Search results

Focuses on a simple question: should Zimmer develop a gender-specific artificial knee? The decision is complicated because while the idea seems to make sense, there is little clinical evidence that a gender-specific knee produces superior patient outcomes, and orthopedic surgeons are likely to be skeptical of the innovation.

To teach new product strategy and growth strategy, and introduce students to the medical device industry.

Situation and problem: a course‐writing team needs to converge rapidly to what it regards as: an agreed topic structure, which is keyed to agreed learning objectives, which specify relevant assessment questions in a natural learning sequence. Only then can the team members go away individually to write, knowing that everything that they write will fit together. In normal practice, this convergence is only partial: the topic structure harbors gaps, ambiguities and contradictions; the learning objectives are not keyed explicitly to the concepts in the topic structure; and questions for assessment of learners’ understanding do not directly exemplify conceptually keyed learning objectives. The result is courseware which does not help people to learn as well as it otherwise could, and which has been created with more effort than otherwise would have been needed. This paper shows how systemic methods inspired by Gordon Pask can be used to complete the necessary convergence with ease.

The evidence for the reciprocal effects of a brand extension on its parent brand is unclear. An experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of an extension's quality, its fit with the parent brand, and parent brand dominance, on parent brand evaluation. The paper finds that extension quality and fit did not dilute parent brand attitude; in other words, an extension either left parent brand attitude unchanged or enhanced it moderately. The only effect of brand dominance was that it enhanced parent brand attitude when the extension was a good fit. Further, the introduction of an extension, regardless of its fit or quality, enhanced parent brand attitude for a durable product relative to a control group. It seems that parent brand attitudes are held strongly enough to resist the new information that is associated with a newly introduced brand extension.

The reliance on teams in today’s work environment underscores the importance of understanding how teams function. To better understand teams, one must be able to measure team dynamics or interaction. The purpose of this chapter is to outline an unobtrusive approach to measuring team dynamics from verbal communications.

The basic premise of this approach is that the words we use provide insight into how we feel and think at any given time. The methodology described in this chapter employs a lexical analytic approach to examining team dynamics. To best accomplish this, we first identify the principal features or dimensions of teamwork and then we propose lexical measures that may map to these processes.

This approach can be employed to track team functioning over time “at a distance” without interrupting task performance.

This chapter describes an approach to measuring relevant teamwork dimensions through verbal content. This approach has the potential to give us direct, unobtrusive insight into the emotional and cognitive states of teams. It is original in its examination of how team dynamics can be indexed in speech.

In this chapter, a general introduction on artificial intelligence (AI) is given as well as an overview of the advances of AI in different engineering disciplines, including its effectiveness in driving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). This chapter begins with some fundamental definitions and concepts on AI and machine learning (ML) followed by a classification of the different categories of ML algorithms. After that, a general overview of the impact which different engineering disciplines such as Civil, Chemical, Mechanical, Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering have on the UN SDGs is given. The application of AI and ML to enhance the processes in these different engineering disciplines is also briefly explained. This chapter concludes with a brief description of the UN SDGs and how AI can positively impact the attainment of these goals by the target year of 2030.

Highlights the importance of research and development to orthopedics company Zimmer.

Reports information gathered during the author's visit to a Zimmer plant in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland, and a presentation to journalists by Richard Fritschi, Zimmer president (Europe and Australasia).

Shows that, in 2004, products introduced in the previous 36‐month rolling period accounted for 18 percent of Zimmer sales – up from 17 percent the year before. These new products contributed $541 in sales. In 2004 alone, Zimmer delivered more than 40 major development projects to the market. Describes some of the company's leading products and their uses.

Illustrates the key role of research and development for organizational success in the medical technology industries.

The fundamental role of corporate boards is to monitor and advise top management on strategic issues. It is therefore of the utmost importance that corporate directors are effective as a decision-making group to ensure corporate performance (Zattoni et al., 2015; Minichilli et al., 2012). But, what do we know about what is really going on inside the boardroom? This study aims to shed light on this important question.

The authors undertake a targeted review of the literature to take account of all publications regarding board dynamics in relation to board effectiveness.

This study shows that we know very little about what is going on inside the “black box” of board dynamics and its relation to how effective directors are at doing their job, namely, monitoring and advising top management and establishing and expanding the firm’s network, to gain access to the resources it needs. The authors propose several avenues of research to better understand board dynamics.

In this study, the authors show how and why the present body of knowledge on team effectiveness should be harnessed to better understand corporate board dynamics in relation to board effectiveness.

States that organizations are using teams and groups to an increasing extent yet current researchers often use the terms interchangeably, despite literature indicating both that their processes and outputs may be very different, and that these differences may have important consequences. Examines how, in order to differentiate between management teams and groups based on the descriptions of managers’ experience in the workplace, 319 part‐time MBA students completed a checklist comprising 149 adjectives. Analyses showed that both teams and groups were best described by separate one factor solutions. Discusses how teams and groups were described equally as “affective”, “effective”, “energetic” and “flexible”; teams were described as “creative”, “innovative”, and “well rounded”, groups were described as “negotiating”, “networking”, “persuasive”, and “the sum of individual goals”. Posits that such characterizations were taken as suggesting that teams create resources and add to their environments while groups manage and redistribute their resources, and further, that teams have stable, valued interpersonal relations but groups do not.

This chapter explores the role of language in the relationship between diversity and team performance. Specifically, we consider how a linguistic approach to social categorization may be used to study the social psychological mechanisms that underlie diversity effects. Using the results of a study examining the effects of gender, ethnicity and tenure on language abstraction, we consider the potential implications for team processes and effectiveness. In addition, we propose a revised team input-process-output model that highlights the potential effects of language on team processes. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research linking diversity, linguistic categorization, and team effectiveness.

Ancient and universal, fantasy was most likely the first mainstream literature rather than the naturalism later recognized as mainstream. Every generation of every culture tells and retells tales based on psychological archetypes, the elements of fantasy. For instance, the Celtic tale “Leir and His Daughters” has been reworked and updated by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Diana Paxson (The Serpent's Tooth, Morrow, 1991). One of the old English/Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century (Child ballad No. 37) has recently reappeared as the novel Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (Morrow, 1991). Similarly, retellings of the Arthurian legend are legion, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Malory to Tennyson to such modern writers as T.H. White, Mary Stewart, Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon, Knopf, 1982), and Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road, Collins, 1986).