Disruptive technologies continue to pose challenges for industries worldwide, and firms are constantly learning how to adapt in order to remain competitive. Family businesses are not immune to these “shocks” in their industry, and they too need to harness the potential advantages of novel technology just as much as corporations do. While there is extensive research on the methods and strategies employed by multinational corporations, the study of how a family business could or should adapt is virtually unexplored. There is a need to understand the intricate decision making process of business leadership in dealing with disruptive technology, particularly in regards to maintaining or gaining a competitive advantage. This study conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with three Swedish family businesses, all who were successful in adopting disruptive technologies to their benefit. Although each of the businesses took different paths for technology adaptation and to maintain their competitive advantage there was a consistent thread in the leadership strategy. The results revealed that strong family leadership, in the form of stewardship, was essential to maintaining their competitive advantage while dealing with the challenges of disruptive technology. Stewardship places emphasis on family core values, the drive to improve the performance of the business for the benefit for family and the employees, and a commitment to long-term goals. Stewardship proved to be the determining factors for these families in their successful disruptive technology adaption.

<p>Due to the great transitions and turmoil uniquely attributed to the period of adolescence, youth experience a greater risk for substance use and the multitude of concerns that coincide with the early onset of substance use. Many biological and environmental factors have been investigated as predictors of adolescent substance use. Executive function and disruptive behaviors are two important individual characteristics linked to adolescent substance use. Both smoking during pregnancy and sibling relationships are separate contexts that can mitigate or exacerbate the associations of executive function and adolescent substance use. The present study focuses on development of substance use through executive function deficits and disruptive behavior, while considering smoking during pregnancy and sibling relationships as unique moderators of these pathways. This work addresses a novel, interrelated set of questions with a series of three studies. The central hypothesis driving this program of research is that smoking during pregnancy and sibling relationships are under-studied contexts that can mitigate or exacerbate the associations of executive function, disruptive behavior, and adolescent substance use. This dissertation examines whether: (1) executive function mediates the smoking during pregnancy-disruptive behavior association and smoking during pregnancy exacerbates the executive function-disruptive behavior association, (2) smoking during pregnancy exacerbates the association between executive function and disruptive behavior during adolescence using a sibling comparison design, and (3) sibling relationship quality moderates developmental trajectories of executive function on the transition from disruptive problems to adolescent substance use using a high-risk, longitudinal sample. Findings challenge the link between exposure to smoking during pregnancy and both executive function and disruptive behavior. Further, these findings reinforce the need to utilize genetically-informed designs when examining potential effects of smoking during pregnancy. Additionally, this dissertation found support for the link between executive function and disruptive behavior, but not executive function and substance use. </p>

This study compared the effects of high-tech (e.g., clickers) and low-tech (e.g., response cards) active responding strategies during whole-group English language arts in two first-grade classrooms serving students with and without disabilities. The authors combined an ABAB reversal design with an alternating treatments design to compare the impact of using high-tech (clickers) and low-tech (response cards and hand raising) modalities on academic engagement, accuracy of responding, and disruptive behavior across four teacher-nominated students in two first-grade classrooms. During baseline, the teacher conducted her lesson as planned by having the students raise his/her hand to answer questions. In the intervention phase, students alternated between using preprinted response cards and clickers each session to answer the teacher’s questions. When using the pre-printed response cards or clickers, the students were instructed to hold up the index card with the correct answer or click the correct answer on his/her remote after the teacher read the question. The results of the study indicate that both active responding strategy (ARS) modalities were equally effective in increasing student academic engagement and decreasing disruptive behavior.

