Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship as Driving Forces of the Global Economy

While there is a tremendous increase in academic research and collaboration between academia, the results of exchange between industry and science are steady. To understand this complex situation and to propose an improvement for technology transfer between academia and industry, it is necessary to investigate the different partners involved. We present a multi-agent system to model this technology transfer of green IT in order to see the impact on the development of sustainability in our society. We define a sustainability indicator and we study its changes according to the parameters defined in the technology transfer.

The Mobile cloud computing (MCC) enables the mobile devices to give high performance using cloud computing techniques. The approach behind MCC is to connect the mobile devices using Internet services to cloud server so that highly complex computations, which consume resources and battery life of Smart Mobile Devices (SMD), can be offloaded on cloud. The mechanism of shifting the computation part of the application on the server is termed offloading. The main steps for the execution of an application in MCC are to check the application for partitioning, offload the application onto cloud, and receive the result back on the SMD. In this paper, we have developed a Health Care Application (HCA) model, which configures a smart mobile application on mobile device to categorize the data into three categories, i.e., normal, critical, and super critical. The main function of HCA model is to aggregate the normal data according to the data size of the application so that the overall transmission time and network traffic can be reduced. The critical and super critical data is offloaded to the cloud without delay so that the data can be processed urgently. The experimental results show the offloading with data aggregation increases the performance of the application. The simulation study is done for two networks, i.e., Wifi and 2G.

The community development in different domains (business, education, welfare, etc.) has been the prime focus over the last decade due to the evolution of digital technologies and the shift in working patterns. However, many public and private investments have failed to produce sustaining and real value from them. The observed deficiencies which are causing the failure of community development projects ranged from initiation within the artificial and closed laboratory to open learning environments. The community development is entailed without understanding the real community needs, community’s value chain, and potential problems with limited interactions. These shortcomings have resulted in failure to develop effective, prosperous, and world class communities, leveraging the new innovative and powerful approaches. An approach to developing collaborative systems, called Living Lab (LILA), is discussed in this paper and this approach has empowered and engaged the communities (students, lecturers, computer scientists, electronics engineers, visually impaired and blind people) to experiment and learn the innovative solutions of their real-world problems. The theme of this innovation-led approach is to embed community-driven solution within the communities.This paper presents the actual framework for the establishment of a Living Lab using specific case study at Birmingham City University (BCU), along with its impact on community development. This research determines the key features that the visually impaired would find useful in a mobility cane called “XploR”. The smart cane incorporates facial recognition technology to alert the user when they are approaching a relative or friend from up to 10 m away. This is a revolutionary ‘smart’ cane enabling blind people to instantly identify friends and family. The cane also features GPS functionality to aid navigation. This project is part of LILA, a European initiative encouraging entrepreneurship and fostering internationalisation.

Due to the need for alternative means that can be used to generate power with high efficiency and less harm to the environment, the free piston Stirling engine has emerged and research has been carried out to prove its relevance. This study is carried out in the thermal energy conversion unit, using solar energy to generate power. This form of renewable energy can be employed for power production using the free piston Stirling engines which converts thermal energy into mechanical energy. The application is considered for micro-CHP applications in small-scale businesses and units. In this study the regenerator being the heart of the Stirling engine and its heat storage and recovery ability is analysed. The quasi-steady flow of the thermodynamic model of the free piston Stirling engine is developed, the thermal losses and effectiveness of the regenerator are considered and the effect on the output results generated during its operation is analysed and presented.

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, advances in information and communication technologies are happening at a very fast pace. As a result, firms are under constant pressure to quickly adapt, be competitive, and identify new business opportunities. Also, the amount of data collected by organizations today is growing at an exponential rate and includes structured as well as new types of large and real-time data across a broad range of industries such as streaming, geospatial, social media, or sensor-generated data. Enterprise data have become an invaluable strategic asset. Many organizations are using modern Business Analytics (BA) to extract new insights and the maximum possible value from these data assets, which will enable them to make timely and accurate decisions. In this paper, we briefly describe business analytics and discuss how leading world class organizations are adopting it and the technology environments that make it relatively easy and inexpensive and, the subsequent competitive benefits they have achieved. In addition, we will report some findings from surveys of executives, managers, and professionals across industries about the use of analytics in their organizations, done recently by IBM, SAS, MIT, and Gartner. Also, we will briefly address the organizational, cultural, and technological challenges faced by organizations embracing business analytics. Finally, we will discuss the unique obstacles and challenges encountered by firms in developing countries with the goal of raising awareness of organizations in the MENA region not only about these impediments but also about the benefits of these technologies and the crucial role they play in the survival and competitiveness of the firm in the complex and turbulent global market.

