The academic subject of mechatronics has been definedpreviously in numerous publications. This study aims atanalyzing mechatronics by using categories developed within theeducational science of Didactics. The result of the analysis,that relies on data from mechatronics education at KTH andother universities, shows that the identity of mechatronics canbe described as thematic, and the legitimacy as functional,which gives implications for the questions of communication andselection: what should be taught, and how. This is combinedwith a study of the evolution of the subject of mechatronics,where it is possible to see the gradually changing identity,from a combination of a number of disciplinary subjects to onethematic subject. The first part of the thesis concludes that mechatronics isautonomous, thematic and functional. Teaching and learningmechatronics according to the identity and legitimacy of thesubject benefits from collaborative, experimental andinternational settings. The functional legitimacy todayrequires the collaborative and the international setting,meaning that the mechatronics employer requires these skillswhen employing a mechatronic engineer. Further, an exemplifyingselection requires the experimental setting, in particular whencomparing a representative selection with the reproduction ofknowledge, and an exemplifying selection with the creation ofknowledge. To conclude, there are a number of important aspects to takeinto account when teaching and learning mechatronics. Three ofthese aspects, collaborative, experimental and internationalare suggested as important, and also a direct consequence ofthe identity of mechatronics. This thesis shows that thesethree aspects are indeed possible to integrate intomechatronics education, which will benefit greatly fromthis. / QC 20100609

Collaborative innovation has become increasingly relevant for maintaining competitive advantage. Recent researchers posit that trust, which is core for collaborative innovation can be built through corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet relatively little is known about the impact of CSR and its dimensions on collaborative innovation. Based on a panel data analysis covering the period 2009 to 2018, this thesis examines the relationship between Collaborative innovation and CSR on publicly listed manufacturing firms around the world and extends the literature by proposing that a firm's absorptive capacity exerts a moderating effect on this relationship. The study finds empirical evidence that supports the assertion that CSR promotes collaborative innovation. Importantly, the effect only manifests through the environmental dimension of CSR. The results also show that firms with higher absorptive capacities are more inclined to collaborate for innovation. However, the effect of CSR, especially the social and corporate governance dimensions on collaborative innovation dwindles in the presence of high absorptive capacity. These results have theoretical implications and provide valuable managerial recommendations for socially responsible firms that seek to form strategic alliances for innovation.

<p>This dissertation is comprised of research articles examining the strategies instructional designers’ employ to transform both conflict with faculty in higher education and learners’ attitudes through instruction. In the first study, we investigated instructional designers’ perspectives on how conflict impacts their collaborative work with faculty. Through our qualitative analysis of fourteen instructional designers’ perceptions and experiences of conflict with faculty, we found that participants held nuanced perceptions of conflict and experienced conflicts falling within three thematic types of conflict. The second study expanded upon the first study by examining instructional designers approaches to navigate conflict with faculty. Findings revealed instructional designers utilized several strategic interconnected approaches focused on cultivating and strengthening collaborations along with using reflection post collaboration to try and improve future collaborations with faculty. Importantly, these strategies were able to be mapped to the typical collaborative project timeline emphasizing that conflict permeates instructional designers and faculty collaborations. In the third article, we synthesized the literature on designing attitudinal change instruction and organized the literature using Merrill’s first principles of instruction framework. We identified specific strategies that instructional designers can use to effectively design attitudinal change instruction.</p>

Collaborative work across different societal and multiple sectors has historically provided innovative solutions to address community development. It continues to be a crucial focus for funders and policymakers in all areas. This dissertation sought to extend organizational communication scholarship’s contribution by examining how collaborative work manifests at the meso level by interviewing 13 key informants who facilitate collaborations in various counties of Indiana and conducting a qualitative structural analysis of the ego-networks of nine community health workers (CHWs)situated in rural, urban and rural-urban counties of Indiana). The mesolevel communicative model of collaboration (Keyton et al., 2008) was applied to do so. The findings of this study support two key theoretical implications for collaborative work from an egocentric network perspective – 1) individual or personal ties of CHWs are perceived as close communicative relationships only when complemented by knowledge and social capital attributes, 2) While diverse ideas are essential for effective collaborations, lack of trust of new people and ideas, specifically in rural contexts may create tensions which can be navigated by finding common ground through close or dense relational ties with an individual already embedded in the socio-cultural context. Additionally, this dissertation extends the mesolevel communicative model to include examining socio-cultural contexts in their examination of communicative acts in assessing collaborative effectiveness. It also furthers the qualitative structural analysis to include case descriptive to understand an actor’s social embeddedness. Lastly, practical implications for those who fund and evaluate collaborative work are presented, including training funders (on local contexts) and collaborators (on determining their success metrics as a collaborative team).