As a disruptive innovation, IoT has been creating a high impact over organizations’ current strategies and business models. This continuous process of change will have an increasing influence on how organizations and industries as a whole conduct their businesses, and is set to have an active role towards the development of entirely new business models and markets. With the development of IoT technologies, and its predicted exponential spread across all sectors of society, one can conclude that the future holds many opportunities for organizations looking to explore new ways of capturing and creating value, but at the same time there are also plenty of challenges to be addressed. While the diffusion and adoption process of IoT has been an ongoing phenomenon over the past decade, there is still not much certitude as to how organizations ought to adjust in order to successfully integrate IoT technologies in their structure and operations. In parallel fashion, there have also been many difficulties in ensuring that different smart, connected devices and ecosystems are able to effectively communicate between each other, as achieving interoperability has become one of the major concerns associated with IoT. The main focus of this study is to analyze the process of how organizations are currently integrating IoT within their businesses, while also investigating causes that hinder interoperability, and evaluating the future potential deployment of the Open IoT ecosystems in companies. For our research we have followed a case-study approach where we conducted semi-structured interviews with managers and project leaders from two organizations conducting pilot studies on Green IoT and Open IoT, and where one has been adopting IoT technologies in its business. Theoretically, we draw on a framework by combining Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory and Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovations in order to analyze the integration of IoT into businesses’ core structure. The research goes through a functional framework that outlines the process of IoT adoption while also presenting the present challenges that are faced by the actors in the industry and the key enablers for successful IoT integration.

<p>Millions of households around the world rely on intermittent water supply systems (IWS), where piped water supply is limited to specific hours during the day or on specific days during the week. Households relying on IWS systems, as their primary water source, often adapt to supply intermittency by installing in-house water storage and/or supplying water from non-piped sources (for instance, in the form of water tanker trucks). The piped water distribution network (WDN) in IWS systems is subject to short-term disruptions that cause dynamic behavior and interactions of the system’s stakeholders, including households, vendors of non-piped water, and the water utility. During disruptions of the WDN, households make decisions about obtaining water from different non-piped sources at different prices and wait times. These decisions, made by a large number of households, have an impact on the dynamics (in particular, the prices and availability) of the non-piped water market, which may in turn affect each household decision. Prior studies on the literature of the analysis of IWS systems focused on analyzing each of the components (namely the WDN, households, vendors of non-pied water, and the water utility) of the IWS in isolation, assuming static behavior of the other components.</p><p>The overreaching objective of this dissertation is to bridge the gap in knowledge and practice in analyzing the short-term dynamics within each component of the IWS system (focusing on the WDN and the households) and the interactions among all components of the IWS system when responding to physical disruptions of the WDN. First, a new framework for quantifying and analyzing the resilience of intermittent WDNs is presented. The framework incorporates the aspects of intermittent supply (including household storage and supply scheduling) into a hydraulic model that examines the network’s hydraulic performance and its topology to assess three resilience capacities: absorptive, adaptive, and restorative, against various types of physical disruptive events. The evaluation of the model, using the IWS network of a case study city in the Middle East, shows that household storage capacities, timing and length of the disruption, supply inequity, and the supply scheduling are significant factors in determining the resilience of the WDN, and the interactions of these variables result in different combinations of direct and post effects on households. The framework was also used to evaluate the impact of temporary modifications of the supply schedule on the network’s resilience. The results show that this short-term utility adaptive measure can significantly improve the resilience of the network. The proposed framework can assist utilities in the operation of the intermittent WDN under normal conditions and in the evaluation of the impact of different short- and long-term resilience enhancement strategies.</p><p>Next, based on empirical data from a survey of households in a city in the Middle East, the households’ decision-making in response to disruptions of the WDN was evaluated using econometric methods. A set of Binary Probit models were developed to model the decision of households regarding their risk attitudes toward running out of water (represented by the timing of their response actions), their willingness to pay for faster delivery of non-piped water, and their willingness to wait in-line to obtain water from a non-piped source. The results show how variables related to household characteristics, wealth, age and occupation of the household’s manager, knowledge of household manager about their households’ water situation, and prior experience with disruptions affect the households’ decisions when the piped-network is disrupted. The outputs of the econometric models can assist the city’s water managers in understanding the behavior of households that affect the demand and prices of different non-piped water sources.</p><p>The final component in this research integrates the two previous components into an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to evaluate the dynamics of the stakeholders’ interactions in response to disruptions of the WDN and to evaluate the impact of these interactions on the resilience of the whole system. The ABM examines the interactions between households and vendors of water tankers under utility’s policies that regulate the water tanker market while integrating variables that describe the response of the WDN to the disruption. The demonstration of the model using a representative subset of the IWS system in the case study city shows dynamic behavior patterns in: (a) the dynamics of households, and (b) the performance of the non-piped water market under different deterministic and stochastic scenarios of disruptions of the WDN.</p><p>The results of this research address many IWS systems in the Middle East and around the world that are characterized by household storage, as well as households’ dependency on the piped network as the main water supply. The models developed in this dissertation are expandable to adopt various systems’ configurations in terms of types and capacities of household storage, types and attributes of non-piped water sources, and attributes and preferences of households. The results of this doctoral research can assist water managers in cities in understanding the behavior of their IWS system (including the WDN and the system’s stakeholders), evaluating long-term resilience enhancement policies, and planning for short-term response to disruptions of the WDN.</p>