We live in a world of changing business environments, competition, mergers, acquisitions, and evolving economic climates. Innovation for the sustainability of global enterprise is a must. There is no shortage of ideas; IBM launched ten new IBM businesses, following an online collaboration of 150,000 global participants (IBM Innovation Jam® 2006). Innovative organizations can still fail at implementation. Lack of business capability, process maturity, vision, and leadership plays a significant part in innovation failure. This paper describes a model for successful innovation realization, leveraging The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture framework (TOGAF® v9.1). A framework through which an enterprise can mature, develop its innovation capabilities and support innovation sustainability.

In this paper we consider development of a user-friendly medical record to follow-up treatment of wet AMD (age-related macular degeneration) with VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) inhibitors. A systematic user-centered design process is described that is realized together with ICT—experts and doctors. We will underline especially ways to solve challenges relating to multidisciplinary communication of all parties involved. The developed application tracks macula condition and medical treatments and can display them in a user-friendly fashion. Data searches can be done for a dedicated patient or overall patient histories. Modern ICT offers also several ways to process and represent the collected big data such that significant sickness development trends are easier to recognize and follow. Usability feedback mechanisms for health-care personnel are also discussed in the various application development phases that should be used to ensure user application quality and the continuous quality development of the respective caretaking practicalities.

Cloud computing (CC) enables users to access application remotely, providing mobility and ubiquitous data access; this would be an advantage in construction management. In addition, mobile cloud computing (MCC) enables mobile devices to augment constrained resources such as processing, storage, and battery autonomy by using the cloud infrastructure. This paper is aimed at proposing solutions to some of the main challenges of the construction sector by adopting mobile cloud services. A literature review was performed highlighting the potential benefits and risks in the implementation of CC, infrastructure and execution of MCC, and main challenges in the construction industry. The main benefits of adopting cloud-based resources are cost reduction, system mobility, system flexibility, and system maintenance. While the main risks are information security, privileged user access, regulatory compliance, data location, availability, and disaster recovery. In terms of execution, cloud-based mobile applications present mostly benefits since they enable users to execute ubiquitously high-performance operations in mobile devices. The review of the literature provided enough information for this paper to suggest solutions to some of the main challenges in the construction sector, namely: design, materials, finance, management, and knowledge. The solutions are mainly based on providing mobility, ubiquitous data access, and improved cross-functional communication.

The articulation of business-IT strategic alignment includes its representation as strategic knowledge for organization to shape the best strategic plan. Although the complexity affects generally any organization, special concern is paramount on the business-IT strategic alignment in public service organization as efficiency of its business is fundamental to serve the best to the public. The efficiency is achievable through a well-aligned IT to business strategy. Hence, this study investigates the articulation of the alignment patterns through mapping the business-aligned IT according to public service organization’s strategic domains. The motivation is to identify and analyze the business-IT strategic alignment patterns as a significant factor to support strategic alignment evaluation. The alignment perspective patterns are mapped on a matrix developed from concepts in strategic alignment model. The established perspective patterns are valuable as an influential aspect in the re-strategy effort to increase the effectiveness of the public service performance.

Great strides have been made in IT governance in the past decade. Today’s organizations need a flexible, complementary, and collaborative IT governance setting to prosper in a turbulent environment that would enable organizations to sustain realizing value from IT instead of restraining its contribution by emphasizing control. The review of existing literature to identify and determine best practices had been studied by previous researchers in order to construct the factors within each category. The aim of this paper is to identify the domain of IT governance and provide insights practice with each domain that was detected through literature.

