Growing competition, globalisation and changing circumstances make innovation a prerequisite for the growth, success and survival of any private or public organisation. While innovation in technology, production, marketing and finance all remain essential, it is innovation in management that is most desperately in short supply. A literature study could not reveal the existence of any scale that measures all the factors and processes relevant to organisational innovation. A scale for managerial innovation was developed. This scale is based on the work of various researchers in the field of innovation. The major tasks in the process were connected to the structural arrangements and social patterns that facilitate the tasks are discussed. Innovation consists of a set of processes carried out at the micro-level, by individuals and groups of individuals, and these micro-processes are in turn stimulated, facilitated and enhanced - or the opposite - by a set of macro-structural conditions. A semantic differential scale was developed to measure managerial innovation. The scale consists of 88 items and was designed to reflect the major factors and processes of organisational innovation. Various statistical tests were used to evaluate the scale and data obtained through the scale. Five Factors were identified after the data was analysed using factor analysis. The five factors are Factor 1 (leadership and culture), Factor 2 (employee acquisition and development), Factor 3 (variables that facilitate problem solving and aid in innovation), Factor 4 (variables that impact negatively on innovation), and Factor 5 (variables external to the organisation that influence innovation). The Alpha Cronbach test for reliability showed a very high degree of reliability and the scale conformed to the criteria of content validity. Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) was used to perform comparative analysis on the biographical variables. The relationships between age, gender, level of education, industry, length of service, and the combined effect of age and gender, age and length of service, gender and industry, and gender and length of service and the five factors were analysed. Age seems to play a significant role in Factor 1 and Factor 2 (i.e. leadership and culture as well as employee acquisition and development). For Factor 1 and Factor 2 average achievement in terms of innovation seems to increase with age. With regard to Factor 3, 4 and 5 age does not seem to impact on achievement significantly. The results of this study indicate that there are no significant relationship between gender and innovation. The results of this study indicate that there is a positive relationship between level of education and innovation for Factors 3, 4 and 5. It was found to differ significantly between the levels for two factors, namely Factor 1: leadership and culture, and Factor 2: employee acquisition and development. They seem to decline as the level of education increases. The results of this study indicate that for all five factors there seem to be a very significant difference in average achievement when individuals from different industries are compared. The results of this study indicate that there is not a significant relationship between length of service and innovation. The ANOVA results for combined variables indicate a significant difference in average achievement Factor 1 (leadership and culture) when the research participants are grouped based on both age and gender. In general, males of any age group tested equal to or higher than their female counterparts for Factor 1. Also apparent from the results is that generally the scores for Factor 1 seemed to increase with age. For Factor 2, 3, 4, and 5 there is no significant difference in achievement when participants are grouped according to age and gender. The results of the tests for difference in achievement when the research participants are grouped according to age and length of service, do not indicate that there is any significant difference in average achievement between the groups. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Human Resource Management / unrestricted

L’objectif de cette recherche est d’évaluer l’intégration universitaire des TIC dans l’enseignement des langues étrangères en Palestine : le cas des projets RUFO et QIF. En adoptant un cadre théorique constructiviste, cette étude est effectuée sur trois plans : micro (enseignants et apprenants), méso (dispositifs en ligne) et macro (décideurs de l’université et du Ministère de l’Education). Se basant sur une méthodologie qualitative et compréhensive de recherche, une démarche d’analyse de contenu du triple corpus de données (entretiens, extraits de cours, communication officielle des institutions) a été appliquée. Les résultats illustrent que les pratiques enseignantes actuelles n’ont pas connu d’évolution par suite de l’intégration des TIC ; l’usage de cette nouvelle modalité a amplifié les pratiques directives et traditionnelles existantes et a parfois entrainé une régression par rapport au mode de présentiel. La conclusion principale est qu’il n’est pas possible d’innover sans changer le paradigme éducatif et passer de celui de l'enseignement à celui de l'apprentissage. Le développement de la pédagogie universitaire nécessite la mise en ouvre d’une ingénierie éducative complexe et participative accompagnée par un pilotage bidirectionnel et transversal de l’innovation et une formation-accompagnement des acteurs à tous les niveaux. / The objective of this research is to evaluate the integration of ICT in Palestinian universities for foreign language teaching: the case of RUFO and QIF projects. By adopting a constructivist theoretical approach, this study is conducted on three levels: micro (teachers and students), meso (on line courses) and macro (policy of the university and the Ministry of Education).The research is based on a qualitative and comprehensive methodology. A content analysis was applied to the triple collected data (interviews, excerpts from on line courses, official excerpts) The findings show that current teaching practices have not evolved as a result of the integration of ICT; the use of this new modality has amplified the existing traditional and directive practices; sometimes it has moved them backward. The main conclusion is that it is not possible to innovate without changing the educational paradigm and shifting from a teaching-centered model to a learning- centered one. Development of higher education requires the implementation of: a complex and cooperative educative engineering, a bidirectional and transversal management process of the innovation, and a training-coaching at all levels.

