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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
51

Digital media to inspire and sustain sport participation in urban areas

Rollinson, Benedict Douglas 26 February 2021 (has links)
This research looks to understand the role digital media plays to inspire and sustain sports participation and how digital media could be used as a socially inclusive tool. The study explores if strategically packaged digital media could be used in a socially inclusive way to increase or sustain sports participation. This would address one of the problems facing sports organisations, as sports participation is decreasing or at least stagnating both in South Africa and on a global scale. This study followed an exploratory, inductive approach, using Self-determination Theory (SDT) developed by Deci and Ryan (1985) as a theoretical framework. The paper looks to understand what research has been done to understand how people are motivated to participate in sport and the proven theories that have been tested (Pelletier et al., 1995) to understand the role of intrinsic motivation has as a powerful indicator of intention. This study made use of a qualitative, cross-sectional design and data was collected through semi-structured interviews with active participants based in Langa, Cape Town. The findings of this study showed the participants regularly accessed digital media in a manner which strongly aligned with the literature and has been shown to increase intrinsic motivation, which leads to action. The findings further show that sports media can be used as a tool for social inclusion, despite the participants socio-economic status they regularly accessed online sports content for motivational and learning purposes. Based on the findings of this research, sports organisations need to consider digital media as a viable and socially inclusive way to sustain or even increase sports participation.
52

From Shock to Awe: The Awe of Organisation: How do Community-Based Festivals do Institutional Work?

Turner, Fergus 02 March 2021 (has links)
This thesis is based on an action research project with festival organisations and festival organising and is interested in key insights and practice models for changing meaning-making, routines, roles and resource flows and effectively doing what scholars of institutional theory call institutional work. The project is located in a central case study, the Muizenberg Festival, where I haved played a role as a coordinator, and have co-designed the festival process and platform between 2014 and 2019. It is further bolstered by research with several social-purpose festivals, from local and international case studies. The present socio-economic development discourse and practice prevalent in South Africa, and the developing South more generally, has been bounded and constrained by strategies that fail to address a milieu of institutionalised issues. If people cannot exercise agency on underlying institutionalised issues, alternative vehicles for organising in order to do such work are necessary. Festivals exhibit large-scale participation around specific themes in a concentrated time frame. Festivals are known to produce an array of social and economic goods including, amongst others, sense of community and social capital. This study will explore new theoretical perspectives on organisations and institutional work through action research with community-based social-purpose festivals. The study aims to provide cogent theoretical and practical frameworks for the study and practice of festivals as organisations and social phenomena that are pertinent to the study of institutional work, offering a model of development with important learnings for addressing intractable socio-economic issues in innovative ways. The research is embedded with the backdrop of literature that specifically looks at, however not exclusively, institutional theory and festival studies. Three years of action research data, in the form of observation, dialogue interviews, working journals, meeting notes and reports will be used spanning from 2015 until 2017. From this learning, the case will be made for festival organising models as offering new insights for transformative development and provide strategies for deploying tactics of community-based festivals as compelling new approaches to institutional work, from the ground up.
53

