Childlessness is not a new phenomenon, but empirical evidence from the demographic field has demonstrated that it is on the increase. Furthermore, childlessness has a number of consequences for both women and men, the communities in which they live, their psychic states, their social networks and the organisations in which they work. Bringing together research from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, gender studies, social work and social pol...

Advancing digital technologies continue to shape all aspects of our society, with particular impact on the professional research community. These new and exciting developments offer considerable advantages in terms of speed, access connectivity, and economy. Advancing Research Methods with New Technologies examines the applicability and usefulness of new technologies, as well as the pitfalls of these methods in academic research practices. This book serves as a practical guide for designin...

It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects discusses frameworks, strategies, and techniques for working with stakeholders of user experience (UX) research in a way that ensures their buy-in. This book consists of six chapters arranged according to the different stages of research projects. Topics discussed include the different roles of business, engineering, and user-experience stakeholders; identification of research opportunities by developing em...

Understand the impact of a global ageing population on how products are bought, and the effect this has on how to market and advertise these products and services to the older generation of consumers. Contains models for companies to evaluate the success of their own strategies, with tools for improving their age-friendly marketing campaigns.

This book presents a series of high performance product design (PD) and development best practices that can create or improve product development organization. In contrast to other books that focus only on Toyota or other individual companies applying lean IPD, this book explains the lean philosophy more broadly and includes discussions of systems engineering, design for X (DFX), agile development, integrated product development, and project management.The “Lean Journey” proposed h...

This book presents an analysis and a critical discussion on performance management systems. It seeks to advance the current state of knowledge in the subject by introducing a holistic performance management system - the loosely coupled performance management system. This new system presents a framework to leverage the systemic relationships among already established performance management mechanisms. The author contends that loosely coupled performance management systems fulfill two differ...

This essential book takes students and instructors through steps undertaken in a start-to-finish engineering project as conceived and presented in the engineering capstone course. The learning experience follows an industry model to prepare students to recognize a need for a product or service, create and work in a team; identify competition, patent overlap, and necessary resources, generate a project proposal that accounts for business issues, prepare a design, develop and fabricate the p...

This volume presents the refereed papers given at the International Conference on Managing the Asian Century, held in Singapore in July 2013. The proceedings of this conference include original papers contributed by researchers from many countries on different continents. The papers cover multi-disciplinary areas such as management, the social sciences, development economics, banking & finance, engineering management, and education, all in connection with the development of countries in As...

Global networks, which are the primary pillars of the modern manufacturing industry and supply chains, can only cope with the new challenges, requirements and demands when supported by new computing and Internet-based technologies. Cloud Manufacturing: Distributed Computing Technologies for Global and Sustainable Manufacturing introduces a new paradigm for scalable service-oriented sustainable and globally distributed manufacturing systems.The eleven chapters in this book ...

This edited volume presents research results of the PPP European Green Vehicle Initiative (EGVI), focusing on electric vehicle batteries. Electrification is one road towards sustainable road transportation, and battery technology is one of the key enabling technologies. However, at the same time, battery technology is one of the main obstacles for a broad commercial launch of electric vehicles. This book includes research contributions which try to bridge the gap between research and innov...

Proposes that video communications tools are a form of infrastructure that enhance the creation of new knowledge which transcends space and time in business activities. Illustrates that the dynamic relationship of four elements of ICT capability promote the formation of business networks and the development of knowledge communities.

This book describes prominent technological achievements within a very successful space science mission: the Herschel space observatory. Focusing on the various processes of innovation it offers an analysis and discussion of the social, technological and scientific context of the mission that paved the way to its development. It addresses the key question raised by these processes in our modern society, i.e.: how knowledge management of innovation set the conditions for inventing the futur...