The healthcare industry is undergoing many challenges due to rising costs, lower governmental support, and ineffectiveness of many treatments. One popular approach to address these issues is the P4 vision where prevention and patient participation is paramount. To implement these newer approaches, there are business process challenges in order to control costs and offer the new personalized approach. The mass customization business model has been successful in offering various levels of personalization with costs and delivery delays similar to mass production. Although it has been researched and implemented for the manufacturing industry, research has shown potential in the service industry.This article presents a business model founded on mass customization to address certain challenges in the health industry. The article discusses the issues and presents an approach to remedy the problems. The business model is demonstrated through an actual global health company head quartered in Dubai.

In this paper, the importance of wind turbine renewable energy management is important. Wind turbine is sophisticated, expensive and complicated in nature. Fault diagnosis is vital for wind turbine healthy operational state for reliability that is of high priority prognostic for effective management system. A novel algorithm is proposed to optimise the observer monitoring system performance to support practical operation. Reducing unplanned maintenance costs for uninterrupted healthy reliable operations will aid the online monitoring of the turbine behaviour.

During search and rescue (SAR) operations, information plays a significant role in empowering the emergency response personnel at various levels. But, understanding the information which is being shared between/among emergency personnel is necessary to improve current coordination systems. However, such systems can help the first responders to gain/increase their situational awareness and coordination. Moreover, there is still the lack of automatic and intelligent tools that can contribute to structure, categorize, and visualize the communicated content that occur during SAR operations. Therefore, in this paper, we present the concept of such analysis by using the qualitative methodology and current findings from an indoor fire game. The result shows first responders’ communicated content and their corresponding content categories. This approach, therefore, provides a better way to learn about exchanged information and relevant information categories from videotaped data.

This paper presents AIbot, an assistant system for helping the exploration and fruition of distance didactic activities in Virtual Worlds. The proposed automatic assistant aims at reaching a natural appearance and a usual interaction style: it concretizes in an avatar, the typical character that habitually represents users during their Virtual World experiences. The utilization of an AIML engine lets AIbot to interact with users in a quasi natural manner and using the ordinary text chat channels. Aiming at evaluating how the Virtual World environment influences user perceptions of artificial intelligence, a controlled experiment has been performed as a modified Turing test: the users randomly interact with a human controlled avatar and with AIbot aiming at understanding the nature of the interlocutor intelligence between human or programmed. Results are really positive and provide interesting suggestions on the adoption of automatic user assistant systems in Virtual Worlds.

Intrusion detection systems offer monolithic way to detect attacks through monitoring, searching for abnormal characteristics, and malicious behavior in network communications. Cyber-attack is performed through using covert channel which currently is one of the most sophisticated challenges facing network security systems. Covert channel is used to ex/infiltrate classified information from legitimate targets; consequently, this manipulation violates network security policy and privacy. The New Generation Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has certain security vulnerabilities and need to be addressed using further advanced techniques. Fuzzy rule is implemented to classify different network attacks as an advanced machine learning technique, meanwhile, Genetic algorithm is considered as an optimization technique to obtain the ideal fuzzy rule. This paper suggests a novel hybrid covert channel detection system implementing two Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithm (FLGA), to gain sufficient and optimal detection rule against covert channel. Our approach counters sophisticated network unknown attacks through an advanced analysis of deep packet inspection. Results of our suggested system offer high detection rate of 97.7 % and a better performance in comparison to previous tested techniques.

Today the terms sustainable development and sustainable innovation are often used. But what is meant by these terms, other than that they in some ways are connected to the terms ‘green’ and ‘ecological’ seen in a long-term perspective? How, in turn, are sustainable innovations developed? Studying the literature on the topic leads to the conclusion that there is no precise or established definition of sustainable innovation, sustainability and sustainable development.A conclusion in the paper is that we now need to focus on how to develop new sustainable innovations, and for these, product development is the most important element. It has been found that Dynamic Product Development (DPD™) is a model that satisfies the different definitions on sustainability that have been proposed.The result of a product development project is based on the product developer’s knowledge, experience and ability. The leadership of an entrepreneur (or intrapreneur) is also important for the level of sustainability of an innovation that is achieved. Therefore, the product developers and entrepreneurs need to be educated in a broader perspective than is common in the technical field today. The product developers must also be monitored in the actual work situation to ensure that new products that are not sustainable are not being marketed. This, in turn, calls for a similar, broader perspective in management education.To describe what a sustainable innovation is and how it is developed, the following definitions are proposed: a sustainable solution is a solution that has been developed to be a long-lasting, environmentally responsible solution for the provider (the business), the society and also the users; an innovation is a new solution that has been ‘sold’ and is used by more than one user or that is used in at least one-use situation; the innovation process, done as an innovation project, contains all of the stages from idea generation, development (R&D) and commercialization to an implemented solution on the market.