Collaborative approaches to the governance and management of drinking water sources have gained traction in recent decades as constituting a superior, bottom-up alternative to conventional and adversarial forms of governance, which have largely occurred from the top-down. Collaborative water governance enables local stakeholders to work together to more effectively manage water resources at the watershed level, in an inclusive manner that considers the interests of the various users of the resource. However, despite its promise, collaboration can be difficult to effectively achieve in practice, and scholars assert that some of the normative assumptions underlying the concept do a disservice to the difficulties that actors face in this setting. This research addresses this gap through an empirical analysis of the collaborative approach to drinking water source protection planning and governance that was implemented in Ontario through the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 2006. Three factors prevalent in the literature that are thought to underscore successful collaboration were chosen as the basis of this analysis: representation, public participation, and financial capacity. The author first analyzed the Hansard transcripts on the debates on the Clean Water Act, in order to identify the issues and concerns that were raised by Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) relating to these factors, and to examine how the legislation was formulated to include these factors in its collaborative mandate. This analysis revealed that elected officials appeared to view these factors as being important for the success of the program, and that in the end, the legislation was strengthened in terms of its collaborative governance elements, at least on paper. The author then conducted a second directed content analysis of the meeting minutes of three source protection committees across the province, to identify how these committees experienced representation, public participation, and financial capacity throughout their respective collaborative processes. This analysis revealed that some of the elements of the legislated process of collaboration, to which the committees were bound, appeared to exacerbate or in some cases lead to fundamental issues throughout the SWP planning processes. This led the author to ultimately question how much authority was delegated to these committees in actuality in order to carry out SWP on the ground, and thus how truly collaborative and “from the ground up” this program was truly intended to be. The findings suggest that greater attention should be paid in future research to the potential implications of particular design features of mandated forms of collaboration on the ability of collaborative organizations to meet their objectives, particularly when collaborative water governance is transplanted to other contexts.

