Corporate reputation is becoming increasingly important for firms; social media platforms such as Twitter are used to convey their message. In this paper, corporate reputation will be assessed from a sustainability perspective. Using sentiment analysis, the top 100 brands of the Netherlands were scraped and analyzed. The companies were registered in the sustainable industry classification system (SICS) to perform the analysis on an industry level. A semantic search tool called Open Semantic Desktop Search was used to filter through the data to find keywords related to sustainability and corporate reputation. Findings show that companies that tweet more often about corporate reputation and sustainability receive overall a more positive sentiment from the public.
A lot of research effort is put in developing enzymatic treatment of textiles by focusing on the performance of enzymes on lab-scale. Despite all this work upgrading of these developments from lab-scale to industrial scale has not been really successful. Companies are nowadays confronted with rapid developments of markets, logistics and social and environmental responsibilities. Moreover these organizations have to supply an evenincreasing amount of information to the authorities, shareholders, lobbyists and pressure groups. Companies have tried to fulfill all these demands, but this led often to the loss of focus on new product and process development. However, both theory and practices of breakthrough innovations has shown that those rightfully proud on previous successes in the past, are usually not the ones that lead the introduction of new technology, aswas shown and excellently documented by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen [Christenson, 2003]. The textile industry is no exception in this observation. With the lack of management impulses on new product and process developments companies began to reduce the investments in these activities. Finally, however, this will result in a reduction of the size of the company or even closing down. Besides the hesitation from the topmanagement of textile companies to focus on new developments it is also seen that the middle management level is reluctant to evaluate and implement developments in new products and processes. One of the reasons for this reluctance is that many processes in textile industry are not fully explored and known yet. From this lack of knowledge it is easy to explain that there is hesitation for changes, since not all consequences of a change inprocessing or production can be overseen. Often new developments cannot be fully tested and evaluated on labor pilot scale level. This is caused by the impossibility to mimic industrial scale production in a lab. Besides of that, pilot scale equipment is very expensive and for many companies it is not realistic to invest in this type of equipment.Fortunately an increasing number of textile companies realize that they have to invest in new products and processes for their future survival and prosperity. New developments are decisive for future successes. If such companies decide to invest in new developments it is obvious that with the scarcity of capital for product- and process developments, the chance of failures should be minimized. For successful process- and product development it is necessary to organize the development process with external partners, as it is clear that it is almost not possible for individual textile companies to control the process from idea generation, academic research, implementation research and development and industrial testing. These issues are specially characteristic for small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s). In the present work the collaboration has been organized on two research levels. The first research level is knowledge and know-how based. Here the universities and the chemical supplier worked closely together to investigate the new process. The aim was to explore the influence of process conditions and interaction of the chemicals in the sub process steps on the result of the treatment. The second level is that of the industrialimplementation of the new process. Here universities and chemical supplier worked closely together with different industries to implement the newly developed process. The focus in this part of the research was the interaction between the chemistry of the new process, equipment and fabrics.A co-operation between the beneficiaries of the new process has been established. The selection criterion for the co-operation was “who will earn something with the new process”. Paper from the Saxion Research Centre for Design and Technology for Proceedings of IPTB Conference, Milan, Italy, M
MULTIFILE
A description of our experiences with a model for education in innovative, interdisciplinary and international engineering. (Students from different (technical) disciplines in Higher Education are placed in industry for a period of eighteen months after completing two-and-a-half year of theoretical studies). They work in multi-disciplinary projects on different themes, in order to grow to fully equal employees in industry. Besides students, teachers and company employees participate in the projects. The involvement of other level students, both from University and from Vocational Education, is recommended. The experiments in practice give confidence in the succesful implementation of this model.
Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
Due to the existing pressure for a more rational use of the water, many public managers and industries have to re-think/adapt their processes towards a more circular approach. Such pressure is even more critical in the Rio Doce region, Minas Gerais, due to the large environmental accident occurred in 2015. Cenibra (pulp mill) is an example of such industries due to the fact that it is situated in the river basin and that it has a water demanding process. The current proposal is meant as an academic and engineering study to propose possible solutions to decrease the total water consumption of the mill and, thus, decrease the total stress on the Rio Doce basin. The work will be divided in three working packages, namely: (i) evaluation (modelling) of the mill process and water balance (ii) application and operation of a pilot scale wastewater treatment plant (iii) analysis of the impacts caused by the improvement of the process. The second work package will also be conducted (in parallel) with a lab scale setup in The Netherlands to allow fast adjustments and broaden evaluation of the setup/process performance. The actions will focus on reducing the mill total water consumption in 20%.
Nederland kent ongeveer 220.000 bedrijfsongevallen per jaar (met 60 mensen die overlijden). Vandaar dat elke werkgever verplicht is om bedrijfshulpverlening (BHV) te organiseren, waaronder BHV-trainingen. Desondanks brengt slechts een-derde van alle bedrijven de arbeidsrisico’s in kaart via een Risico-Inventarisatie & Evaluatie (RI&E) en blijft het aandeel werknemers met een arbeidsongeval hoog. Daarom wordt er continu geïnnoveerd om BHV-trainingen te optimaliseren, o.a. door middel van Virtual Reality (VR). VR is niet nieuw, maar is wel doorontwikkeld en betaalbaarder geworden. VR biedt de mogelijkheid om veilige realistische BHV-noodsimulaties te ontwikkelen waarbij de cursist het gevoel heeft daar echt te zijn. Ondanks de toename in VR-BHV-trainingen, is er weinig onderzoek gedaan naar het effect van VR in BHV-trainingen en zijn resultaten tegenstrijdig. Daarnaast zijn er nieuwe technologische ontwikkelingen die het mogelijk maken om kijkgedrag te meten in VR m.b.v. Eye-Tracking. Tijdens een BHV-training kan met Eye-Tracking gemeten worden hoe een instructie wordt opgevolgd, of cursisten worden afgeleid en belangrijke elementen (gevaar en oplossingen) waarnemen tijdens de simulatie. Echter, een BHV-training met VR en Eye-Tracking (interacties) bestaat niet. In dit project wordt een prototype ontwikkeld waarin Eye-Tracking wordt verwerkt in een 2021 ontwikkelde VR-BHV-training, waarin noodsituaties zoals een kantoorbrand worden gesimuleerd (de BHVR-toepassing). Door middel van een experiment zal het prototype getest worden om zo voor een deel de vraag te beantwoorden in hoeverre en op welke manier Eye-Tracking in VR een meerwaarde biedt voor (RI&E) BHV-trainingen. Dit project sluit daarmee aan op het missie-gedreven innovatiebeleid ‘De Veiligheidsprofessional’ en helpt het MKB dat vaak middelen en kennis ontbreekt voor onderzoek naar effectiviteit rondom innovatieve-technologieën in educatie/training. Het project levert onder meer een prototype op, een productie-rapport en onderzoeks-artikel, en staat open voor nieuwe deelnemers bij het schrijven van een grotere aanvraag rondom de toepassing en effect van VR en Eye-Tracking in BHV-trainingen.
