Vertical and horizontal alignment within organizations are seen as prerequisites for meeting strategic objectives and indications of effective management. In the area of safety management, the concept of vertical alignment has been followed through the introduction of hierarchical structures and bidirectional communication, but horizontal alignment has been given little attention. The principal goal of this study was the assessment of horizontal alignment within an aviation organization with the use of data from safety investigations, audits and meetings in order to explore the extent to which (1) causal factors recorded in safety investigation reports comprised topics discussed by safety committees and focus areas of internal safety auditors, and (2) the agendas of safety committees include weak points revealed during safety audits. The study employed qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected over a 6 years’ period at three organizational levels. The results suggested a low horizontal alignment across the three pairs of the corresponding safety management activities within each organizational level. The findings were attributed to the inadequacy of procedures and lack of a safety information database for consistently sharing safety information, cultural factors and lack of planning for the coordination of safety management activities. The current research comprises a contribution to the literature and practice and introduces a technique to assess the intra-alignment of safety management initiatives within various organizational levels. Future research is needed in order to investigate the association between horizontal alignment of safety management practices and safety performance.
For organizations that use IT systems in their primary business or as support of their business processes, optimal alignment between the business strategy and their business information technology (BIT) is critical. However, achieving business information technology alignment remains challenging due to the vast number of choices one has to make. Firstly, one has to choose from a large number of potential BIT practices. Secondly, one has to choose BIT practices that align with the business strategy. Thirdly, one has to understand the dynamics of combining multiple BIT practices. And, finally, as business strategy and BIT practices evolve, one needs to consider the long-term alignment as this has significant consequences for both the business strategy and the overall enterprise architecture. These intricacies of alignment mirror the challenges apparent in other business strategy-practice alignment domains. An example is human resource management and strategy alignment for which a simulation model and serious game has been developed in prior research. Here, we build upon this prior research. In BITInLine players have to select a set of BIT practices with the best strategy fit from a list of 48 different BIT practices. The challenge is to select a combination of practices over multiple consecutive simulated years (rounds within the game) that align to the organisations’ strategic profile, and adapt to the outcomes of the choices made in previous years. Practices in the game are clustered around six key BIT topics emerging from the strategic alignment and enterprise architecture disciplines: (1) service strategy, (2) information & data strategy, (3) platform & application strategy, (4) Infrastructure strategy, (5) security strategy, and (6) operations and performance. In BITInLine feedback on the BITA and the deviation from the desired strategic profile is presented after each round (representing a year of using the selected practices). Using BITInLine, players can experiment with, and in doing so learn from, selecting multiple combinations of BIT practices and experience the outcome of their choices in terms of BITA over multiple simulated years, while adapting their choice of practices to the situation at hand. In the current paper the serious game (re)design to create BITInLine and an initial trial run will be presented.
MULTIFILE
The Dutch biogas industry is developing slowly and in many instances still unviable. Insights in the drivers of value creation may help to create viable biogas business networks. This research explores these related drivers and accordingly, proposes a new and comprehensive definition of a driver of value creation. This definition focuses on the enabling and inhibiting factors of value creation in a business network and forms the backbone of three case studies. The results suggest the presence of four specific drivers as necessary for a viable biogas business network: stability and certainty, partner alignment, local opportunities and economies of scale.