This paper is a critical review of the conceptual models that are developed in the area of finding motivators behind different parties’ alignment to implement innovation and to develop more sustainable projects. Different parties always have diversified interests. The alignment of those parties has to have drivers, but at the same time it has also challenges. Investigations of drivers and challenges will facilitate better achievement of sustainable development goals. Alignment of organizational projects creates new opportunities in the market for those projects. The second part of this research paper presents a conceptual model architecture. This model is explaining inhibitors and reinforcements for having innovative projects. The model shows that innovative projects have certain characteristics. The purpose of innovative projects in this research is alignment and resources optimization for better sustainability. The main goal of the research is providing an approach for best practice of achieving sustainability among innovative projects.

In the traditional software development life cycle (SDLC), the project management theory assumes the involvement of project manager in every phase of the project with all parties. However, this will not be always possible because of the variation of software projects based on the project size (small, medium, and enterprise), which affects the project constraints of cost, time, and scope. In this paper, we take real-life case studies of successful projects in Jordan to be classified based on many factors, and then, we define the responsibilities of the project managers in every class based on those case studies.

ERP system implementation allows organisations to integrate different departments working in silos, while allowing them to have real-time business visibility and access to centralised information. ERP implementation is fraught with challenges and requires substantial resources and effort with no guarantee of success. The study of ERP implementation is limited mostly to developed countries, but the need for ERP implementation in developing countries is growing. However, many organisations are reluctant to adopt ERP systems, due to lack of implementation experience and fear of a failed implementation. To improve our understanding of what may lead to implementation failure in developing countries, this study adopts a case study research methodology to investigate a failed ERP implementation in a Middle Eastern country, and the critical success factors (CSFs) which contribute towards failure. The findings identify factors, including country and organisational culture, lack of change management strategies, system choice, customisation, and internal politics as contributing towards implementation failure. This study provides insights into the role of CSFs in ERP implementation failure in developing countries. The critical factors identified, appear to be correlated, meaning changes in one factor, will have an impact on another. The study provides organisational guidance for planning implementation strategy, based on the role of CSFs during implementation. Further, by drawing on the findings, we relate how an organisation can better utilise and prioritise CSFs to avoid a failed implementation.

The term “off-grid community” specifically defines certain clusters of people, and their main electrical supply line is not connected with any available national grid line for electricity needs in everyday life. Rather, these people fulfill their electricity needs from a small to medium-scale, self-sustained off-grid energy system (OGES). This choice of embracing OGES can be out of extreme necessity or voluntary. This paper primarily focuses on the feasibility of implementing off-grid energy system to support the rural communities in Bangladesh. It also focuses on the cost-benefit analysis in embracing the off-grid energy system in the longer run. A dedicated section highlights the SWOT analysis and STP analysis of installing and implementing self-sustained OGES. Finally, this paper recommends different yet appropriate types of OGES for various remote rural locations in Bangladesh for sustainable and environment-friendly electricity generation and supply.

