This dissertation discusses research on Canada’s collaboration with emerging economies, specifically Brazil and India, in the field of health biotechnology. In recent years Canada has shown interest in engaging with emerging economies including Brazil and India in S&T fields. However, little is known about the levels and characteristics of such collaboration. Without greater understanding of this phenomenon it is difficult to inform public policy on how to best encourage collaboration. In this dissertation, the levels of Canada-emerging economies research and entrepreneurial collaboration are gauged. The motivations driving Canada-emerging economies research as well as entrepreneurial collaboration, its challenges and outcomes are examined. The roles of wider institutional actors – funding agencies, intellectual property experts, regulators, etc – in both Canada and the two emerging economies that support international collaboration are analyzed. The research reveals that north-south collaboration in health biotechnology has the potential to lead to a wide range of scientific and commercial benefits for both partners. They include access to expertise, technologies, biodiversity, as well as increasing potential to publish in high impact journals. The benefits are mutual. Northern academics and entrepreneurs are not necessarily in a dominant position in the partnerships, thus contradicting stereotypical notions of partners in north-south relationships. The systems of innovation conceptual framework is useful to uncover how institutions in both the north and the south shape S&T collaboration, and also to develop multi-pronged policy approaches to promote such partnerships and mitigate risks. The framework enables moving away from a donor-recipient, linear model of S&T interactions between the north and the south, and towards conceptualizing north-south collaboration as complex interplay of two innovation systems.

Collaboration between international NGOs (INGOs) and governmental organizations (GOs) have contributed significantly to the goals of poverty alleviation and agricultural development in developing countries. Much of the literatures on NGO-GO partnerships have explored theoretically or empirically what motivate and hinder cross-sector collaboration. But not many have studied cross-sector collaboration from both analytical and descriptive perspectives. This study filled in this gap by drawing from previous studies a conceptual framework through which contexts, incentives, and barriers that influence INGO-GO partnerships were described and explained. The researcher adopted a qualitative case-study method with emergent design. Personal interviews were conducted with 20 key informants, including eight Vietnamese staff from one INGO and 12 government officials from six GOs who partnered with the INGO. All participating organizations were institutions serving agricultural and rural development in the south of Vietnam. The data were collected in 2010 and analyzed using the software package ATLAS.ti. The results showed four categories that interact to form a framework of a dynamic continuum of partnership development. The four categories included conditioning factors, incentives, barriers, and feedback loop. The categories held the following themes: 1) socio-political contexts and organizational natures for conditioning factors, 2) shared missions, resource mobilization, capacity building, and networking for incentives, 3) ideological conflicts, structural constraints, and operational hurdles for barriers, and 4) reflections and recommendations for feedback loop. The study contributed a theoretical- and empirical-based perspective on INGO-GO partnerships in post-reform countries. It provided a framework that comprehensively describes and explains partnership dynamics. The study also shared knowledge of the intricacies of INGO-GO partnerships in rural Vietnam. For institutions serving agricultural and rural development, the study could assist in strategic management to minimize constraints and maximize opportunities in collaborative environments.

Technology is becoming an integral part of teaching and learning in schools. This thesis explored the use of a wiki, a collaborative editable webpage within physical education teacher education. An interpretive inquiry investigated the perceptions of a cohort of 28 final year physical education teacher candidates (PETC) through an online group project. The objective of the assignment was for PETC to develop deeper understanding of the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach. Information collected from reflective journals, writing samples and focus groups identified both enabling and constraining factors this wiki brought to the wiki project. Data analyses confirmed that the wiki facilitated collaboration among group members, improved writing skills and enhanced deeper understanding through scaffolding of one’s own ideas as well as those of others. In their efforts to work collaboratively, the students realized that establishing roles and responsibilities and creating more opportunity for communication were necessary ingredients for learning. / October 2008