Essays on innovation management in established firms

Buisson, Bernard 15 July 2016 (has links) (PDF)
Abstract for Chapter 2:Most of the debate related to innovation now focuses on the disruption theory.This theory is the result of years of research and multiple contributions over the last forty years, the most important ones coming from Clayton Christensen.Still it comes with limitations. This paper therefore examines the usefulness of the theory compared with the contributions of the strategy literature.It concludes that the disruption theory is mostly descriptive, that using it as a prescriptive theory to build a strategy can be quite dangerous, and that incumbents could probably design more relevant strategies using contributions from the strategy literature. Abstract for Chapter 3:Innovation is widely recognized as a major driver of long-term corporate growth. Successful innovators who manage to dominate new markets enjoy Schumpeterian rents for their inventions. How then can a firm dominate a new market? Two streams of literature have proposed opposite answers to this question.The First Mover approach indicates that by setting up a strong differentiation strategy,companies are supposed to create a new area where profits abound. This approach issupported especially by Kim and Mauborgne (2004) who coined the term Blue Ocean to describe it.The Fast Second approach, defended by Markides and Geroski (2005), contends, onthe contrary, that companies should not try to become pioneers, but should target the newly created market in second position, and colonize it.But neither Blue Ocean nor Fast Second are able to convincingly explain successfulmarket domination. Our study of 24 innovation cases suggests that innovation which leads to market domination is instead achieved by using four kinds of breakthroughs, separately of simultaneously.Abstract for Chapter 4:The question addressed in this study is: "Is there a relationship between the level of R&D internationalization and the innovation performance?"Using a sample of 237 companies, representing 126,824 priority patents with country information, it turns out that no link can be found between innovation performance and the proportion of foreign R&D (the proportion of patents which were not invented in the company home country), but that innovation performance is positively related to the geographical dispersion of R&D (the number of countries where a given company invented patents), and that this relationship is statistically significant at the 1% level. This paper also discards the possibility of any reverse causality.Abstract for Chapter 5:This paper investigates the dynamics of innovation, profits and economic performance of multinational corporations. Using a panel of 1130 companies with financial data over a three-year period (2011, 2012 and 2013), this paper confirms that contemporaneous relationships exist between innovation performance and profits, but comes up with two unexpected results: 1) innovation performance is positively related to profits and 2) profits are negatively related to innovation performance.Models are estimated using alternative methods as suggested by the literature. The modelling methods are not implemented to suggest a simultaneous structure per se, and are implemented to mitigate concerns related to circularity (endogeneity) issues. Innovation performance and profits are used as independent variables including a proxy for economic performance as dependent variable. Empirically, this paper indicates that economic performance is positively related to both innovation performance and profits, and that this relationship is statistically significant at the 1% level. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
54

User-interface design and evaluation in a mobile application for detecting latent tuberculosis

Farao, Jaydon Ethan 30 April 2020 (has links)
Treatment and monitoring of tuberculosis have been met with various interventions to reduce its prevalence. One such intervention, to detect and prevent latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI), is the tuberculin skin test (TST), for which an induration response on a patient’s arm is an indication of LTBI. The test requires the patient to return to a clinic 48 to 72 hours after TST administration for assessment of the response. This is a challenge because of financial and accessibility obstacles, especially in under-resourced regions. A mobile health (mHealth) application (app) has been developed for remote assessment of the response to the TST. The previous version of the LTBI screening app, however, had usability limitations. The app is intended for use by patients and healthcare workers; thus, ease of use is important. There is a lack of literature on the usability of mHealth apps, especially in under-resourced settings. In this project, the user interface of the app was redesigned and tested. The Information Systems Research (ISR) framework was integrated with design thinking for this purpose. The project included creating mock-ups of the interface which were iteratively prototyped with ten student participants, adjusted, and assessed according to the user feedback. Thereafter, the Android Studio software was used to adjust the user interface based on the insights gained through the progression of prototypes. The usability of the updated app was tested and assessed with ten healthcare workers at a community health clinic in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa. Data collection and analysis comprised both qualitative and quantitative methods. Observations, the “think aloud” approach, and the post-study system usability questionnaire were used for data collection. Student participants highlighted various usability limitations of the app during each iteration. The major usability limitations included: the complex image capture protocol, misunderstanding of instructions, and time taken to capture images. Engagement with students allowed for improvement of the app interface and enabled adequate preparation for testing in the field with end-users. Furthermore, improving the app interface before engaging with healthcare workers, enabled context specific limitations that would affect the usability of the app, to be explored during the field testing. These included safety concerns when using the app and the privacy of health information. Future work should explore how these concerns, as well as other social factors, affect usability. Furthermore, improving the image capture protocol is required for improving the usability of the app.
55

Development of an assessment framework for student engagement in design thinking projects for health innovation

