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This chapter focuses on techniques and technologies to aid groups in making decisions, with an emphasis on computer-based support. Many office workers regularly meet colleagues and clients in virtual meetings using videoconferencing platforms, which enable participants to carry out tasks in a manner similar to a face-to-face meeting. The development of computer-based platforms to facilitate group tasks can be traced back to the 1960s, and while they support group communication, they do not directly support group decision making. In this chapter we distinguish four technologies developed to provide support to group decisions, clustered into two main traditions. Technologies in the task-oriented tradition are mainly concerned with enabling participants to complete tasks to solve the group's decision problem via computer-supported communications. Group Decision Support Systems and social software technologies comprise the task-oriented tradition. Alternately, in the model-driven tradition, participants use computers to build and use a model that acts as a referent to communicate, mostly verbally, about the group's decision problem. System modeling and decision-modeling technologies constitute the model-driven tradition. This chapter sketches the history and guiding ideas of both traditions, and describes their associated technologies. The chapter concludes with questioning if increased availability of online tools will lead to increased use of group decision support technologies, and the differential impact of communication support versus decision support.

In the course of flexible PCB manufacture where the reliability of those parts subjected to bending stresses is a matter of utmost concern, the design of the PCB should enable the flexible interconnection parts to withstand the greatest possible bending stresses. Therefore, extensive investigations were carried out to demonstrate the relationship between the design and flexural strength. The study shows the functional correlation between bending radius, material thickness, type of material, design of the circuit and number of bending cycles. Only with a detailed knowledge of these five mentioned properties can reliable PCBs be designed and manufactured. The results of these investigations are based on a great number of bending experiments performed on a practical basis and demonstrate the numerical relation between all effects. As bending cycle results are subject to relatively high deviations, the whole problem has been investigated by means of statistical evaluation criteria.

Capital restrictions normally exist in the creation of a startup, requiring investors to analyze funding alternatives in a highly competitive climate. Although different types of incentives to support startups exist, these incentives are only available to those companies that fulfill the requirements of the funding program to which they have applied. Due to social and economic changes introduced by the digital economy, however, existing mechanisms for assessing the potential growth of startups are scarce, outdated or simply incomplete, distorting the results of such evaluations.

Evaluating business opportunities and how to exploit them are critical activities for an entrepreneur. This study sought to address this issue through the combined use of cognitive mapping and the Decision EXpert (DEX) technique. Assuming a constructivist stance, the study brought together a panel of experienced entrepreneurs and business investors to identify and articulate the criteria to be considered in the evaluation and classification of startups.

The evaluation system created in this study was tested, and the results were validated by the expert panel on a collective basis, demonstrating that the dual methodology used can increase our understanding of the decision problem at hand and lead to more informed and potentially better evaluations of the potential growth of startups.

The authors know of no prior work reporting the integrated use of cognitive mapping and DEX in this study context.

To consider the role of technology in knowledge management in organizations, both actual and desired.

Facilitated, computer‐supported group workshops were conducted with 78 people from ten different organizations. The objective of each workshop was to review the current state of knowledge management in that organization and develop an action plan for the future.

Only three organizations had adopted a strongly technology‐based “solution” to knowledge management problems, and these followed three substantially different routes. There was a clear emphasis on the use of general information technology tools to support knowledge management activities, rather than the use of tools specific to knowledge management.

Further research is needed to help organizations make best use of generally available software such as intranets and e‐mail for knowledge management. Many issues, especially human, relate to the implementation of any technology. Participation was restricted to organizations that wished to produce an action plan for knowledge management. The findings may therefore represent only “average” organizations, not the very best practice.

Each organization must resolve four tensions: between the quantity and quality of information/knowledge, between centralized and decentralized organization, between head office and organizational knowledge, and between “push” and “pull” processes.

Although it is the group rather than an individual that determines what counts as knowledge, hardly any previous studies of knowledge management have collected data in a group context.

With a third of business successions failing, the EU is still confronted with a haemorrhage of around 150,000 enterprises and 600,000 jobs every year. Although 30 years of research have confirmed the positive effects of employee share ownership (ESO) for European enterprises and its important function for business succession, best practice, such as the US ESOP, is thinly spread across the EU. Nevertheless, Member States (MS) have developed a broad variety of ESO schemes involving intermediary entities to acquire and administer employee shares in the employer firm in particular for the transfer of businesses to employees. However, for small and medium enterprise (SME) owners the main barrier is still a lack of clearcut and transparent options to sell their enterprise to their employees and corresponding incentives to do so. In this light, this paper proposes a European approach, that is, a European Employee Stock Ownership Plan (European ESOP).