De nos jours, il y a une demande croissante pour fournir de l'information temps réel à partir de l'environnement, e.g. état infectieux de maladies, force du signal, conditions de circulation, qualité de l'air. La prolifération des dispositifs de capteurs et la mobilité des personnes font de la Mobile Collaborative Sensing (MCS) un moyen efficace de détecter et collecter l'information à un faible coût. Dans MCS, au lieu de déployer des capteurs statiques dans une zone, les personnes disposant d'appareils mobiles jouent le rôle de capteurs mobiles. En général, une application MCS exige que l'appareil de chacun ait la capacité d'effectuer la détection et retourne les résultats à un serveur central, mais également de collaborer avec d'autres dispositifs. Pour que les résultats puissent représenter l'information physique d'une région cible et convenir, quel type de données peut être utilisé et quel type d'information doit être inclus dans les données collectées? Les données spatio-temporelles peuvent être utilisées par des applications pour bien représenter la région cible. Dans des applications différentes, l'information de localisation et de temps sont 2 types d'information communes, et en les utilisant la région cible d'une application est sous surveillance complète du temps et de l'espace. Différentes applications nécessitent de l'information différente pour atteindre des objectifs différents. E.g. dans cette thèse: i- MCS-Locating application: l'information de résistance du signal doit être incluse dans les données détectées par des dispositifs mobiles à partir d'émetteurs de signaux ; ii- MCS-Prédiction application : la relation entre les cas d'infection et les cas infectés doit être incluse dans les données par les dispositifs mobiles provenant des zones de flambée de la maladie ; iii- MCS-Routing application : l'information routière en temps réel provenant de différentes routes de circulation doit être incluse dans les données détectées par des dispositifs embarqués. Avec la détection de l'information physique d'une région cible, et la mise en interaction des dispositifs, 3 thèmes d'optimisation basés sur la détection sont étudiés et 4 travaux de recherche menés: -Mobile Collaboratif Détection Cadre : un cadre mobile de détection collaborative est conçu pour faciliter la coopérativité de la collecte, du partage et de l'analyse des données. Les données sont collectées à partir de sources et de points temporels différents. Pour le déploiement du cadre dans les applications, les défis clés pertinents et les problèmes ouverts sont discutés. -MCS-Locating : l'algorithme LiCS (Locating in Collaborative Sensing based Data Space) est proposé pour atteindre la localisation de la cible. LiCS utilise la puissance du signal reçu dans tous les périphériques sans fil comme empreintes digitales de localisation pour les différents emplacements. De sorte LiCS peut être directement pris en charge par l'infrastructure sans fil standard. Il utilise des données de trace d'appareils mobiles d'individus, et un modèle d'estimation d'emplacement. Il forme le modèle d'estimation de localisation en utilisant les données de trace pour atteindre la localisation de la cible collaborative. Cette collaboration entre périphériques est au niveau des données et est supportée par un modèle. -MCS-Prédiction: un modèle de reconnaissance est conçu pour acquérir dynamiquement la connaissance de structure de la RCN pertinente pendant la propagation de la maladie. Sur ce modèle, un algorithme de prédiction est proposé pour prédire le paramètre R. i.e. le nombre de reproduction qui est utilisé pour quantifier la dynamique de la maladie pendant sa propagation. -MCS-Routing : un algorithme de navigation écologique ‘eRouting’ est conçu en combinant l'information de trafic temps réel et un modèle d'énergie/émission basé sur des facteurs représentatifs. Sur la base de l'infrastructure standard d'un système de trafic intelligent, l'information sur le trafic est collectée / Nowadays, there is an increasing demand to provide real-time information from the environment, e.g., the infection status of infectious diseases, signal strength, traffic conditions, and air quality, to citizens in urban areas for various purposes. The proliferation of sensor-equipped devices and the mobility of people are making Mobile Collaborative Sensing (MCS) an effective way to sense and collect information at a low deployment cost. In MCS, instead of just deploying static sensors in an interested area, people with mobile devices play the role of mobile sensors to sense the information of their surroundings, and the communication network (3G, WiFi, etc.) is used to transfer data for MCS applications. Typically, a MCS application not only requires each participant's mobile device to possess the capability of performing sensing and returning sensed results to a central server, but also requires to collaborate with other mobile and static devices. In order to make sensed results well represent the physical information of a target region, and well be suitable to a certain application, what kind of data can be used for different applications, and what kind of information needs to be included into the collected sensing data? Spatio-temporal data can be used by different applications to well represent the target region. In different applications, location and time information is two kinds of common information, and by using such information, the target region of an application is under comprehensive monitoring from the view of time and space. Different applications require different information to achieve different sensing purposes. E.g. in this thesis: i- MCS-Locating application: signal strength information needs to be included into the sensed data by mobile devices from signal transmitters; ii- MCS-Prediction application: the relationship between infecting and infected cases needs to be included into the sensed data by mobile devices from disease outbreak areas; iii- MCS-Routing application: real-time traffic and road information from different traffic roads, e.g., traffic velocity and road gradient, needs to be included into the sensed data by road-embedded and vehicle-mounted devices. With sensing the physical information of a target region, and making mobile and static devices collaborate with each other in mind, in this thesis three sensing based optimization applications are studied, and following four research works are conducted: - a MCS Framework is designed to facilitate the cooperativity of data collection, sharing, and analysis among different devices. Data is collected from different sources and time points. For deploying the framework into applications, relevant key challenges and open issues are discussed. - MCS-Locating: an algorithm LiCS (Locating in Collaborative Sensing based Data Space) is proposed to achieve target locating. It uses Received Signal Strength that exists in any wireless devices as location fingerprints to differentiate different locations, so it can be directly supported by off-the-shelf wireless infrastructure. LiCS uses trace data from individuals' mobile devices, and a location estimation model. It trains the location estimation model by using the trace data to achieve collaborative target locating. Such collaboration between different devices is data-level, and model-supported. - MCS-Prediction: a recognition model is designed to dynamically acquire the structure knowledge of the relevant RCN during disease spread. On the basis of this model, a prediction algorithm is proposed to predict the parameter R. R is the reproductive number which is used to quantify the disease dynamics during disease spread. - MCS-Routing: an eco-friendly navigation algorithm, eRouting, is designed by combining real-time traffic information and a representative factor based energy/emission model. Based on the off-the-shelf infrastructure of an intelligent traffic system, the traffic information is collected

