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The purpose of this paper is to propose a design of online-merge-offline (OMO) classroom for open education with design principles related to practical issues of teachers’ teaching, students’ learning and schools’ management.

Three stages were covered: drafted an OMO classroom framework, built a sample classroom and explored end-users’ experience. First, authors searched for and reviewed previous studies and related cases to draft an OMO framework. Second, a classroom, consisted of wireless devices, cloud-based services, Internet of Things terminals, ergonomics furniture, and comprehensive data management and analysis services, was built in Shanghai Open University. Third, invited 11 students’, 18 teachers’ and 9 school managers’ perspectives were collected and analysed by surveys and interviews.

All student participants responded positively in terms of learning experience in the classroom. They not only engaged in classroom activities such, but also accessed needed learning materials and interacted with teachers and peers anytime anywhere via mobile devices. Similarly, most teachers (90 per cent) made positive responses because of flexibility of teaching strategies and learning activities and expressed willingness to use the classroom in the future (94.4 per cent). In addition, more than 78 per cent of managers positively commented on the design of classroom, interaction effects and effective management. Visualised data allowed them to timely monitor status of facilities, comprehensively understand users’ behaviour and issues, make necessary decision with scientific evidence.

The framework and classroom not only provide teachers, students, school managers and researcher with a better understanding of innovative open education, but also indicate the key role of objective-oriented and data-driven issues for further work.

To meet needs of teachers, students, managers and researchers in today’s open education, an OMO classroom was built in Shanghai Open University based on the proposed Objective-Oriented Pedagogy-Space-Technology (OPST) framework. The framework provides readers (especially teachers and administrators of open-education institutes, staff of information centres and ed-tech researchers) with a better understanding of innovative instruction and effective management, and the originally designed classroom can be a practical and illuminating example.

This paper aims to offer empirical insights on how investing in e-commerce capabilities affects the relationship between loyalty programs and hotel operating performance so as to aid in identifying proper resource allocation strategies.

This study extended the model in Hua et al. (2015) by testing the interaction of e-commerce and loyalty programs.

The findings illustrate that proper allocation of company financial resources to e-commerce initiatives can help improve the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operating performance.

The results of this study illustrate that hotel performance can be improved by the synergy between loyalty program and e-commerce initiatives. Thus, hotel managers and owners can use results from this study to improve the efficiency of their asset allocation strategies, with five practical implications offered.

Theoretically, this study adapted and extended an integrative model of hotel operating performance (Hua et al., 2015) by identifying critical factors that elucidate the variance in firm performance. In addition, the moderating role of e-commerce provides a new conceptualization of information technology. Practically, this study makes several important contributions as well.

In order to be a true global leader, Chinese firms must be able to be trailblazers in both emerging and advanced markets.

Five major Chinese companies are studied: Each of the five leaders has shown interest in building an organization that can nurture innovation that is more than incremental.

Each of the five companies needs a clear long-term vision that will guide innovation and point to where these companies should place their slow-to-pay-off R&D bets.

The agility to take advantage quickly as opportunities emerge–by practicing frequent experimentation, promptly divesting failed projects and rapidly scaling up investments in successful ones–has been an important ability that has contributed to the success of the five companies.

Breakthrough product innovation will be an important competence for the future success of these five Chinese companies. Some of the five companies have developed a growing appetite for external collaboration to drive innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the practice potential of self-administered drop-off as a survey mode for contingent valuation (CV) studies.

This paper conducts an empirical comparison of mode effects of two survey methods for improved ecological services in Beijing. Data were collected from a CV survey, which has two subsamples, one using face-to-face interviews and the other employing self-administered drop-off surveys.

There is some evidence of social desirability bias in the face-to-face interviews for the participation question; however, such effects do not carry over to subjects’ responses to the contribution decision. No difference is observed in sample demographics between modes. And satisficing effect is not observed in the drop-off survey in this study.

More well-controlled mode comparisons are warranted to test the robustness of the results; and collection time effects as well as the use of drop-off surveys for environmental valuation with different levels of complexity and familiarity are worthy of further study.

The authors find more similarities between drop-off and face-to-face surveys than differences therefore support the practice of self-administered drop-off surveys in CVM for environmental valuation.

This paper adds to the limited number of well-controlled mode comparisons in the CV surveys, and contributes to a better understanding of self-administered drop-off surveys, a potential low-cost alternative to face-to-face interviews in future CV applications.

It is estimated that the largest share of future food fish will come from aquaculture production and that sustainable aquaculture is a precondition to realising this potential. Sustainable aquaculture will also play a key role in achieving several of the targets set out in SDG14. It is now established that most of the aquafeed ingredients used today are not sustainable and cannot support the projected growth of the sector, hence the need for sustainable alternatives. Sustainable aquaculture is multidimensional, therefore, this chapter focuses on sustainable feed ingredient sourcing. The authors explored a group of highly promising emerging novel ingredients known as microbial ingredients (MIs), means of producing them and how they can help achieve sustainable aquaculture and SDG14 targets. Specifically, the chapter narrows down on producing MIs from Norwegian spruce tree hydrolysates using a biotechnological approach and how Foods of Norway, a centre for research-based innovation at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences is leading efforts to produce feed-worthy MIs from industrial and agricultural by-products through biotechnology-based valorisation. MIs such as yeast, fungi, and bacterial meal can support the growth of Atlantic salmon without compromising the health of the fish. Thus, MI has a net positive impact on climate and can help achieve some targets in SDG14 by reducing pressure on marine resources used as fish feed ingredients. Suggestions on how to address current bottlenecks in scaling up MIs have also been provided in the chapter.

The main purpose of this paper is to understand and model the hydrodynamic influence of surface textures on journal bearings.

In the model, a rectangular array of circle dimples is used to modify the film thickness expression. In full film and cavitation regions, classical Reynolds equation and Reynolds boundary condition are used as the governing equations, respectively. By setting high load bearing capacity as the main optimal goal, the influence of textures on tribological characteristics is studied to get the optimal distribution and parameters of textures.

The results suggest that the load bearing capacity of a journal bearing may be improved through appropriate arrangement of textures partially covering its sleeve. The reduction of the cavitation area may also be achieved by arranging the textures in divergent region. With a high density distribution of textures which have step depths varying linearly along the circumferential direction of the bearing, the load bearing capacity enhancement seems to give good performance. Comparing with smooth bearing, the load bearing capacity enhancement of such textures is about 56.1 per cent, although the influence of texture diameters for the same area density seems insignificant.

The paper shows how surface textures can be designed on journal bearing to improve its tribological performances.

This paper seeks to address the appropriateness and effectiveness of technology transfer based on the extant literature reviews and the structured survey data in Jiangsu, Henan and Xinjiang, China.

Structured survey followed by a correlation analysis with the CORREL function in Excel.

This paper describes a structured survey undertaken in Jiangsu Province, Henan Province and Xinjiang Autonomous Region, PRC, which examines a particular aspect of technology transfer within Sino‐foreign joint ventures. The findings suggested important implications for the relationship between technology transfer and economic development. Moreover, the identification of the peculiarities of both technology transfer and knowledge transfer has led to the thorough examination of appropriateness and effectiveness of technology transfer. This study is thought‐provoking in establishing the blockage of tacit knowledge transfer and suggests means by which tacit knowledge transfer could be improved. In addition, it also leads the way for the introduction of systematic processes that could be specifically incorporated into World Bank projects that involve international technology transfer as a major feature.

This paper addresses the appropriateness and effectiveness of technology transfer. The study identifies that, without knowledge transfer, technology transfer does not take place, as knowledge is the key to control technology as a whole. Hence, knowledge transfer is crucial in the process of technology transfer. Furthermore, the study identifies that technology transfer is not obtainable if there is too big a gap in terms of economic development between transferor and transferee. This has important implications for the economists in addressing economic problems both at macro and micro levels and the government policy‐makers in addressing the existing deficiencies in the process of technology transfer and assisting in development of more appropriate arrangements for the transfer of management knowledge.