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The purpose of this paper is to draw from up-to-date reports that outline the current situation for Yemen in terms of education and the socio-political context, and to address this context with theory from the complexity science domain in order to propose practical recommendations.

The paper outlines highlights from the current situation in Yemen, namely, the challenges presented by conflict, and international engagement in conflict, and offers an appraisal of key factors pertaining to education and progress made in this arena in recent years. A focus is made on tribal groups as a starting point for bottom-up emergent engagement, and complexity science is suggested as a theoretical domain to draw from to conceptualise how to enact this.

A discussion of how complexity science could be meaningfully applied to the case of education in Yemen is presented, along with seven recommendations for the focus of future international aid interventions in Yemen.

At this time, there are few, if no, other works that have been found that have considered the case of education in Yemen in this way from the perspective of a bottom-up emergent engagement with tribes as a way of leveraging the values-based system of tribal customary law in order to address sustainability development goals, literacy, integration in digital society and education as a means of approaching these issues.

The purpose of this article is to describe a future center as an urban innovation engine for the knowledge city, to understand the success factors of a future center and how this success can be replicated systematically in the implementation and development of future centers in the future.

Nine future centers were visited and a longitudinal action research‐based case study was conducted at the regional Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in Israel, within the educational domain.

There are 13 conceptual building‐blocks for a future center and the unifying principle is conversations. The PISGA future center put the concept of a future center into action and was guided by six operating principles: values, experiment and learning, organizational structure, partnerships, physical space, and virtual space. They were able to initiate ten new educational projects within the first two years of operation. A conceptual model of a regional future center was developed and tested on the PISGA case, defining the five key ingredients as community conversations, future images, an innovation lab, a knowledge and intelligence center and implementation projects.

After two years of testing the findings, only intermediate results are available. Further research is needed to develop and test the concepts and model further.

This paper provides building‐blocks and a generic model that can be used by the creators of next generation future centers.

This paper provides the first generic building‐blocks and the first generic implementation and operational model for a future center.

To present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.

An in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.

Although empowerment is not always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.

The empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.

This paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.

This paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers.

This paper seeks to propose a research approach and methods for knowledge‐based development (KBD) researchers and practitioners exploring the social capital and knowledge networks of a city region.

This paper proposes that regional surveys be carried out using a harmonised question set to investigate social capital and the gap identified in this set regarding “bridging” questions, i.e. questions allowing researchers to look at distant types of relationships between business associates, maybe in different organisations. The approach responds to regional development agendas identifying the need to address underlying weaknesses (participation, connectivity and enterprise) in city regions specifically. Specific questions are suggested as a starting point for further development and integration with social network analysis.

A practical research approach and methods are described that can be used at the city region level.

One limitation of the research is the potential technological exclusion of research participants without internet access.

The research outlined here postulates the use of special sets of survey questions that already exist that can be adapted and used to investigate relationships among networks (formal and informal) of city region populations, identified through their links with and between organisations, groups and networks, which will provide rich insights on the current state of city region knowledge networks in order to facilitate their improvement socially and economically through the power of people and their relationships.

A research methodology and subsequent practical knowledge to be derived for application at city region level are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the findings of research into the value perception of knowledge management among lawyers and staff from among the top ten global law firms.

Interviews were conducted with lawyers as well as knowledge management (KM) service providers within the selected law firms. The results were then analysed by statistical means and compared to previous findings in literature. The methodology is inspired and broadly based on a research paper into the value perception of information by Broady‐Preston and Williams.

The findings are that respondents showed strong support for the value of KM to law firm success through concepts such as improved efficiency, quality and other drivers for better performance.

The survey in the paper itself was limited to the top ten global law firms and is therefore not representative of the entire professional service sector or the law firm sector.

The results in the paper indicate strong support from the internal customer side for the notion of KM adding value to the business of a law firm.

Prior to this paper there has been little research into the value perception of knowledge management within the professional service environment.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to questionnaires as a corporate touch point, and their relationship with corporate identity (CI).

