Een korte Nederlandse uitleg over het concept 'Whole Systems Approach' op basis van het promotie onderzoek van Anu Manickam van het Lectoraat Duurzaam Coöperatief Ondernemen
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The challenge of sustainable development requires cities to aim for drastic improvements in the systems that support its vital functions. Innovating these systems can be extremely hard, and might take lots of time. A transparent and democratic strategy is important to guarantee support for change. Such a process should aim at developing consensus regarding a basic vision to guide the process of systems change. This paper sketches future options for the development of sanitation- and urban drainage systems in industrialized economies. It will provide an analysis of relevant trends for sewage system innovation. In history, sewage systems have emerged from urban sewage and precipitation removal systems, to urban sewage and precipitation removal and cleaning systems. The challenge for the future is recovering energy and resources from sewage systems while maintaining/improving its sanitary service and lowering its emissions. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11051383 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karel-mulder-163aa96/
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This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ (1995a) levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. While belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that whereas the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.
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World globalisation drives companies to undertake international expansion with the aim of retaining or growing their businesses. When companies globalize, managers encounter new challenges in making international marketing strategy (IMS) decisions, which are influenced by perceived cultural and business distance between their home- and foreign country. Telkom Indonesia International (Telin) was formed by Telkom Indonesia (i.e. the state-owned company in the telecommunication industry in Indonesia) to engage in international business within a global market. The central question in this study is to what extent do managers’ perceived cultural and business distance between home- and foreign country influence their IMS decisions? A mixed research strategy will be employed by applying qualitative and quantitative methods concurrently. The data collection will involve interviews with CEOs and managers, alongside a web survey to 55 managers of Telkom's. Results suggest important consequences for IMS decisions and emphasizes the need for dialogue on perceptions of cultural and business characteristics of countries.
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There is an ongoing transition towards renewable energy sources in order to combat climate change. National power grids are suffering due to the rapid introduction of new energy sources and have other disadvantages. Local Energy Systems (LESs) are a beneficial example of an off-grid energy systems that can aid the energy transition. LESs are community driven and require participating and steering members. This can be achieved through empowering end-users to become active participants or steerers. End-users can be empowered to become an active participant through engagement with energy management activities. This does not work for empowering to steer, which begs the question, how to empower end-users or participants to become steerers in Local Energy Systems. Through a literature review this study explores the importance of establishing a group containing steerers with diverse skills, strong leadership, and engagement with the environment and community. Additionally, this study identifies the strategy that empowers end-users to steer. Which is training technological and managemental skills; and training capabilities in establishing relations with local participants and intermediary organisations. To apply these findings more precisely a secondary analysis is conducted on a survey with 599 participants. The original study researched willingness to participate in LESs, however the secondary analysis establishes three important factors to predict willingness to steer. These are energy independence, community trust, and community resistance. Additionally, men with a high level of education are most willing to become steerers per default, thus different demographics generally require more empowerment.
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The methodology of biomimicry design thinking is based on and builds upon the overarching patterns that all life abides by. “Cultivating cooperative relationships” within an ecosystem is one such pattern we as humans can learn from to nurture our own mutualistic and symbiotic relationships. While form and process translations from biology to design have proven accessible by students learning biomimicry, the realm of translating biological functions in a systematic approach has proven to be more difficult. This study examines how higher education students can approach the gap that many companies in transition are struggling with today; that of thinking within the closed loops of their own ecosystem, to do good without damaging the system itself. Design students should be able to assess and advise on product design choices within such systems after graduation. We know when tackling a design challenge, teams have difficulties sifting through the mass of information they encounter, and many obstacles are encountered by students and their professional clients when trying to implement systems thinking into their design process. While biomimicry offers guidelines and methodology, there is insufficient research on complex, systems-level problem solving that systems thinking biomimicry requires. This study looks at factors found in course exercises, through student surveys and interviews that helped (novice) professionals initiate systems thinking methods as part of their strategy. The steps found in this research show characteristics from student responses and matching educational steps which enabled them to develop their own approach to challenges in a systems thinking manner. Experiences from the 2022 cohort of the semester “Design with Nature” within the Industrial Design Engineering program at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands have shown that the mixing and matching of connected biological design strategies to understand integrating functions and relationships within a human system is a promising first step. Stevens LL, Whitehead C, Singhal A. Cultivating Cooperative Relationships: Identifying Learning Gaps When Teaching Students Systems Thinking Biomimicry. Biomimetics. 2022; 7(4):184. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics7040184