The role of organisational commitment, leadership and strategic human resources practices towards developing a sustainable tourism industry has received limited attention under multi-country perspective. The aim of this research project is to concentrate on testing hypothesis derived from theories presented by leading scholars regarding the potential impact of organisational commitment, leadership style, strategic human resources practices and job satisfaction towards developing sustainable tourism industry, using cross-sectional data from the UAE and Malaysia. The research is empirically motivated where the survey is to be conducted among managers and employees from different tourism service providers in the UAE and Malaysia. Convenience sampling and a survey of questionnaires have been utilised in both countries. Although several assumptions and judgements have been tested regarding the foundation of sustainable tourism, there were still very few empirical research gaps on the comparative study with regard to strategic human resources aspects in preparing a sustainable tourism industry. The research findings showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between the independent variables, such as organisational commitment, leadership style, strategic human resources practices and job satisfaction with the dependent variable, sustainable tourism in both countries. The findings also revealed the antecedents of creating sustainable tourism industry by concentrating on human resources practices which is deemed to contribute to the UAE and Malaysian tourism industry. This explains the necessity for intra-country cooperation (between the UAE and Malaysia) for the preparation of a favourable environment and mobilisation of strategic human resources for sustainable tourism growth.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of leaders on creating creative climate that supports innovation, change, and creativity in the organization. It will mainly answer how can leaders create a creative climate that stimulates creativity and innovation in the workplace? An organizational model named leadership-creative-climate model has been developed in order to examine this role. Moreover, an assessment survey will be developed and validated. A sample was selected from a local organization in UAE. It was grouped into three categories—highly innovative, moderately innovative, and low innovative—based on an electronic suggestion system results. The selected sample involves more than 350 respondents. Surveys will be distributed electronically to the respondents. Structured Interviews will be conducted with the key seniors and employees. Results of the surveys and structured interviews will be analyzed statistically and discussed critically. Then, conclusions regarding the role of leaders on creating creative climate that stimulates creativity and innovation in the organization will be derived, and the influences of leaders on each of the nine creative climate dimensions will be addressed. Finally, the model will be enhanced and verified based on the empirical data of the conducted case study and combined methodological framework that involves leadership-creative-climate model, and the assessment survey will be developed.

Inclusive leadership qualities are needed to assume responsibility for and meet complex global challenges. This study is a thorough search of published literature. It includes observations, scholarly work, and reports of studies. New insights are generated based on the grounded theory and dialectic between data collection and analysis. The objective of this study is to produce a framework for the responsible leader based on a set of integrated conceptual models. The outline of the “responsible leader” is organized around an innovative, socially responsible citizen who supports business ethics and comprehends sustainable governance.

CPS uses recent computing, communication, and control methods to monitor and control geographically dispersed field sites in order provide and maintain a high level of confidence about their operation and, hence, plays an important role in several sustainable systems and has extraordinary significance for the future of several industrial domains. The complexity of these systems requires that adequate attention is paid to their design process, since any failure in detecting errors in safety critical systems can lead to catastrophic situations. This work shows how different methods can be used for the analysis of CPS at different levels of abstraction. The method is demonstrated on an industrial case study of a four-tank process that illustrates several challenging features in the design and implementation of CPS.

The health care industry continues to face the challenges of being able to provide high quality services at an acceptable cost. One of the challenges being faced is the reactive versus proactive mode of health professionals and patients, in dealing with health issues. This is due in part to the incongruent incentive structures in place for the B2B stakeholders, as well as the need to create greater awareness of preventive care and its benefit over reactive care.While some stakeholders are now increasing their focus on preventive health care initiatives in order to be more effective and efficient, the health care industry still faces the ultimate marketing challenge of changing health care providers to shift towards a more proactive versus reactive approach to health care.This article explores the literature and industry best practices in marketing for companies focusing on preventive health care. The article discusses a variety of ideas and critically analyzes their potential in the context of a company’s innovative business model on the global market.

Power saving techniques in wireless networks have an effect on the quality of VoIP applications. These techniques are used to reduce the consumption of power when mobile terminals are used for VoIP. This paper will introduce a study on the effect of different techniques (used to reduce power consumption at various layers of the wireless network) on voice quality of service (QoS). The study will concentrate on jitter and delay of voice packets. Current standards for power saving techniques, at each network layers, will be discussed, and their effectiveness will be analyzed. WLAN is used in this study to fully analyze the effect of these power saving techniques on the voice packets jitter and delay. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the analysis.