Following observational research, the paper presents a review of published works, including journals, textbooks and industry papers that consider qualitative aspects of questionnaire design. Primary data was collected via existential phenomenological interviews to understand the experiences of employees who engage with questionnaires from external companies within the industrial business-to-business (B2B) industry.

A lack of practical advice around aesthetic appearance of questionnaires in both journal papers and research design textbooks is identified, suggesting limited awareness of visual aspects of questionnaire design, even for those with formal training. Through interviews, it is suggested that poor design is forgiven through the understanding of the practical nature of the document, the idea that CI is a performance that is unnecessary at particular points of the B2B relationship, and that a more powerful company need not spend time on CI if collecting data from a stakeholder that is perhaps perceived as less important than other stakeholders. The findings indicate that organisations should consider questionnaires as a vehicle to promote CI, and as stakeholders to consider the document in terms of their relationship with the issuing company.

This study proposes that qualitative inquiry is required to further determine how questionnaires are understood as a corporate touch point by stakeholders.

This paper considers the relationship between questionnaire appearance and stakeholder perceptions in the context of CI.

The purpose of the paper is to introduce the 2008 annual special issue on knowledge‐based development (KBD), from the perspective of the construction of an R&D agenda relevant to the international community of knowledge‐based development (KBD) practitioners and researchers.

The papers in the special issue are introduced and discussed.

A number of preliminary exercises around the world show a trend towards building a common KBD research and innovation agenda able to diversify into specialized topics such as urbanism, economics and geography, while maintaining a distinctive set of core issues.

This paper introduces a volume that may contribute to raise new questions and stimulate further research into the potential of knowledge as a leverage to the social and economic development of cities, regions and countries.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) Picture System is a reliable and face valid measure of internal working models of attachment in adults with intellectual disabilities (ID).

The AAPs of 20 adults with ID were coded blind by two reliable judges and classified into one of four groups: secure, dismissing, preoccupied, or unresolved. Inter-rater reliability was calculated using κ. Six participants repeated the assessment for test-retest reliability. Two independent experts rated ten cases on the links between the AAP analysis and the clinical history.

There was significant agreement between AAP judges, κ=0.677, p<0.001. Five out of six participants showed stability in their classifications over time. The majority of expert ratings were “good” or “excellent”. There was a significant inter-class correlation between raters suggesting good agreement between them r=0.51 (p<0.05). The raters’ feedback suggested that the AAP had good clinical utility.

The inter-rater reliability, stability, face validity, and clinical utility of the AAP in this population is promising. Further examination of these findings with a larger sample of individuals with ID is needed.

This is the first study attempting to investigate the reliability and validity of the AAP in this population.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the role of trust and distrust in social networks within the entrepreneurial ecosystem and to develop a conceptual scheme of the impact of trust and distrust on productive and unproductive entrepreneurship.

This study develops a conceptual scheme, founded on the social capital and resource-based view of a firm, by exploring the impact of trust and distrust on entrepreneurial behavior in a social network.

As the paper indicates, trust within an entrepreneurial ecosystem has a positive impact on productive entrepreneurship, while distrust within the ecosystem is expected to be unproductive and destructive (or potentially illegal) to an economy.

The research implication of this paper is that it connects levels of trust and distrust within the ecosystem to the type of the behavior exhibited by entrepreneurs leading either to productive or unproductive entrepreneurial endeavors. As this study is based on the theoretical review resulting in a conceptual scheme, it requires further investigation of proposed interactions.

This paper offers strategic alternatives for entrepreneurs seeking to enhance future endeavors by strengthening trust within social networks for the mutual benefits of the ecosystem and businesses within it.

This study highlights the importance of two social constructs of trust and distrust in maintaining existing and developing future ecosystems. It also reviews potential outcomes of entrepreneurial behavior and their impact on economies.

This research examines both trust and distrust (two separate social constructs) as significant predictors of future outcomes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that go beyond productive entrepreneurship.