To date, most of the research on group cohesion has focused on team sports, with little known about how this body of knowledge relates to individual sports. The case of the male French whitewater slalom canoe and kayak team was chosen because of the success of the team at World Championships and Olympic Games. The purpose of the present case study was to investigate how the coaches and athletes of this highly successful team worked together in training and competition within a highly competitive environment. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with six athletes and four coaches. Three themes, each containing numerous sub-themes, emerged from the analysis: (a) the nature of collaboration within the team environment, (b) coach leadership, and (c) the fragility of collaboration. The results of the present study have advanced our understanding of what collaboration within an individual sport team may look like. For a period of time, the leadership skills of the coaches, as well as their technical coaching expertise, and the willingness of the talented and driven athletes to work together, contributed significantly to a collaborative environment for this team. Then a change in the Olympic entry rules, the departure of an influential coach, and the inevitable change in the ages and experiences of the athletes themselves all combined to erode the foundation of that productive and collaborative environment.

This is a qualitative study based on interviews with professionals who are cooperating at a children advocacy center, in swedish called “Barnahus”. The center, Barnahus, pulls together law enforcement, criminal justice, child protective service, medical and mental health workers in to one coordinated team. Children suspected to be victims of any kind of violence or sexual abuse shall, at Barnahus, be offered coordinated efforts and support all the way from suspicion to possible intervention.   The aim of the study is to examine how the participants involved relate to collaboration in Barnahus. The study will also present the success factors and barriers to collaboration that identifies by the participating actors, who are mentioned above. The study will provide insight and understanding of how collaboration can be represented in multiprofessional activities in practice.

One of the most significant developments in cockpit technology over the past several years is the emergence of a new cockpit architecture that uses cursor control devices and keyboards for interaction with individual and shared displays. This architecture has allowed for the design of cockpit interfaces with many advantages compared to traditional designs. However, there are a number of challenges associated with these new cockpits that should be addressed so that pilots will be able to take full advantage of the performance improvements available from the new designs. This thesis describes three of the major challenges associated with the new architecture: supporting awareness, assisting interruption recovery, and mitigating interaction conflicts. It also describes the analysis process used to identify these challenges and proposes an interface augmentation with the potential to address them. The proposed design uses visualizations of the history of operator interactions with the interface to provide cues to the pilots about where each of them has been (and is currently) interacting. This interaction data includes both visual (sourced from a gaze tracking system) and input (from the keyboard or cursor control device) information, and was communicated on the interface using dynamic borders around the relevant areas of the interface. This augmentation aimed to address the three identified challenges by providing pilots with: improved awareness of each other’s actions, visual cues of where they were working prior to an interruption and what has changed since, and clear indications of where each is working to allow them to avoid conflicts. A two-stage evaluation process was used to determine the utility of the interface concept in a cockpit context by developing a non-interactive video prototype and showing it to pilots. The results of the evaluation indicated that the design has sufficient potential to warrant further study, as evaluation in higher fidelity environments would help provide further evidence of its potential utility for live cockpit operations. Therefore, future work should include the development and evaluation of a fully interactive prototype for live cockpit operations, as well as further examination of the design concept’s potential for use as a training tool.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) presents the new paradigm in strategic and operational business management for the 21st century. By offering a cooperative and integrated model of the value-creation process in a cross-organizational perspective, it also places new challenges on business management methods and instruments used, in theory as in practice. In the field of materials management, the new SCM perspective led to major changes in the methods used and in the emphasis of the different process steps. This master thesis presents classical as well as supply-chain-based materials management methods, compares them and draws conclusion on their use in theory and practice.   Materials Management (MM) was long neglected by business management and economic theory. The role of materials management as a secondary activity in the organization and its supportive role to production were encouraged in classical materials management. SCM reevaluated the value chain of whole industries and therefore reemphasized the strategic role of materials management for the supply chain. MM is divided into 5 steps or activity fields: supporting activities, sourcing, distribution, storage and disposal. SCM changed the methods used in each separate step. In supporting activities for example SCM requires multi-dimensional, long-term and dynamic instruments to guide decision-making in materials management, using cross-organizational cooperation to succeed, such as advanced purchasing. In sourcing the strategic role of sourcing was reemphasized by SCM and new tools such as the use of procurement marketing, SCR, green sourcing, TCO, ethical sourcing, PCB, strategic alliances and TPB were introduced, due to the new cooperative paradigm in SCM. In distribution and storage too, cooperative instruments are used to keep up competitiveness, such as VMI and integrated logistics. In disposal, however, SCM provides a totally new philosophy, reducing the focus on waste and enhancing material cycles, environmental programs and new recycling programs, such as reverse logistics. Overall in SCM, the main focus was relocated from scheduling and storage planning that was the main activity of materials management in the classical perspective to strategic sourcing and disposal as the two main processes of materials management. Concluding, the comparison of classical and supply-chain-based materials management showed, that SCM emphasizes on the strategic role of materials management by offering an integrated and process-oriented perspective on the value-creation process. Furthermore supply-chain-based materials management bases on communication, mutual interdependence and decreasing short-term competition to stay competitive in the long run as an entity, represented by the supply-chain. The long-term, complex and dynamic perspective of SCM and the pursuing of multiple and conflicting goals in SCM are mirrored in the methods used in supply-chain-based Materials Management. Recapitulatory, SCM reemphasized the strategic role of materials management as a cooperative, process-oriented primary activity within the supply-chain that has major potential for the competitiveness of the supply chain in the long-run.

