<p> The purpose of conducting this research was to compare the effectiveness of drum circles and appreciative inquiry as team-building interventions. The researcher conducted two team-building inventions in the same organization&mdash;one intervention used a drum circle design; the other used an appreciative inquiry design. Both interventions measured the following aspects of team effectiveness: collaboration, trust, authenticity, communication, creativity, commitment, interrelatedness, and recognition. Data was collected from the two teams through pre-, immediate post-, and four-week post-workshop surveys. There were no significant differences in immediate post-workshop perceptions of their teams. The two teams did not differ significantly in their four-week post-workshop perceptions of their teams, contrasted with earlier findings from pre-workshop independent samples findings. Four main conclusions were drawn. First, based on the survey results, it appears that drum circles and appreciative inquiry are equally useful team-building interventions. Second, it can be suggested that appreciative inquiry has an effective use for team building in the areas of communication, trust, teamwork, and strategy. Third, it can be suggested that drum circles have an effective use for team building in the areas of teamwork, communication, and trust. Fourth, both drum circles and appreciative inquiry can be suggested as team-building interventions in the areas of teamwork, communication, and trust.</p>

<p> Knowledge management (KM) professionals are instrumental drivers of innovation. Their individual understanding of innovation is of seminal importance as they are instrumental in archiving and structuring the world's largest knowledge storage and knowledge generation activities. Understanding how members of members of the Federal Knowledge Management Working Group (FKMWG) perceive innovation from the personal perspective is instrumental in assisting senior leaders and decision makers better train, organization, and recruit future KM professionals to meet organization needs. Key to understanding the KM professional's personal perceptions are gender, generation, job function, and job classification. This quantitative study was designed to explore and surface valuable information concerning how KM professionals working for the Federal government view innovation from a personal level. This study built upon the earlier work of Zhuang (1995), Zhuang, Williamson, and Carter (1999), and McLaughlin and (2013). This study expands the previous work by targeting the 650 KM professionals associated with the FKMWG on-line social community employing McLaughlin and Caraballo's updated survey instrument. The study found there are differences in how FKMWG members as a whole and how genders view innovation from a personal perspective, but found there are no differences in how generations or specific job classifications (technical verse non-technical) viewed innovation from a personal perspective. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong), 2007. / (UMI)AAI3290117. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4759. Advisers: Jaksa Kivela; Bob McKercher.

Thesis (Educat.D.)--Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1983. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-12, Section: A, page: 3972.

Thesis (Educat.D.)--Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1984. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-12, Section: A, page: 3684.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1969. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 09-02, page: 0056.

In this dissertation, I present three essays on the dynamics of intellectual property bargaining and trade, particularly of patents. The first essay presents a game theoretic model examining the sale of intellectual property rights from small inventors with buyers of varying commercialization capacity across intellectual property rights regimes with full and no property rights protection. The essay finds that in Nash equilibrium in both single seller and infinite seller scenarios, sellers generally approach firms with greater commercialization capabilities if property rights are strong, and approach firms with lesser commercialization capabilities if property rights are not protected. The second essay examines the sale of patents from small inventors and entities to firms from 1992 to 2000. I exploit the 1996 Supreme Court case Markman v. Westview Instruments, arguing that patent protection weakened afterwards, to compare patent sales to firms with greater or weaker commercialization capabilities, which I proxy using industrial patent holdings. Using a conditional fixed-effects multivariate choice model, I find that patent sales are more highly concentrated towards firms with weaker patent holdings after Markman. The last essay develops a conceptual model of patent dynamic capabilities for firms, developing several predictions in conjunction with the technology life-cycle model.

Effective operating models based on carefully selected resources, processes and logic allow organizations to develop the right products and services and deliver them to customers. However, there has been little investigation of how organizations design and manage their operating models when they enter new contexts due to changes in regulation, competition, markets, technology, location and/or a combination of these factors. This dissertation examines the relationship between an organization’s external context and its operating model by carefully examining the choice of operating resources, processes and logic as organizations enter new contexts. The dissertation specifically focuses on one developing country, India, and adopts an inductive approach to study the design of operating models in response to significant changes in location and/or market in three different empirical settings within the healthcare industry. The first study, conducted jointly with Stefan Thomke, explores the influence of the institutional context on the R&D processes. Inductive field work, focused on medical device development at a newly established R&D center of a US MNC in India, suggests that institutional flexibility in emerging markets (such as India) might allow for high fidelity experimentation and testing during early stages of product development. This, in turn, has implications for R&D search performance and the locus of innovation and entrepreneurship. The second study, a joint project with Rob Huckman and Tarun Khanna, identifies the development of an operating model based on the practice of shifting less complex surgical tasks from senior surgeons to skilled junior surgeons as fundamental in enabling Narayana Health (NH) to provide high-quality, low-cost cardiac surgery care to the indigent population in India. Our analysis of surgical outcome data suggests that the task shifting based model – while costing significantly less – does not negatively affect clinical outcomes. Further, we highlight the location-specific contextual factors that allow for such a model in India. The third study, conducted with Tarun Khanna, focuses on NH’s design of a low-cost, high-quality tertiary care hospital in the Cayman Islands. The prior experience of developing different hospital models in response to the heterogeneous market in India allowed NH to develop a deep understanding of the environmental context and a diverse set of knowledge and practices. This understanding of and experience at diverse contexts informed the Cayman project, and NH was able to selectively borrow and recombine elements from their different models in India while setting up the Cayman hospital. Building on these findings, we develop a process model that highlights how recombination of elements developed to address heterogeneity of context in the home country can allow an organization to develop an effective operating model in the host country. Collectively, the studies illustrate how the external context shapes an organization’s ability to design, implement and transfer operating models. At the same time, they emphasize that organizations can successfully develop an operating model to accommodate any significant context change by approaching the design effort as a fundamentally new design problem. This latter approach is in contrast to the often discussed replication-adaptation balancing approach that emphasizes marginal adaptation of prior established model(s). Further, by uncovering the importance of the local context in selecting and adopting specific operational resources and processes in healthcare settings in an emerging market, the studies contribute rich insights to the new yet growing streams of literature related to healthcare management in resource-constrained settings, innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets, and the transfer of innovations from developing to developed markets. In conclusion, by focusing on the relation among (1) the external context of an organization, (2) the design of operating logic, resources and processes and (3) organizational performance, this dissertation contributes to research in operations strategy, organization theory and the management of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Abstract Not Available.

The performance evaluation of the communications networks have been the main focus in the analysis of data communications in automated office environments. This thesis is aimed at the performance evaluation of different office communications applications over LANs which are interconnected via one of the latest fast packet switching techniques called frame relaying. Different LAN technologies have been examined, namely Ethernet, Token ring and AppleTalk. The T1 (1.544 Mbps) link and the 56 kbps link are used as a public services for inter-site communications. In this study, two main applications were considered: office communications which include different types of documents that pass across an office worker's desk (publications, messages, financial forms, and normal documents), and file transfer activities such as the transfer of X-RAY images or a medium size newsletter. The transfer delay, link utilization, packet size, and the number of workstations interconnected to each LAN are the main parameters used for evaluating the system performance. Results show that the 56 kbps link is best suited for office communications under normal conditions. However as inter-site traffic increases T1 should be considered. A comparison of the performance of each LAN technology is given for both applications. The results of this study should furnish any office organization with strategic insight for the planning of its communications services.