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Behaviour Change Support Systems (BCSS), already running for the 10th time at Persuasive Technology, is a workshop that builds around the concept of systems that are specifically designed to help and support behaviour change in individuals or groups. The highly multi-disciplinary nature of designing and implementing behaviour change strategies and systems for the strategies has been in the forefront of this workshop from the very beginning. The persuasive technology field is becoming a linking pin connecting natural and social sciences, requiring a holistic view on persuasive technologies, as well as multi-disciplinary approach for design, implementation, and evaluation. So far, the capacities of technologies to change behaviours and to continuously monitor the progress and effects of interventions are not being used to its full potential. The use of technologies as persuaders may shed a new light on the interaction process of persuasion, influencing attitudes and behaviours. Yet, although human- computer interaction is social in nature and people often do see computers as social actors, it is still unknown how these interactions re-shape attitude, beliefs, and emotions, or how they change behaviour, and what the drawbacks are for persuasion via technologies. Humans re-shape technology, changing their goals during usage. This means that persuasion is not a static ad hoc event but an ongoing process. Technology has the capacity to create smart (virtual) persuasive environments that provide simultaneously multimodal cues and psycho-physiological feedback for personal change by strengthening emotional, social, and physical presence. An array of persuasive applications has been developed over the past decade with an aim to induce desirable behaviour change. Persuasive applications have shown promising results in motivating and supporting people to change or adopt new behaviours and attitudes in various domains such as health and wellbeing, sustainable energy, education, and marketing. This workshop aims at connecting multidisciplinary researchers, practitioners and experts from a variety of scientific domains, such as information sciences, human-computer interaction, industrial design, psychology and medicine. This interactive workshop will act as a forum where experts from multiple disciplines can present their work, and can discuss and debate the pillars for persuasive technology.
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Innovations are required in urban infrastructures due to the pressing needs for mitigating climate change and prevent resource depletion. In order to address the slow pace of innovation in urban systems, this paper analyses factors involved in attempts to introduce novel sanitary systems. Today new requirements are important: sanitary systems should have an optimal energy/climate performance, with recovery of resources, and with fewer emissions. Anaerobic digestion has been suggested as an alternative to current aerobic waste water treatment processes. This paper presents an overview of attempts to introduce novel anaerobic sanitation systems for domestic sanitation. The paper identifies main factors that contributed to a premature termination of such attempts. Especially smaller scale anaerobic sanitation systems will probably not be able to compete economically with traditional sewage treatment. However, anaerobic treatment has various advantages for mitigating climate change, removing persistent chemicals, and for the transition to a circular economy. The paper concludes that loss avoidance, both in the sewage system and in the waste water treatment plants, should play a key role in determining experiments that could lead to a transition in sanitation. http://dx.doi.org/10.13044/j.sdewes.d6.0214 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karel-mulder-163aa96/
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This study explores how households interact with smart systems for energy usage, providing insights into the field's trends, themes and evolution through a bibliometric analysis of 547 relevant literature from 2015 to 2025. Our findings discover: (1) Research activity has grown over the past decade, with leading journals recognizing several productive authors. Increased collaboration and interdisciplinary work are expected to expand; (2) Key research hotspots, identified through keyword co-occurrence, with two (exploration and development) stages, highlighting the interplay between technological, economic, environmental, and behavioral factors within the field; (3) Future research should place greater emphasis on understanding how emerging technologies interact with human, with a deeper understanding of users. Beyond the individual perspective, social dimensions also demand investigation. Finally, research should also aim to support policy development. To conclude, this study contributes to a broader perspective of this topic and highlights directions for future research development.
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For the integrated implementation of Business Process Management and supporting information systems many methods are available. Most of these methods, however, apply a one-size fits all approach and do not take into account the specific situation of the organization in which an information system is to be implemented. These situational factors, however, strongly determine the success of any implementation project. In this paper a method is provided that establishes situational factors of and their influence on implementation methods. The provided method enables a more successful implementation project, because the project team can create a more suitable implementation method for business process management system implementation projects.
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