Cette thèse explore la notion d’innovations en contrôle de gestion environnemental et vise à explorer la façon dont elles sont créées, si elles sont adoptées ou non dans les entreprises et les conséquences de l’adoption, et enfin comment elles sont pratiquées. Les méthodes de recherche combinent l’observation participante, les entretiens semi-directifs et des données secondaires. Cette thèse est composée de trois articles qui explorent ensemble les différentes facettes de l’innovation en contrôle de gestion. Le premier article aborde la question de comment les innovations sont créées et leur processus d’institutionnalisation. L’accent est mis sur les acteurs et leurs stratégies, le qui et le comment du processus d’institutionnalisation. Grâce à une étude de cas approfondie d’une organisation, le deuxième article révèle le processus de non-adoption d’une méthodologie de comptabilité carbone. Le troisième article analyse les pratiques entourant une innovation en contrôle de gestion dans une multinationale. Dans l’ensemble cette thèse fait trois principales contributions théoriques sur le travail institutionnel spécifique développé par les élites, le rôle de la légitimité interne dans la légitimité organisationnelle, et sur les processus de co-émergence de nouvelles pratiques. Cette recherche sur les innovations en contrôle de gestion environnemental contribue également à mieux comprendre comment le développement durable peut aussi être atteint à travers la comptabilité dans les organisations. / This dissertation explores the notion of environmental management accounting innovation and aims to explore how they are created, if they are adopted or not into companies and the consequences thereof, and finally how they are practiced. Research methods combine participant observation, semi-structured interviews and secondary data. This dissertation is composed of three articles that together explore the different facets of management accounting innovations. The first article tackles the question of how innovations get created and on their path to institutionalization. The focus is on the actors and their strategies, the who and how of the institutionalization process. Through an in-depth case study of one organization, the second article uncovers the process of the non-adoption of a carbon accounting methodology. The third article analyses the practices surrounding and accounting innovation in a multinational.Overall, this dissertation makes three main theoretical contributions on the specific institutional work developed by elite, the role of internal legitimacy in organizational legitimacy, and on the processes of co-emergence of new practices. This research on EMA innovations also contributes to further understanding how sustainable development can be pursued through accounting in organizations

The topic of the Master's thesis is focusing on the quality management systems in connection with the competition ability of the company or with the impact to increasing ability to compete. Currently one of the main targets of almost every company is a competition fight. One of the ways to be able to compete is a quality of the provided services eventually quality of sold goods. Existence of the quality management system, which is implemented and maintained, is practically a big necessity for the nowadays companies that want to win this fight.

