes how those factors interact with each other to influence success or failure.     

An Exploratory User Study of Visual Causality Analysis

Interactive visualization tools are being used by an increasing number of members of the general public; however, little is known about how, and how well, people use visualizations to infer causality. Adapted from the mediation causal model, we designed an analytic framework to systematically evaluate human performance, strategies, and pitfalls in a visual causal reasoning task. We recruited 24 participants and asked them to identify the mediators in a fictitious dataset using bar charts and scatter plots within our visualization interface. The results showed that the accuracy of their responses as to whether a variable is a mediator significantly decreased when a confounding variable directly influenced the variable being analyzed. Further analysis demonstrated how individual visualization exploration strategies and interfaces might influence reasoning performance. We also identified common strategies and pitfalls in their causal reasoning processes. Design implications for how future visual analytics tools can be designed to better support causal inference are discussed.     

Triggering Creativity in Teams: An Exploratory Investigation

Triggering, developing and maintaining creativity in teams is critical to the economic performance of the firm. This article presents an exploratory action research effort in a health care organization that focused on interaction patterns amongst team members, creativity and performance. The results indicate that the teams’ inquiry and dialogue into their interaction patterns have the potential of influencing creativity. Team interaction patterns were found to influence team performance. Directions for future research are discussed.     

An Exploratory Study of Trust Dynamics in Work-Oriented Virtual Teams

This study explores trust development and maintenance in temporary, work-oriented virtual teams, and examines the effect of trust on communication and cohesiveness. Results suggest that for work-oriented virtual teams formed on a temporary basis, members swiftly develop calculus-based trust in order to assess the outcomes and costs of maintaining team relationships. Members also rely on prior knowledge to determine other members' competence so that they can make predictions about one another's behaviors. Thus, both calculus-based and knowledge-based trust play accentuating roles in the initial development of work-oriented virtual teams. Identification-based trust also develops swiftly initially, but is relatively insignificant compared to the other two types of trust. Finally, initial trust may correlate to both later communication and later cohesiveness .     

Knowledge building in mathematics: Supporting collaborative learning in pattern problems

While it has been suggested that patterning activities support early algebra learning, it is widely acknowledged that the shift from perceiving patterns to understanding algebraic functions—and correspondingly, from reporting empirical patterns to providing explanations—is difficult. This paper reports on the collaborations of grade 4 students (n = 68) from three classrooms in diverse urban settings, connected through a knowledge-building environment (Knowledge Forum), when solving mathematical generalizing problems as part of an early algebra research project. The purpose of this study was to investigate the underlying principles of idea improvement and epistemic agency and the potential of knowledge building—as supported by Knowledge Forum—to support student work. Our analyses of student-generated collaborative workspaces revealed that students were able to find multiple rules for challenging problems and revise their own conjectures regarding those rules. Furthermore, the discourse was sustained over 8 weeks and students were able to find similarities across problem types without the support of teachers or researchers, suggesting that these grade-4 students had developed a disposition for evidence use and justification that eludes much older students.     

An Exploratory Study of Data Sketching for Visual Representation

Hand‐drawn sketching on napkins or whiteboards is a common, accessible method for generating visual representations. This practice is shared by experts and non‐experts and is probably one of the faster and more expressive ways to draft a visual representation of data. In order to better understand the types of and variations in what people produce when sketching data, we conducted a qualitative study. We asked people with varying degrees of visualization expertise, from novices to experts, to manually sketch representations of a small, easily understandable dataset using pencils and paper and to report on what they learned or found interesting about the data. From this study, we extract a data sketching representation continuum from numeracy to abstraction; a data report spectrum from individual data items to speculative data hypothesis; and show the correspondence between the representation types and the data reports from our results set. From these observations we discuss the participants’ representations in relation to their data reports, indicating implications for design and potentially fruitful directions for research.     

基于本体匹配的数字卡通项目异构知识集成方法研究

在数字卡通项目开发过程中知识的管理和共享面临诸多难题.该文将本体匹配技术应用到数字卡通项目异构知识管理中,给出了一种可行的数字卡通项目知识共享解决方案,并且在该解决方案的框架内探讨了适用于数字卡通项目的本体匹配技术.     

支持电信企业系统整合的本体知识库

随着电信企业竞争日益激烈,快速响应市场需求,建立有效的业务流程管理十分重要.通过三层的本体空间构建一个支持电信企业系统整合的本体知识库框架,使用本体知识库达到组件的有效重用和解决异构系统数据间的互操作性问题.     

基于本体的业务流程知识集成研究

本文在企业知识集成的现有研究成果基础上,提出一个基于本体的业务流程知识集成模型,详细介绍该模型中的知识表示、知识建模和构建知识链3个方面的关键技术,给出了实现在采购及物资管理系统中集成知识管理的具体应用实例。