En 2010, 1 500 chefs d'entreprise ont identifié la créativité des managers comme le facteur le plus important pour les réussites futures des organisations. Cependant, l'engagement des managers dans des actions créatives est en constante concurrence avec des comportements de routine qui impliquent moins de prise de risque, d'incertitude et de possibilité d'échec. La thèse présente trois axes de recherche pour étudier et comprendre la décision des managers de s'engager dans des actions créatives. Le premier se concentre sur la façon dont les managers conçoivent la créativité et l'innovation lorsqu'elles s'appliquent à leur activité. Elle étudie aussi la façon dont les conceptions des managers peuvent influencer leurs propres comportements créatifs et leur évaluation de pratiques managériales et de managers créatifs. Le second axe montre que les actions créatives résultent d'un processus décisionnel qui évalue la pertinence de la créativité dans des situations spécifiques et prend en compte les prédispositions individuelles comme les caractéristiques favorables de l'organisation. Le troisième axe établit comment la complémentarité ou l'inadéquation entre les caractéristiques des managers et de leurs organisations peuvent déclencher des comportements créatifs. Les conclusions de cette recherche réaffirment l'intérêt des approches multivariées et interactionnistes de la créativité dans les organisations. Elle souligne également l'importance de considérer l'évaluation par les managers de la pertinence et de l'efficacité d'actions créatives dans des situations de travail spécifiques. Enfin, la plupart des recherches tendent à concevoir que la créativité émerge de circonstances positives et encourageantes. Au contraire, la présente recherche atteste que les managers sont le plus souvent amené à adopter des comportements créatifs dans des situations de travail qui ne sont pas optimales et satisfaisantes. / In 2010, 1,500 Chief Executive Officers identified managers' creativity as the most crucial factor for future organizational success. However, managers' engagement in creative actions is constantly competing with routine behaviors that imply less risk taking, uncertainty and possibility of failure. This dissertation explores three potential avenues to understand managers' decisions to engage in creative actions. The first one focuses on managers' conceptions of creativity and innovation as antecedents of their own creative behaviors and their evaluation of creative managers and managerial practices. The second avenue examines how creative actions result from a decision-making process that evaluates the relevance of creativity in specific situations and takes into account individual predispositions and organizational characteristics. The third avenue investigates the extent to which a fit or misfit between managers and their organizations can trigger creative behaviors. This research reaffirms the relevance of the multivariate and interactionnist approaches to organizational creativity. It highlights also the importance of considering managers' evaluation of the appropriateness and effectiveness of specific creative actions in specific situations. Finally, most research tends to conceive that managerial creativity emerges from positive and encouraging circumstances. In contrast, the present research highlights that managerial creativity can emerge as a response to situations of misfit and dissatisfaction.

Research has shown a link between urban students' success in U.S. schools and the level of parental involvement. However, urban parents have historically low levels of engagement in their children's education. Increased involvement of urban parents in their children's education can increase student success in urban schools. The purpose of this generic qualitative research study was to understand the experiences of urban parents of children diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) who have participated in an online training program to learn about their children's learning disability. Self-efficacy, andragogy, experiential learning, and sociocultural theory were used as conceptual foundations to guide the research. The research question was what are the experiences and perspectives of urban parents of children diagnosed with ADHD who participated in an online training program designed to develop their understanding of their child's learning disability. Participants in this generic qualitative study were 8 parents who participated in an online training program for parents of children with ADHD. Data sources included semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic inductive data analysis to identify patterns and themes. The key findings indicated that parents found the online training program helpful in understanding their children's specific learning needs and supported them to become more involved in their children's education. This study contributed to social change by providing insights into an innovative learning environment that advanced urban parent learning and fostered parental involvement in urban schools. Educational leaders can use this knowledge to encourage productive parental outreach programs for urban parents.