Dikgomo, Kagiso 18 May 2021 (has links)
Student engagement is a dynamic and multifaceted concept – it encompasses physical, emotional, and cognitive components. Various instruments to assess student engagement exist, however these are not intended to assess how students engage with one another and with community stakeholders in participatory health projects. Although instruments do exist to assess participation/power-sharing in participatory health projects, none of the available instruments are suitable for the assessment of student engagement in such projects. The current study set out to develop an assessment framework for student engagement in design thinking projects for health innovation. Design thinking is a human-centred and participatory approach to problem-solving. The objectives of the project were: (1) the design and implementation of a questionnaire to assess student engagement in design thinking activities, and (2) assessment of the validity of the questionnaire. A preliminary questionnaire was developed with the aid of the literature and implemented for students taking a postgraduate course called Health Innovation & Design, which follows a design thinking approach for health innovation. Analysis of students’ written reflective reports and a focus group discussion were used to revise the questionnaire items. The revised questionnaire was validated by design thinking practitioners (the course lecturer and facilitators), and further modifications were made based on their views. The assessment framework developed in this study incorporates the design thinking phases according to the IDEO design thinking approach, an educational definition of student engagement, and recommendations by students of the Health Innovation & Design course and their course lecturer and facilitators. This questionnaire may be used to assess engagement in academic settings as well as non-academic settings when design thinking is applied for health innovation.
56

International scientific cooperation as a mechanism for diffusion of competences in the field of advanced manufacturing technologies

Tolmachev, D., Lopatina, T. 17 September 2018 (has links)
No description available.
57

Understanding innovation in low-income markets

Harrison, Rebecca 03 April 2011 (has links)
As western markets stagnate, companies are looking to the emerging world for growth, and have begun to experiment with offerings that target the four billion microconsumers at the base of the pyramid. To successfully engage these emerging consumers, firms must innovate around their product offerings and business models. This report sought to better understand innovation in a low-income market context. It explored what drives companies to enter low-income markets, the triggers for innovation in these markets, and the characteristics of that innovation, drawing particularly on Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Nineteen interviews with executives at 11 companies operating in South Africa were interviewed in order to test propositions derived from the literature. The findings showed that companies enter low-income markets largely in pursuit of growth, but that a variety of secondary factors also play a role. The data indicated that innovation in low-income markets is often triggered by negative factors such as lack of infrastructure or limited buying power, rather than the positive factors cited in much of the existing innovation literature. Finally, it illustrated that companies often exhibit the elements of disruptive innovation when they engage with emerging consumers. The report then offered two models -- Innovation in low-income contexts: a descriptive model, and the Emerging Consumer Innovation Web -- to help companies frame the innovation process in a low-income context. It concluded that companies need to adopt a new philosophy of innovation when engaging emerging consumers, one which embraces the challenge of low-income markets as a springboard for innovation and a catalyst for creativity. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted
58

The Effect and Potential of Digital Health in The Cycle of Care in Tuberculosis Patients from Low and Middle-income Countries

le Roux, Jacobus Johannes 02 March 2022 (has links)
Background LMICs account for approximately 87% of all new TB cases. Effective TB management is vital if the global end TB goals are to be achieved by 2035. The role of digital health (DH) interventions in achieving these goals are pertinent. TB treatment adherence is considered to be critical not only in successful eradication of the disease, but also in the containment of drug-resistant strains of the disease. This review set out to assess the effect of DH interventions on TB patient treatment adherence in LMICs. Methods A systematic review was conducted by searching various databases (Pubmed, Scopus, EBSCOhost Web of Science) as well as grey literature sources for literature incorporating randomized controlled trials (RCTs), cohort, or cross-sectional studies which assessed DH interventions aimed at improving TB patient treatment adherence within LMICs. Studies were included if they were reported primary outcomes related to patient treatment adherence and were published in English before 30 November 2020. The risk of bias was independently assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Assessment Tool. Results Out of the 1030 articles identified through the databases, 41 articles were full text screened and eleven included in the synthesis of this review. Seven studies utilized text-based reminders, two employed electronic medication monitors, and two employed call reminders, and one involved video observed therapy (VOT). Grouped analysis of all included studies yielded a marginal improvement in positive patient treatment outcomes (RR 1.05, 95% CI 1.02 - 1.09). Conclusion DH interventions show promise in improving patient adherence and positive treatment outcomes. Current available literature remains scarce and of questionable quality. Studies incorporating a patient-centred approach which is executed according to standardized implementation procedures and outcome assessment is required.
59