The traditional print publishing industry has been faced with significant change over the past decade. Advances in technology have led to the increased digitisation of business processes, and have debatably brought e-books to the brink of the mainstream market. With the growing popularity of e-books in the trade market come several opportunities for publishers to expand, improve and differentiate their businesses. But publishers also face a very challenging time ahead to successfully implement digital publishing in their business processes. This study examines the implications of digitisation and digital publishing on publishing business processes in the traditional print publishing environment. The research considers digital publishing as a disruptive technology in the publishing industry, and draws on the context and predictive value of disruptive technology theory. Disruptive technology theory examines why, when faced with a disruptive technology, some firms succeed in the marketplace, and others fail. The research applied the principles and predictions of disruptive technology theory to the publishing industry to develop a set of recommendations for publishers implementing digital publishing processes. The research employed a mixed methodology design that included an extensive literature review and an online survey of South African book publishers. The literature provided an overview of the issues surrounding digital publishing, and the opportunities and challenges that publishers are faced with. Literature on disruptive technology theory served to establish trends in industries faced with disruptive technology, and uncovered recommendations for its successful implementation. The researcher made use of an online survey that was sent to South African trade publishers that had already started experimenting with digital publishing in 2010 or 2011, or had plans to do so during the course of 2011 and 2012. The survey was designed to uncover the current state of digital publishing in the South African trade publishing industry, to discover the approaches that publishers are currently taking, and the barriers to implementation that they are experiencing. The research confirmed that the current state of digital publishing in South Africa, and the problems that publishers are experiencing, are characteristic of industries faced with disruptive technology. The principles of disruptive technology can therefore be applied to develop recommendations and suggest strategies for publishers planning to venture into digital publishing. Although the focus of the research was on South African trade publishers, the results and recommendations that emerged from the research can be applied to the wider international publishing industry. / Dissertation (MIS)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / gm2013 / Information Science / unrestricted

The convergence of mobile and social media, enabled by the ever-changing landscape of information and communication technologies and wireless technologies, has over the last decade, transformed our world into a Socio-Mobile Economy. Looking at the disruptive impact of this convergence on the global payment market, this study investigates the incentives behind different reactions and cooperation models that have been adopted by providers in the Swedish mobile payment market. The methodology of the study has been built on a combination of both theoretical and empirical bases. The theoretical base constitutes a literature review along the line of concepts such as innovation management, disruptive innovation, business model innovation, resource-based theory of the firm and the transaction cost theories, to identify existing gaps within the literature. The empirical base constitutes of qualitative in-depth interviews with three providers in the Swedish mobile payment market. The study shows three main reactions from the Swedish mobile payment providers. These providers have reacted to disrupt the disruption, attract a critical mass of customers, and to wrap their solutions with the right context. Currently, there is no cooperation between all three key input providers of a mobile payment solution, the banks, the MNOs and the card payment systems thus there are no full-integration or partial-integration models in the Swedish mobile payment market. Three cooperation models, the all-bank-centric, the MNO-centric and the light models were also identified in this market.