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This thesis presents an appreciative application of the Systems of Innovation (SoI) approach to local development analysis (LDA) practice as applied in the context of a transformative approach to neighbourhood planning. The study’s point of departure is in interrogating what “lenses” conventional planning applies in making sense of neighbourhood-level realities in the first place, and therefore to recognise what it is that planning might “see” or fail to see in its analyses and prescripts. The researcher proposed to test this by undertaking an appreciative application of the Systems of Innovation (SoI) approach to neighbourhood planning to explore whether SoI contributes any additional perspective or insight beyond what conventional practice may have seen or found. The research undertaken was exploratory and inductive, involving data collection through intensive local observation and interviewing in two South African township neighbourhoods: T-Section in Mamelodi Township, and Saulsville node in Atteridgeville Township. The data was then analysed using an SoI model. The study found that the application of the SoI model identified additional key development considerations which were not previously recognised by conventional plans. Specifically, the findings highlight key social, economic and institutional factors which distinguish the two neighbourhoods from each other, and suggest different development intervention opportunities. The study also in addition identified an enhancement to the SoI model by introducing a spatial dimension which would strengthen the model’s application for planning and neighbourhood analysis. At the same time, however, the study also demonstrated the difficulty of applying the SoI framework to relatively deprived neighbourhood contexts, such as those in South African townships (or of describing these places as “systems of innovation” in the conventional sense) due to characteristic gaps and weaknesses, particularly their low technology base. The results of this study suggest that there are possible gaps in how conventional planning practices see local development contexts. It concludes that consideration should be given to what planning could glean from other disciplines which are grappling with similar transformational challenges, and adopting a transdisciplinary approach is motivated. Further research to support this continued exploration would have to address the main limitations of this study, which include the lack of generalizability, and limited interrogation of the limitations of SoI itself. Keywords: Local development analysis, System of Innovation, planning and transformation, neighbourhood development, township economy, transdisciplinarity

Abstract  Background  All companies need innovation in some form and ethical rules on how the employees are ex-pected to behave. There are today too few studies on how the ethical culture in the companies affect the innovative abilities of the company. Some aspects of this link have not previously been covered. For example, will the innovative work be hindered by to extensive ethical rules? Or perhaps the innovative abilities can be improved if the ethical culture in the company shows a clear road map how act and leaves no room for personal interpretation? Furthermore, as the previous research has been quantitative studies, this qualitative study will add new in-depth insights into the employees’ perception of the mechanisms related to ethical culture and inno-vation.  Objectives  In this thesis the link between the ethical culture in the company and the company’s innovative abilities is studied. The study investigates the mechanisms behind idea generation and innova-tive behaviour at employee levels. Furthermore, the study includes the connection between eth-ical culture and the speed of innovation and whether the post-pandemic changes in work con-ditions have impacted the speed of innovation.  Methodology  The study is a qualitative, exploratory study with in-depth interviews with ten interviewees. These will be selected among the MBA students and people with similar engineering back-ground that makes different kind of innovative work in different industries.  Results  The study shows a clear connection between the individual’s personal interpretation of the com-pany’s ethical culture and how the innovative ideas are received by the company. Different companies have different methods of showing appreciation for successful innovation. An eco-nomic incentive for successful innovation seems to be the most successful method. It also shows that employees do not feel hindered in their work as a result of the company having an ethical culture. Larger companies have well implemented methods for keeping an ethical culture in the company and still be innovative.  Recommendations for future research  The study covers only ten interviewees – however, to make the group of interviewees as repre-sentative as possible, the group consisted of engineers working in different areas and in differ-ent countries. For future studies, the interview could be repeated with several people in similar role in the same companies to see the differences in the personal interpretation of ethical culture and its effect on innovative abilities.

After Brexit, the city of Amsterdam has been boosting its attractive power for people around the world, becoming a major international centre in Europe and one of the most interesting social-cultural and innovation hubs of the globe. While the city grows, it pursues ambitious objectives related to sustainable development, social inclusion, housing shortage and heritage protection. Amsterdam-Noord has historically been a leftover part of city, accommodating large industrial infrastructure, while the fabric of the old town would expand in all the other directions. Only in the last century, the Dutch capital started expanding on the other side of the river IJ. The late development generated a mix of models and urban typologies that collide and coexist in the area. Village-like row houses and low-density neighborhoods from the 1920s are only few meters away from brand new residential towers, social housing blocks mix with new industrial heritage regeneration projects, touristic harbor and boat houses pop here and there. IJ-Plein is the site of a representative urban plan designed by OMA in the 1980s, which created a distinctive urban fabric, but over time the original neighborhood no longer meets the requirements of sustainability and the needs of the people. Together with the old harbor industrial area next door, this area is in need of renewal and renovation. With the aim of developing a new urban center for Amsterdam, the project intends to provide a future-proof urban solution, with innovative, cultural and urban center roles in different loops, depending on the specific location of the area. It will attempt to address a variety of urban issues such as student housing pressure, urban-water relations, community social-cultural life, recycling, green space, urban densification, etc., making the area a well-rounded organic whole and an attractive highlight of Amsterdam in 2050.