A “Common European ESOP Regime”, as a first step towards a “Common European Regime on EFP” would complement existing national laws aiming primarily at their harmonisation. As the name suggests, this would be a second contract law regime parallel to national legislation on ESO. Its objective is to eliminate obstacles to the single market that mainly, though not exclusively, stem from heterogeneous regulatory density. The existing obstacles are due to the multifarious development of national laws governing employee financial participation (EFP) in the MS. The “Common European ESOP Regime” would offer employers and employees a choice between two alternative EFP regimes one originating in national legislation, the other in European legislation. The choice between these two alternatives would be entirely optional, as in the case of the European Company Statute.

The European ESOP is modelled on the US ESOP and EU best practices. It embraces six European types of legal vehicles, i.e. the employee ownership trust (EOT), the French employee ownership mutual fund (FCPE), the Austrian civil law foundation, the Spanish Sociedad Laboral, the cooperative and the closely held limited liability company.

The “Common European ESOP regime” would neither replace nor override national legislation but would serve as a cross-border alternative to national laws, to be used at the discretion of the parties involved. Regarding its contents, it would contain best practice rules derived from each of the ESOP vehicles discussed to reflect the entire life cycle of SMEs (starting up, consolidation and succession).

In this chapter, we consider collaborative models of engaged research in comparison to models of team science that include persons with lived experience of the topic area as team members. ‘Co-led’, ‘co-design’ and ‘co-research’ are all terms used in the literature with distinct, but not precise, definitions and approaches. These collaborative models tend to describe methods that allow those with lived experience to be treated differently than other academic members of the research team. Power imbalances between those with lived experiences and researchers persist in such models, in spite of researcher efforts. For example, persons with lived experience are often described as being compensated with gift cards which may be welcomed but can be perceived as diminishing their role and contribution. In contrast, participatory team science involves persons with lived experience as full members of the research team. In the model that we propose, power is balanced through mutual planning and consensus-based decision-making. We contend that using participatory team science advances research through egalitarian consideration of team members' perspectives of the research problem and the designs necessary to knowledge development.

The resourcing of policing activity is characterised by a level of complexity, particularly where evaluating alternative policy options is concerned. In this paper, a case study using multimethodological modelling to compare alterative policy choice in a group context is outlined with respect to response-patrol officer (RPO) deployment within a UK police force. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The application of a three phase modelling process is illustrated where scenario planning is used to generate the scope of the system elements to be modelled. This is followed by causal mapping to identify the barriers to improving officer resourcing, and system dynamics modelling is used to simulate the impacts of a range of policy options within this policing function. A group model building approach was applied throughout the modelling phases with an expert group to negotiate a shared view of the structure and dynamics of the resourcing policy challenges.

A fully validated system dynamics model emerged from the multi-phase modelling process which allowed a series of alternative future policy scenarios to be explored and evaluated. Useful policy insights were generated by the system dynamics simulation model which suggested more efficient rules for resource allocation in the police force’s RPO function.

The insights from this case study demonstrates that multi-phase modelling has potential application in policy exploration across a range of emergency service providers whose actions are governed by both variable demand and constrained supply of resource.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the conversation activities of design teams to negotiate task conflict and reach consensus.

Four case studies were conducted to analyse the conversation activities that teams use in the course of design projects.

The conversation activities that teams used to negotiate conflict and bring about consensus were identified. These conversation activities are associated with collaboration, communication and social skills enabling teams to engage in the high level of information exchange and negotiation that is required to manage task conflict. How they were used to negotiate conflict and help reach consensus is also discussed.

The findings from this research are based on a small number of participants; hence, it cannot be generalised without further study with larger groups. However, the questions this paper has raised can be generalised to other design tasks and groups.

The findings have implications for the management of design teams and teams working on complex unstructured problems both in industry and education. They highlight how conflict can be constructively managed to bring about consensus that integrates the knowledge and perspective of all team members.

The benefits of task conflict have been disputed in the literature. This research has identified the conversation activities that facilitate the constructive management of task conflict to bring about consensus that integrates the perspectives and knowledge of a team.

The idea of implementing supply chain management (SCM) principles for the construction industry was embraced by construction stakeholders to enhance the sector's performance. The analysis from the literature revealed that the implementation of SCM in the construction industry enhances the industry's value in terms of cost-saving, time savings, material management, risk management and others. The construction supply chain (CSC) can be managed using the pull or push system. This chapter also discusses the origin and proliferation of SCM into the construction industry. The chapter revealed that the concept of SCM has passed through five different eras: the creation era, the use of ERP, globalisation stage, specialisation stage and electronic stage. The findings from the literature revealed that we are presently in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) era. At this stage, the SCM witnesses the adoption of technologies and principles driven by the 4IR. This chapter also revealed that the practice of SCM in the construction industry is centred around integration, collaboration, communication and the structure of the supply chain (SC). The forms and challenges hindering the adoption of these practices were also discussed extensively in this chapter.