Impact of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) in safety management at healthcare organisations

Wessels, Maatje 22 March 2022 (has links)
Patient safety events are likely to be one of the ten leading causes of death and disability in the world (World Health Organization, 2020). To manage safety, healthcare organisations have traditionally focused on identifying failures, performing analysis of events, and developing strategies to reduce the failures. Several thought leaders have argued that the traditional method is not adequate to manage safety in a complex environment. Their argument is that safety management should not solely focus on what went wrong, it should also include efforts which enable things to go right more often. If healthcare organisations want to broaden their approach towards managing safety, suitable methods must be investigated. The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) was developed by Hollnagel in 2004 and has been applied in high-risk industries such as railway, aviation, maritime and healthcare. FRAM investigates the interaction of the different functions within a complex, underspecified system, and improves the understanding of normal work and its variability (Hollnagel, 2012). This systematic review will assess the application of FRAM in healthcare settings to develop a rich understanding of the application of FRAM in healthcare as a complementary method to safety management. Firstly, understanding how FRAM was implemented within healthcare organisations and secondly understanding how healthcare organisations have perceived the value-add of FRAM in terms of safety management. The results are expected to provide healthcare organisations with guidance on applying the FRAM and demonstrate the value it potentially adds to safety management. In the studies reviewed, FRAM was applied in a wide variety of settings and in different contexts. Thematic value-added aspects were identified and discussed. Shortcomings and prerequisites for the application of FRAM was also highlighted. This dissertation wishes to motivate healthcare organisations to investigate and apply alternative methods such as FRAM to enhance their ability to manage safety in a complex environment.
60

Misaligned needs: A study of CSR from an NGO and corporate perspective

Hidden, Karen January 2017 (has links)
From a global perspective Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been highlighted by business and society alike as essential. However, there is a growing concern surrounding the misalignment of funded and failed projects between business and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). Literature indicates that often projects are initiated by the corporate donor without taking into consideration the need and long-term impact their investment might have on the selected NGO and the community that NGO supports (Blowfield & Frynas, 2005; Blundin, 2012; Kanter, 1999; Salang & Molebatsi, 2012). Furthermore, there is little emphasis on the role the NGO could play in the CSR granting process. The current research explores the role of CSR in business, the role of NGOs and the problems arising from the misalignment between the two. This paper questions the strategic alignment of CSR between business and NGOs and argues that something needs to change to form a cohesive and mutually sustainable model of engagement. A combination of phenomenology and Grounded Theory were used as the methodological frameworks for this research in order to understand how strategic alignment might result in a cohesive and sustainable match for the business and the NGO in the grant making and grant requesting phase. Justification for the use of blended methodologies is discussed in the study. The research examined the role of Dell South Africa's CSR processes and two of their NGO beneficiaries namely Christel House South Africa (CHSA) and Students Health and Welfare Centre Organization (SHAWCO). Staff from various levels within each of the above mentioned organizations formed part of the sample group. Semi-structured face-to-face and telephonic interviews were used to gather the research data, which was then analyzed and developed into codes using NVivo. The validity, reliability and justification surrounding the research have also been addressed. Eight key categories namely goal and vision alignment, strategic intent, communication, value creation, relevance and ROI, harsh realities, sustainability and impact and monitoring and evaluation, emerged from the data analysis and a model, based on the traditional Business Model Canvas, was developed. This model acts as a visual tool for corporates and NGOs when going through the CSR granting process and suggests that it should form the basis for a strategically aligned and cohesive fit between the two entities. Implications for corporates, NGOs and academics as well as areas for future research have also been outlined.

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