As societies evolve, offices have become the places were the majority of working activities take place. Occupants’ comfort in office buildings has always been a very important issue in the building sector and therefore guidelines regarding indoor comfort standards have been developed throughout the years. Nevertheless, there is a need for investments on new and innovative ideas which will go beyond the existing guidelines and move towards a more sustainable and human oriented office environment.The present thesis aims at promoting this idea of sustainable offices by developing and presenting an innovative technological method which will provide the opportunity to measure the office workers’ perceived comfort in real time. This in its turn will enable the building sector stakeholders to operate office buildings in a more sustainable way in terms of building services provision to their occupants.In order to achieve these objectives, the first part of the thesis is dedicated in describing the basic indoor environmental components of the office environment as well as the possible associations between improved indoor environmental quality and occupants’ health, wellbeing and productivity. The second part aims to provide a detailed presentation of the existing or emerging methods which are currently used in order to predict or directly measure occupants’ perceived comfort in office places while in the same time discussing their current capabilities and limitations. In the final part, our proposed method, which could be used for the purposes of real time perceived comfort measurements, is presented. This proposed method includes four different steps which are separately presented with detailed instructions regarding their proper implementation.

This work stems from two different studies related to this performance assessment of seismic resistant systems. The first study compares the performance of newly developed and traditional seismic resisting systems, and the second study investigates many of the assumptions made within provisions for nonlinear response history analyses. In the first study, two innovative systems, which are hybrid buckling restrained braces and collapse prevention systems, are compared to their traditional counterparts using a combination of the FEMA P-695 and FEMA P-58 methodologies. Additionally, an innovative modeling assumption is investigated, where moment frames are evaluated with and without the lateral influence of the gravity system. Each system has a unique purpose from the perspective of performance-based earthquake engineering, and analyses focus on the all intensity levels of interest. The comparisons are presented in terms consequences, including repair costs, repair duration, number of casualties, and probability of receiving an unsafe placard, which are more meaningful to owners and other decision makers than traditional structural response parameters. The results show that these systems can significantly reduce the consequences, particularly the average repair costs, at the important intensity levels. The second study focuses on the assumptions made during proposed updates to provisions for nonlinear response history analyses. The first assumption investigated is the modeling of the gravity system's lateral influence, which can have significant effect on the system behavior and should be modeled if a more accurate representation of the behavior is needed. The influence of residual drifts on the proximity to collapse is determined, and this work concludes that a residual drift check is unnecessary if the only limit state of interest is collapse prevention. This study also finds that spectrally matched ground motions should cautiously be used for near-field structures. The effects of nonlinear accidental torsion are also examined in detail and are determined to have a significant effect on the inelastic behavior of the analyzed structure. The final investigation in this study shows that even if a structure is designed per ASCE 7, it may not have the assumed probability of collapse under the maximum considered earthquake when analyzed using FEMA P-695. / Ph. D.

In recent years, both academia and practice have shown an increased interest in sustainable innovation. This new area is examined in the context of large enterprises in our qualitative multiple case study. This thesis thus contributes to a better understanding of the concept as well as the underlying variables that drive sustainable innovation. Theory emphasized both external and internal elements in organizations' engagement in sustainable innovation. The empirical evidence helps to identify nine key factors driving sustainable innovation in large firms: cost and cost reduction, risk and risk reduction, sales and profit margin, reputation and brand value, attractiveness as an employer, innovation capabilities, partnerships and collaborations, regions and culture, regulation and government. It also clarifies the extent to which each of the components influences the process of producing sustainable innovation within organizations. These elements have been discovered to complement one another, occasionally colliding and enhancing one another. This study is based on extensive data gathered through semi-structured interviews and secondary sources from two of Sweden's top industry leaders: IKEA and Epiroc. Theoretical and managerial implications are examined in depth, providing valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners.