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The purpose of this paper is to develop and introduce the new concept of the collaborative space.

Building on an extensive overview of past research and footing on extant conceptual work, the paper chooses an explicating conceptualization approach.

The paper presents the collaborative space, which features the three bipolar dimensions, namely, the type of consumption (access vs reownership), source of resource (company-owned vs consumer-owned) and the type of compensation (with vs without monetary fee). These dimensions open up multiple areas of the collaborative space, including the pseudo sharing economy, sharing ecology, redistribution markets and redistribution communities.

The paper shows blind spots in the literature as well as the need to consider the consumption context to outline directions for future research.

For managers, this paper develops a foundation for entering, exploring and exploiting the collaborative space along the stages acquisition, distribution, consumption and compensation.

Collaborative consumption is associated with community-building, resource saving and sustainability. The conceptualization of the collaborative spaces provides different options to enable more sustainable consumption and raise social exchange between consumers.

So far, an overarching framework that reveals similarities and differences of business models that are associated with collaborative consumption and the sharing economy is missing. This paper develops this framework, which is labelled the collaborative space.

This study aims to propose an integrated framework for analyzing the effect of lean and agile innovation on the lean and agile supply chains.

The literature was reviewed and the dimensions of lean and agile supply chain/innovation were extracted. The statistical population included the managers and experts of pharmaceutical companies in Isfahan province. Eight pharmaceutical companies were selected. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to investigate the research variables. The face and content validity of the questionnaire and the data reliability were confirmed. After data collection, the studied companies were positioned in a two-by-two matrix and the associated data of two cells of the matrix, i.e. high lean supply chain/innovation and high agile supply chain/innovation were used for further statistical effect analysis using Smart-PLS.

The research results indicated that with the improvement of lean innovation in pharmaceutical companies, the lean supply chain improved by 97.9%; and with the improvement of agile innovation, the agile supply chain improved by 97.1%.

Considering lean innovation, pharmaceutical companies should deal with the process of conceptualizing innovation, and regarding agility strategy, their focus should be more on generating ideas to improve their agile supply chain. This study was performed during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers appropriate innovation strategies to improve the supply chain of pharmaceutical companies.

The literature review implies that no research has been conducted on the selected and classified variables of this study. Also, using the positioning matrix before statistical analysis distinguishes this paper from similar studies.

The current analysis produces the fractional sample of non-Newtonian Casson and Williamson boundary layer flow considering the heat flux and the slip velocity. An extended sheet with a nonuniform thickness causes the steady boundary layer flow’s temperature and velocity fields. Our purpose in this research is to use Akbari Ganji method (AGM) to solve equations and compare the accuracy of this method with the spectral collocation method.

The trial polynomials that will be utilized to carry out the AGM are then used to solve the nonlinear governing system of the PDEs, which has been transformed into a nonlinear collection of linked ODEs.

The profile of temperature and dimensionless velocity for different parameters were displayed graphically. Also, the effect of two different parameters simultaneously on the temperature is displayed in three dimensions. The results demonstrate that the skin-friction coefficient rises with growing magnetic numbers, whereas the Casson and the local Williamson parameters show reverse manners.

Moreover, the usefulness and precision of the presented approach are pleasing, as can be seen by comparing the results with previous research. Also, the calculated solutions utilizing the provided procedure were physically sufficient and precise.

Most Middle Eastern countries suffer from high rates of unemployment and underemployment among university graduates. This condition is known as overeducation and it is observed in many countries around the world. Two countries, Singapore and Hong Kong, have been able to prevent overeducation. The purpose of this paper is to identify political and institutional factors that have allowed these two countries to succeed.

The author has relied on published government documents, online short articles and academic publications to collect evidence on higher education policies in Hong Kong and Singapore. The author has also received some valuable insight by e-mail communication with scholars and some government institutions in these countries. In addition, the author has generated tables and charts based on official government statistics from both countries to show the trends in higher education and the labor market outcomes for university graduates.

First, in Singapore and Hong Kong, the labor ministry and the private sector industries are able to influence the higher education enrollment policy based on economic demand for skilled labor. Second, in both countries, the political leadership is committed to preventing graduate surplus and has enough political strength to resist populist pressures for increasing the enrollment into higher education. Third, both countries have been able to direct a large number of high school graduates to vocational and two-year associate degrees.

Overeducation is a very costly and undesirable outcome that leads to a large amount of wasted investment in human capital. It is very valuable for developing countries to learn about policies that have been successfully used by Singapore and Hong Kong to prevent overeducation because the same policies can be used in the affected countries.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the quality of services provided by the Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST) employing the Six Sigma methodology.

The studied population in this research consists of the users of RICeST. To start with, 120 users of RICeST have been chosen as the samples in a simple random way. Next, in order to collect the data, the LibQUAL+ Questionnaire has been used. Having applied this questionnaire, the gap between the customers' expectations and perceptions has been identified and analyzed. Moreover, the given data are analyzed and their mean and standard deviations are calculated by “SPSS”. Then, in each of the evaluated cases, the calculated standard deviation is compared with the sigma level in the output table in order to specify the qualitative efficiency of services. Accordingly, the error rate in each of the provided services has been determined.

Findings revealed that staff at RICeST could meet the users' minimum expectations of this center in all cases except for the option “the courteous staff”; therefore, they have allocated the efficiency of 50 percent which is equal to 500,000 errors per million. In other words, the average rate seems to be true in all options about the staff in this center. The efficiency of 69.20 percent obtained from the users' view about the quality of existing resources of this center, represents their relative satisfaction with the information resources in RICeST. But it is just in the option “the presence of a web site in the center” that the level of users' expectations is equal to the actual level and the achieved efficiency of 99.97 percent. Finally, it has been found that the quality of library space at the actual level was lower than the maximum level of users' expectation, but higher than the level of users' minimum expectations. The efficiency of 69.20 percent about the physical space of RICeSt indicates 308,000 errors per million. Consequently, it is far from achieving the desired level or the maximum users' expectations.

The increasing expectations of users in libraries and information centers have caused that these types of centers need modern strategies and management techniques in order to comply with these increasing changes and requirements. Evaluating the service quality in the library means to assess the effectiveness of services provided. The effect of evaluating the service quality is not limited to this fact, in which the services are provided only for users, but it is also focusing on the users' application level and compliance with their information needs and satisfaction of the quantity and quality of services.