The current manufacturing business environment becomes more dependent of digital tools to increase business opportunities and customer value. The organizations ability to embrace the digital tools is dependent of a its digital maturity position. The organization structure, information systems, and communication are variables affecting the position and enables or disables possibility of data-based decisions-making (DBDM). To determine the ability information system and information flow is analyzed through a case study at one of the production departments. The areas studied in the case study are information flow of metal powder and compression tools.  The case study is performed to study the organizations ability to connecting information, study information flow and assess potential information disruption. It is assessed by using digital maturity assessments. This result provides an insight of how it affects the DBDM abilities within the department. These areas are common in a general production setting. The metal powder area is analyzed by an experiment where the metal powder containers is manually measured and evaluate the real weight compared to the depreciated weight in the information system. The compression tool analysis is performed by extracting and analyzing structured- and unstructured machine data from the production. This analytical angle is dependent of reliable data, and information disruption between the production processes and the servers is noticed during the extraction of data. This extraction process and analysis resembles the need when implementing machine learning and other automatic applications.  The 360DMA assess a general view of the organizations position and follow up with a method how to reach certain goals to increase one of the five levels. The Acatech-model is used to assess two structural areas, resources and information systems. The metal powder container analysis shows that there is a problem between the information stored in the systems regarding weight of the metal powder containers. The compression tool analysis result is that the stored data about the compression tools and the count of the different components is not correct. This and difficulties with manually- and automatically extracting data from server’s cause information disruptions and decrease the production process information reliability and validity. This decrease the ability to use the production data to make data driven decisions and gain insights about the production. The digital maturity assessment position the organization on a connectivity level (Acatech model) regarding information systems and resources means that data is unreliable and once its reliable the next level is in reach. The varying position within the 360DMA model call for management to synchronize development between processes by introducing strategies, define responsibilities and understand the information flow.

Children placed in foster care face considerable stress and trauma related to being removed from their homes and subsequently living in a new environment. They may exhibit severe disruptive or antisocial behavior as a consequence. Clinicians and researchers often have not considered that these behaviors may be due to children's underdeveloped cognitive control and response. Treatment approaches that offer more holistic perspectives on stress and the inclusion of individual and specialized therapies may help foster children to better control their responses and return to their biological families sooner. The purpose of this study was to focus on whether individual therapy and the inclusion of rehabilitative strategies decreased severe disruptive/antisocial behavior in children placed in foster care or foster homes. Using archival data, disruptive behavior tallies were compared between foster children who began individual therapy and then the same children with the inclusion of rehabilitative strategies. A significant decrease in disruptive behavior was found with foster children within three months of individual therapy and then again, three months after the inclusion of rehabilitative strategies, regardless of gender. Gender was found to have no significance in participants' response to treatment. Findings demonstrate the value of using multiple treatments for decreasing disruptive behavior in foster children. Using multiple treatments, clinicians may be better able to help children positively transform their lives as they navigate the foster care system, resulting in potential positive social change.

The evolution of technology has led to a need for business leaders to embrace disruptive technology for the purpose of capturing new markets and remaining competitive. Multiple challenges have been faced by business leaders in the processes of integrating and sustaining disruptive innovations, resulting in the failure to achieve expected efficiency and profitability. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies used by business leaders to integrate and sustain disruptive innovations. The conceptual frameworks were Roger's diffusion of innovation theory and Christensen's disruptive innovation theory. Semistructured interviews were administered to 10 business leaders and employees from institutions of higher learning in the Northeastern region of the United States. The participants were selected using a purposive nonrandom sampling technique. The selection criteria included organizational leaders, technology professionals, training and development professionals, and organizational end-users. Three themes and several subthemes were identified. The strategies for integrating and sustaining disruptive innovations include training, changeover mechanisms, and the use of critical resources. The procedural and structural factors in processes to integrate and sustain disruptive innovations include identifying critical success factors, ascertaining benchmarks, determining levels of support and effectiveness. Obstacles faced during the processes of integrating and sustaining disruptive innovations were categorized into human, technology, changeover, and external issues. Social change may be realized through the improved success rates of small business leaders implementing disruptive innovations by increasing meaningful employment and enhancing livelihoods.