Mixed Reality (MR) is a technique to blend together the real life with virtual reality. Using this technique it is, for instance, possible for experts to assist persons several miles away to perform tasks by talking and  visually aid them. In this thesis the main issue is to see how the delay in such a system for remote assistance eects the users. A controlled test was carried out with 20 test persons of dierent backgrounds. The study shows that it is very likely to be able to use an MR system for remote assistance even if there is a delay between the user and the expert. As long as they both are aware of the problem and are able to take it easy and do not have to move around too much it is still possible to work with delays to up to 4000 ms. Furthermore, the average time of completion for a task did not increase with the added delay. It was linear, i.e. the task is not more difficult toperform when the instructions are delayed.

Collaboration technologies are difficult to design due to the complex myr-iad of social, cognitive, and communicative aspects of group interactions. New interaction technologies like multitouch sharable interfaces, such asdigital tabletops, have lead to a renewed interest in designing collaborativetechnologies. This thesis focuses on turn-taking protocols as a coordinat-ing mechanism during collaborative work with digital tabletops. The goalwas to develop new conceptual designs and interactive mechanisms to sup-port face-to-face collaborations of small groups. Inspired by ethnographicalstudies of collaborative work and theories in distributed cognition and re-lated theories of language and action a model of collaborative turn-takingwas developed. Moreover, the thesis presents five design concepts and in-teraction components for the digital tabletop that exemplifies the differentproperties of the model.

The intention of this study was to create an understanding of how multi-professional interaction could convert into inter-professional collaboration, which takes advantage of and acknowledges the individual professional identity. The intention was to understand the meaning of collaboration through the study of meetings between professionals who use different symbol systems. In particular, we wanted to study inter-professional interaction from a symbolic interactional perspective with a focus on Self, Identity, Symbols, Meaning and Professional community. The employed method was semi-structured interviews with ten questions. A convenience sample was used to identify working groups composed of different professions, such as teachers, social workers and therapy assistants. The results suggest that the working group believed that personality precedes the profession one is impending, and that participants preferred stability before communication and reflection. Our study also revealed that inter-professional collaboration cannot be pursued without cultivating awareness, active reflection and communication between the professionals involved. Keywords: Self ∙ Multi-professional ∙ Inter-professional ∙ Identity ∙ Collaboration ∙ Symbols ∙ Qualitative rapport.