The IMPULS-2020 project DIGIREAL (BUas, 2021) aims to significantly strengthen BUAS’ Research and Development (R&D) on Digital Realities for the benefit of innovation in our sectoral industries. The project will furthermore help BUas to position itself in the emerging innovation ecosystems on Human Interaction, AI and Interactive Technologies. The pandemic has had a tremendous negative impact on BUas industrial sectors of research: Tourism, Leisure and Events, Hospitality and Facility, Built Environment and Logistics. Our partner industries are in great need of innovative responses to the crises. Data, AI combined with Interactive and Immersive Technologies (Games, VR/AR) can provide a partial solution, in line with the key-enabling technologies of the Smart Industry agenda. DIGIREAL builds upon our well-established expertise and capacity in entertainment and serious games and digital media (VR/AR). It furthermore strengthens our initial plans to venture into Data and Applied AI. Digital Realities offer great opportunities for sectoral industry research and innovation, such as experience measurement in Leisure and Hospitality, data-driven decision-making for (sustainable) tourism, geo-data simulations for Logistics and Digital Twins for Spatial Planning. Although BUas already has successful R&D projects in these areas, the synergy can and should significantly be improved. We propose a coherent one-year Impuls funded package to develop (in 2021): 1. A multi-year R&D program on Digital Realities, that leads to, 2. Strategic R&D proposals, in particular a SPRONG/sleuteltechnologie proposal; 3. Partnerships in the regional and national innovation ecosystem, in particular Mind Labs and Data Development Lab (DDL); 4. A shared Digital Realities Lab infrastructure, in particular hardware/software/peopleware for Augmented and Mixed Reality; 5. Leadership, support and operational capacity to achieve and support the above. The proposal presents a work program and management structure, with external partners in an advisory role.
Organ-on-a-chip technology holds great promise to revolutionize pharmaceutical drug discovery and development which nowadays is a tremendously expensive and inefficient process. It will enable faster, cheaper, physiologically relevant, and more reliable (standardized) assays for biomedical science and drug testing. In particular, it is anticipated that organ-on-a-chip technology can substantially replace animal drug testing with using the by far better models of true human cells. Despite this great potential and progress in the field, the technology still lacks standardized protocols and robust chip devices, which are absolutely needed for this technology to bring the abovementioned potential to fruition. Of particular interest is heart-on-a-chip for drug and cardiotoxicity screening. There is presently no preclinical test system predicting the most important features of cardiac safety accurately and cost-effectively. The main goal of this project is to fabricate standardized, robust generic heart-on-a-chip demonstrator devices that will be validated and further optimized to generate new physiologically relevant models to study cardiotoxicity in vitro. To achieve this goal various aspects will be considered, including (i) the search for alternative chip materials to replace PDMS, (ii) inner chip surface modification and treatment (chemistry and topology), (iii) achieving 2D/3D cardiomyocyte (long term) cell culture and cellular alignment within the chip device, (iv) the possibility of integrating in-line sensors in the devices and, finally, (v) the overall chip design. The achieved standardized heart-on-a-chip technology will be adopted by pharmaceutical industry. This proposed project offers a unique opportunity for the Netherlands, and Twente in particular, which has relevant expertise, potential, and future perspective in this field as it hosts world-leading companies pioneering various core aspects of the technology that are relevant for organs-on-chips, combined with two world-leading research institutes within the University of Twente.
This proposal originates from a pilot of the ‘Frontrunners coalition’ on initiatives for the Circular Economy at the city level. This spin off project studies strategizing in hotels, to find innovative solutions how to manage the integration of circularity in the overall business strategy. The theoretical innovation is to better understand the strategizing process by using the theoretical framework of “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P)”. Exploring in two cases the daily challenges of implementing principles of the circular economy at a luxury and a budget hotel (group). The “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P) framework will be used, emphasizing that strategizing is a joint process of (higher) management and other practitioners (within and outside of the company). The data collection and analysis will be executed by Bachelor and Master students of Hotelschool the Hague and faculty of the research centre. The stages of the Design Oriented Research Approach will be used in this project, with a focus on the stages of Analysis & Diagnoses and Solution Design. The hotels will facilitate this research by giving access and support to the operations and (formal) meetings and additional primary data collection. (Small teams of) Student researchers collect qualitative data based on interviews and observations: they will ‘blend’ in during a 10-week period. Faculty of Hotelschool The Hague will safeguard the continuity and alignment in the project in the several rounds in which these steps are executed. The finding will be presented to the participating companies, the coalition in Amsterdam and the Hospitality industry. Direct societal impact is the showcasing of potential initiative and the responsibility of organizations towards circularity in their environment. Another result is the proposal for a larger follow-up project. This larger project will continue this study within a broader set of hotels but will also be studying and developing potential interventions for improvement the strategizing process.