Collaboration has always been critical to the success of new product development teams, and the advent of geographically dispersed teams has significantly altered the way that team members interact. Multi-user computer-aided design (MUCAD) and crowdsourcing are two results of efforts to enable collaboration between geographically dispersed individuals. In this research, a study was done to investigate the differences in performance between MUCAD and single-user CAD teams, in which teams competed to create the best model of a hand drill. This was done across a three-day period to recreate the scenario found in industry. It was found that MUCAD increases awareness of teammates' activities and increases communication between team members. Different sources of frustration for single-user and multi-user teams were identified, as well as differing patterns of modeling style. These findings demonstrate that MUCAD software has significant potential to improve team collaboration and performance. A second study explored a number of potentially significant factors in MUCAD team performance, including leadership, design style, unfamiliar parts, knowledge transfer, individual experience, and team composition. In this study, teams of undergraduate mechanical engineering students worked together to complete tasks using NXConnect, a MUCAD plugin for NX developed at Brigham Young University. A primary finding was that having an appointed leader for a MUCAD team improves performance, in particular when that leader works with the team in creating the CAD model. It was also found that creating a framework to aid in organizing and coordinating the creation of the CAD model may decrease the time required for completion. In the final study, the possibility of using crowdsourcing to complete complex product design tasks was explored. In this study, a process for crowdsourcing complex product design tasks was developed, as well as a website to act as the platform for testing this process. A crowd consisting of engineering and technology students then worked together on the website to design a frisbee tracking device. The crowd was able to collaborate to accomplish some detailed product design tasks, but was not able to develop a complete product. Major findings include the need for more formal leadership and crowd organization, the need for better decision making mechanisms, and the need for a better model for engaging crowd members on a consistent basis. It was also found that crowd members had a greater willingness to pay for the product they developed than individuals who had not worked on the project. Results also show that although crowd members were often frustrated with the collaboration process, they enjoyed being able to work with a large group of people on a complex project.

Collaboration has always been critical to the success of new product development teams, and the advent of geographically dispersed teams has significantly altered the way that team members interact. Multi-user computer-aided design (MUCAD) and crowdsourcing are two results of efforts to enable collaboration between geographically dispersed individuals. In this research, a study was done to investigate the differences in performance between MUCAD and single-user CAD teams, in which teams competed to create the best model of a hand drill. This was done across a three-day period to recreate the scenario found in industry. It was found that MUCAD increases awareness of teammates' activities and increases communication between team members. Different sources of frustration for single-user and multi-user teams were identified, as well as differing patterns of modeling style. These findings demonstrate that MUCAD software has significant potential to improve team collaboration and performance. A second study explored a number of potentially significant factors in MUCAD team performance, including leadership, design style, unfamiliar parts, knowledge transfer, individual experience, and team composition. In this study, teams of undergraduate mechanical engineering students worked together to complete tasks using NXConnect, a MUCAD plugin for NX developed at Brigham Young University. A primary finding was that having an appointed leader for a MUCAD team improves performance, in particular when that leader works with the team in creating the CAD model. It was also found that creating a framework to aid in organizing and coordinating the creation of the CAD model may decrease the time required for completion. In the final study, the possibility of using crowdsourcing to complete complex product design tasks was explored. In this study, a process for crowdsourcing complex product design tasks was developed, as well as a website to act as the platform for testing this process. A crowd consisting of engineering and technology students then worked together on the website to design a frisbee tracking device. The crowd was able to collaborate to accomplish some detailed product design tasks, but was not able to develop a complete product. Major findings include the need for more formal leadership and crowd organization, the need for better decision making mechanisms, and the need for a better model for engaging crowd members on a consistent basis. It was also found that crowd members had a greater willingness to pay for the product they developed than individuals who had not worked on the project. Results also show that although crowd members were often frustrated with the collaboration process, they enjoyed being able to work with a large group of people on a complex project.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19856号 / 情博第607号 / 新制||情||105(附属図書館) / 32892 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 喜多 一, 教授 守屋 和幸, 教授 松下 佳代 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Thesis (Ph.D. (Applied English Language)) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / Refer to document