Een bekend probleem: je hebt je net op een nieuwe dienst geabonneerd of een nieuw apparaat gekocht en je krijgt bepaalde functies niet aan de praat. Of, je hebt een nieuw softwarepakket aangeschaft, dit op je PC geïnstalleerd en er duikt allerlei narigheid op. Bijvoorbeeld, die handige integratie van het net gekochte elektronische woordenboek met Microsoft Office op je Windows XP-machine komt niet tot stand. Erger nog: Office gedraagt zich plotseling instabiel. Hoe los je als gebruiker dit soort problemen op? De dienstinstructies, de handleiding van het apparaat of de helpfuncties van de softwarepakketten bieden geen uitkomst. In FAQ’s zoeken op de websites van leveranciers en producenten levert ook geen antwoord op. Bellen met helpdesks en de winkel geeft na vele minuten van irritante wachtkamermuziek ook geen uitkomst. E-mailen leidt uitsluitend tot nietszeggende, door een mailrobot vervaardigde antwoorden. Of tot helemaal geen antwoord. Kortom: dit moet beter kunnen. En anders bedenk je je een volgende keer minstens tien keer of je die nieuwe dienst, dat nieuwe apparaat of dat nieuwe softwarepakket eigenlijk wel wilt hebben.
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The capacity to guide the evolution and creation of new products (manufactured goods or services) is crucial for the enterprise's profitability. Hence, enterprises have acquired the capacity to manage the future of their product portfolio. However, companies that offer a combination of manufactured goods and services as an integrated system or a Product-Service System confront challenging conditions to maintain or increase their market share due to the complex relationship between manufacturing and service production systems. The complexity of a PSS makes it challenging to adapt its physical products to new customer requirements, satisfy new standards, or develop/adopt new technologies because any modification in one part of the system will undoubtedly affect the other. Therefore, it is necessary to propose an approach for managing the development process of a PSS from a broad perspective. The approach presented in this article combines the advantages of the Business Model Canvas to define the crucial functions of a business model with the service blueprinting capacity to represent service processes. The proposal describes a five stages methodology: Conceptualization, Business Model Design, Product-Service System (PSS) Scenarios, Blueprint design, and Validation. The methodology helps the analysis of a PSS from three perspectives: product, use, and result, which are the typical PSS scenarios. A case study applied to a company that distributes purified water is helpful to illustrate the methodology. Finally, the methodology includes some aspects that favor implementing creative and dynamic business models, emphasizing the constant changes in the evolution of products and services.
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Although workplace design and management are gaining more and more attention from modern organizations, workplace research is still very fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia. There are several books on the market related to workplaces, facility management (FM), and corporate real estate management (CREM) disciplines, but few open up a theoretical and practical discussion across multiple theories from different fields of studies. Therefore, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplace management and effects of workplace design on employees has been or could be studied. A lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines, and sadly, many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Therefore, this new book series is started by associate professor Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and postdoc researcher Vitalija Danivska (Aalto University, Finland) as editors, published by Routledge. It is titled ‘Transdisciplinary Workplace Research and Management’ because it bundles important research insights from different disciplinary fields and shows its relevance for both academic workplace research and workplace management in practice. The books will address the complexity of the transdisciplinary angle necessary to solve ongoing workplace-related issues in practice, such as knowledge worker productivity, office use, and more strategic workplace management. In addition, the editors work towards further collaboration and integration of the necessary disciplines for further development of the workplace field in research and in practice. This book series is relevant for workplace experts both in academia and industry. This first book in the series focuses on the employee as a user of the work environment. The 21 theories discussed and applied to workplace design in this book address people’s ability to do their job and thrive in relation to the office workplace. Some focus more on explaining why people behave the way they do (the psychosocial environment), while others take the physical and/or digital workplace quality as a starting point to explain employee outcomes such as health, satisfaction, and performance. They all explain different aspects for achieving employee-workplace alignment (EWA) and thereby ensuring employee thriving. The final chapter describes a first step towards integrating these theories into an overall interdisciplinary framework for eventually developing a grand EWA theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003128830, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
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RFID technology is a promising technology currently finding its way into the field of customer interaction strategy, supply chain accuracy and inventory management. Primarily, RFID tags are seen as substitutes of traditional barcodes, yet they can add a lot of value and functionality. Where barcodes require a scanning device to be placed directly in front of the tag to be read, RFID tag readers are able to scan all tags that are in the proximity of the scanner . The next difference is that whereas barcodes usually are the same for all articles of the of the same type (i.e. a jar of peanut butter of brand x), RFID tags will be unique for each individual product occurrence. This opens up the possibility of tracking the entire history of a specific occurrence of a product. Moreover, due to the nature of the scanning technology, it suddenly becomes achievable for manufacturers to track individual products through all stages of production and base inventory management and front office planning on real-time data at item level from production facilities.
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When it comes to integrating internationalisation in the curriculum and ensuring internationalisation for all, the true impact of our efforts is being fully committed to supporting our educators. As the key players in creating purposeful and inclusive internationalisation, educators need to be properly equipped with expertise, resources, research and policy supports.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education (HE) to shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT), subsequently influencing academic belonging and social integration, as well as challenging students' engagement with their studies. This study investigated influences on student engagement during ERT, based on student resilience. Serial mediation analyses were used to test the predictive effects between resilience, academic belonging, social integration, and engagement.
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Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education.
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This investigation explores relations between 1) a theory of human cognition, called Embodied Cognition, 2) the design of interactive systems and 3) the practice of ‘creative group meetings’ (of which the so-called ‘brainstorm’ is perhaps the best-known example). The investigation is one of Research-through-Design (Overbeeke et al., 2006). This means that, together with students and external stakeholders, I designed two interactive prototypes. Both systems contain a ‘mix’ of both physical and digital forms. Both are designed to be tools in creative meeting sessions, or brainstorms. The tools are meant to form a natural, element in the physical meeting space. The function of these devices is to support the formation of shared insight: that is, the tools should support the process by which participants together, during the activity, get a better grip on the design challenge that they are faced with. Over a series of iterations I reflected on the design process and outcome, and investigated how users interacted with the prototypes.
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Dissertatie met als onderwerp het ontwerp en evaluatie van de Hogere Beroepsopleidding Orthopedische Technologie in Nederland. In deze dissertatie wordt naast het ontwerp van de opleiding ingegaan op een vergelijking die is gemaakt met andere opleidingen op het gebied van hoger orthopedisch technologisch onderwijs in de wereld.
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The adoption of social media (web 2.0) in the e-marketing strategy of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is not yet researched much. Research findings in bigger companies in the USA, Europe and the Netherlands suggest that the issue is high on the think list of marketers and entrepreneurs. But what are the drivers and barriers for small and medium enterprises to make, execute, and further develop their strategy on social media? This paper places the perceptions and actions of 10 SMEs in the Netherlands in the Stages of Growth for e-Business model (SOG-e model) which focuses on e-business maturity. Findings are that general expectations and customer wishes are important drivers and that, besides time and money, the fear of negative comments on the Internet are important barriers.
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