Open Innovation bezeichnet Innovationsprozesse, die nicht an den Grenzen von Unternehmen oder deren Innovationsabteilungen enden, sondern Akteure unabhängig von deren institutioneller Zugehörigkeit als Ideengeber, Konzeptentwickler oder auch Innovationsumsetzer in die Gestaltung von Innovationen einbinden. Dieser Beitrag skizziert Grundlagen der Open Innovation, stellt die einzubindenden Akteure und ihre Rollen im Innovationsgeschehen vor und führt ein in die fünf zentralen Werkzeugklassen, auf die Unternehmen zur Implementierung von Open Innovation heute zurückgreifen können. Herausforderungen und Spannungsfelder, die sich bei der Nutzung von Open Innovation zeigen, werden abschließend aufgezeigt.

Basierend auf den Erfahrungen der Mitarbeiter der confuture Innovationssysteme GmbH auf den Gebieten der Entwicklung von internetbasierten Anwendungssystemen und Groupware-Anwendungen sowie den Mitarbeitern des Instituts für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Universität Leipzig (IWi) bei der Entwicklung, Einführung und Betrieb von e-Learning-Systemen im Projekt „Winfoline“ wurde im Jahre 2003 der Prototyp eines modularen, frei konfigurierbaren e-Learning Systems entwickelt.

Involving customers in the creation and design process of new products and services has been dis-cussed in practice and research since the early 1980’s. As one of the first researchers, von Hippel (1986) shed light on the concept of Lead Users, a group of users who are able to provide most accu-rate data on future needs for organizations. Subsequently, many scholars emphasized different areas of contribution for customers and how they provide assistance to the process of innovation. First of all, customers may contribute to product innovation (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1987; Driessen & Hillebrand, 2013; Füller & Matzler, 2007; Gruner & Homburg, 2000; Sawhney, Verona, & Prandelli, 2005; Snow, Fjeldstad, Lettl, & Miles, 2011; Yang & Rui, 2009) and service innovation (Abecassis-Moedas, Ben Mahmoud-Jouini, Dell’Era, Manceau, & Verganti, 2012; Alam, 2002; Chesbrough, 2011; Larbig-Wüst, 2010; Magnusson, 2003; Paton & Mclaughlin, 2008; Shang, Lin, & Wu, 2009; Silpakit & Fisk, 1985), e.g., by co-creating values (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), such as concepts or designs as well as reviewing and testing them throughout the stages of the process of innovation. From the customers’ point of view, being involved in innovation processes and becoming a part of the organ-ization is a desire of an increasing number of them. Customers are demanding more individual and more tailored products. They are increasingly knowledgeable and capable of designing and produc-ing their own products and services. Due to the fact that their influence on product development is positively related to the quality of the new product (Sethi, 2000), more and more organizations appreciate them as innovation actors and are willing to pay them for their input. Today, customers are not only involved in the qualification of products (Callon, Méadel, & Rabeharisoa, 2002; Callon & Muniesa, 2005; Grabher, Ibert, & Flohr, 2009) but also allowed to customize and evaluate them on the path to innovation (Franke & Piller, 2004; Piller & Walcher, 2006; von Hippel & Katz, 2002; von Hippel, 2001). Moreover, there is an abundance of studies that stress the customers’ influence on effectiveness (de Luca & Atuahene-Gima, 2007; Kleinschmidt & Cooper, 1991; Kristensson, Matthing, & Johansson, 2008; Still, Huhtamäki, Isomursu, Lahti, & Koskela-Huotari, 2012) and risk (Bayer & Maier, 2006; Enkel, Kausch, & Gassmann, 2005; Enkel, Perez-Freije, & Gassmann, 2005). While the latter comprises the risk of customer integration as well as the customers’ influence on market risks, e.g., during new product development, studies on effectiveness are mostly concerned with customer-orientation and products/services in line with customers’ expectations (Atuahene-Gima, 1996, 2003; Fuchs & Schreier, 2011). The accompanying change in understanding became known as open innovation (OI; first coined by Chesbrough in 2003) and represents a paradigm shift, where organizations switch their focus from internally generated innovation (i.e., ideation, in-house R&D, etc.) toward external knowledge and open innovation processes, thus, allowing them to integrate external ideas and actors, i.e. custom-ers (Chesbrough, 2006) and other external stakeholders (Laursen & Salter, 2006). Since then, OI has been identified as a success factor for increasing customer satisfaction (Füller, Hutter, & Faullant, 2011; Greer & Lei, 2012) and growing revenues (Faems, De Visser, Andries, & van Looy, 2010; Mette, Moser, & Fridgen, 2013; Spithoven, Frantzen, & Clarysse, 2010). In addition to that, by open-ing their doors to external experts and knowledge workers (Kang & Kang, 2009), organizations cope with shorter innovation cycles, rising R&D costs, and the shortage of resources (Gassmann & Enkel, 2004). Parallel to the paradigm shift in innovation, another shift has taken place in information and com-munication technologies (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Only a few years ago, when customer integration was still very costly, companies had to fly in customers, provide facilities onsite, permanently assign employees to such activities, and incentivise each task execut-ed by customers. Today, emerging technologies (subsumed under the term ‘social software’) help integrating customers or other external stakeholders, who are increasingly familiar with the such technologies from personal usage experience (Cook, 2008), and grant them access from all over the world in a 24/7 fashion. Examples include blogging tools, social networking systems, or wikis. These technologies help organizations to access customer knowledge, facilitate the collaboration with customers (Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga, 2010; Piller & Vossen, 2012) at reduced costs and allow them to address a much larger audience (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). On the other hand, customers can now express their needs in a more direct way to organizations. However, each technology or application category may present a completely different benefit to the process of innovation or parts of it and, thus, the innovation itself. Reflecting these developments, organizations need to know two things: how can they exploit the customers’ knowledge for innovation purposes and how may the implementation of social soft-ware support this. Hence, this research addresses the integration of customers in organizational innovation, i.e. new product development. It addresses how and why firms activate customers for innovation and which contribution customers provide to the process of innovation. Additionally, it investigates which tasks customers may take over in open innovations projects and which strategies organiza-tions may choose to do so. It also addresses which social software application supports each task best and how organizations may select the most suitable application out of a rapidly growing num-ber of alternatives. The nature of this research is recommendatory and aims at designing a solution for organizations that are interested in the potential contribution of customers during innovation, already involve customers in innovation tasks or plan to do so. Following the recommendations of this research should result in a more effective organizational exploitation of customer knowledge and their workforce and, thus, a value added to innovation and the outcomes of the process of innovation, e.g., a product that better fits the customers’ expectations and demands or consequently a better adoption of the product by the customer.:1 Introduction 2 Theoretical foundation 3 Research areas and focal points 4 Research aims and questions 5 Methods 6 Findings 7 Conclusion References Essay 1: The Role of External Knowledge in Open Innovation – A Systematic Review of Literature Essay 2: External Knowledge in Organisational Innovation – Toward an Integration Concept Essay 3: Idea Mining – Text Mining Supported Knowledge Management for Innovation Purposes Essay 4: How do Tasks and Technology fit? – Bringing Order to the Open Innovation Chaos

Malaysia is a transition economic country that aims to be a developed country by 2020. In realising this mission (Vision 2020), the cluster concept has been an interest and adopted by the central authorities. There are few years ahead to reach the targeted year and it interest of this study to investigate the relevant development on its own engineered cluster of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) that was put forward on the success of Silicon Valley in the US. This thesis focuses on the development of the MSC cluster in the Malaysia context. It examines and measures the state of the cluster, the role played by its core actors (from Triple Helix perspective) and their relationship in the MSC. The role of collaboration has been used to measure the relationship among actors with the key determinants of cluster formation. A mixed data collection method was used to answer the research question and objectives involved. A conceptual model for analysing the MSC cluster is proposed, bringing together insights from the literature on clusters, role of actors, collaborative relationship and the complex systems of innovation approach. This conceptual model uncover the weaknesses of social dimension (social infrastructure) in Porter’s diamond model and the general approach of Triple Helix model in the cluster development. The cluster lifecycle model is used to add the depth to the analysis on the condition of cluster development.