This research reveals the concept of intelligence in modern management, particularly the management of Lebanese tourism organizations.In this world of continuous change and development, organizations should be competitive to be able to face the challenges of globalization. To attain a high level of competences and therefore competitiveness, it is necessary for organizations to deepen their professional and cultural knowledge in the focus of offering to consumers the best products and services and to build a relationship of loyalty–fidelity between the organization and the market.This study focuses on the role of the cultural intelligence as the capability to function effectively in a variety of cultural context. In fact, cultural intelligence provides insights about individual capabilities to cope with multicultural situations, engage in cross-cultural interactions, and perform in culturally diverse work groups.The success of tour operators through intelligent management and cultural intelligence will benefit the tourism sector with economic and competitive advantages.We identified the topic in all its complexity to a set that will converge into the world of culture in its general concept, and into the inter-culture as relational concept.

The higher education system worldwide is on the cusp of disruptive change due to innovative education providers such as digital platforms and universities offering fully online or blended programs. While the e-learning industry in the UAE is projected to grow significantly, the level of adoption of e-learning has not been high. The overall purpose of our multistage research project is to understand the barriers to the adoption of e-learning in the UAE despite the benefits of online education, such as lower costs and pedagogical benefits. We propose a preliminary conceptual framework explaining the students’ attitudes and intention to adopt e-learning. In our future research, we will refine and test the conceptual framework and provide guidelines for higher education institutions and policymakers on institutional change to support e-learning initiatives.

The technology acceptance model (TAM) is practically explaining behavioral intention (BI). However, extensions are needed to further examine BI toward mobile commerce (m-commerce) acceptance due to the insufficient power of just two constructs perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) to explain BI. Therefore, limitations of TAM lead this research to extended TAM in two ways. First, facilitating conditions (FC) factor is not considered in TAM. In fact, Davis assumed that everyone is in control of the resources regarding adopting a new system. Second, cost is one of the obstacles in adopting m-commerce. High cost can decrease the acceptance rate of m-commerce. M-commerce services involve fees (connections fees, subscription fees, or roaming fees). TAM does not explain cost factor, because TAM was applied mostly in an organizational context that does not involve cost by the end-users in workplace. This research intends to address the above limitations by augmenting facilitating conditions and cost.

The purpose of this paper is to audit and compare innovation management capability of two organizations using an auditing tool proposed by Tidd and Bessant (Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change, 5th ed. Wiley, West Essex, 2014) which constitutes of five dimensions: Strategy, Innovation Process, Learning, Innovative Organization, and Linkages. Both organizations were selected from the municipal field, a municipality in UAE and a municipality in Jordan. A sample was selected from each organization from High Suggestion Department (HSD) and Low Suggestion Departments (LSD). The auditing tool was distributed to respondents. Results have been obtained and discussed. A comparison has been conducted between both organizations in terms of their innovation management capabilities. Moreover, a comparison has been conducted between the HSD and LSD within each organization. The results of the study revealed that the municipality in UAE obtained higher scores in all auditing dimensions; hence, it is concluded that the municipality in UAE has higher innovation management capability than the municipality in Jordan. Moreover, each organization shall take care of the different components of innovation management with balance in order to maintain it.

Bangladesh is one of the most populous countries in the world and mass people are still unbanked and still not included under central financial banking service. This causes huge setbacks in progressing the financial status of Bangladesh. In order to avoid such problematic scenario, the central bank of Bangladesh, Bangladesh bank decided to adopt and promote agent banking service in rural areas of Bangladesh to include the mass rural population under central financial enclosure. As of current situation, mobile operators can play a vital role to promote and educate and motivate the rural people of Bangladesh to be registered and use the service of agent banking to perform their daily financial tasks. Furthermore, mobile operators along with top banking software farms and banks can work together to build a unified platform to provide effective agent banking service in real time to the rural people of Bangladesh. This paper specifically discusses about mobile learning system for the rural people in order to educate them about the advantages and various useful services of banking system of Bangladesh. Furthermore, this paper also promotes a unified system based on mobile platform which can benefit both banking industry as well as their customers to get quick and risk-free financial services. This will result a better economical situation in Bangladesh and the rural people will be benefited from better, secure and quick financial services from Bangladeshi banks.

Clustering countries mathematically according to Geert Hofstede’s cultural proximity and similarity factors is one way of classifying regional communities into well-defined cultural categories. Trying to test this statement mathematically shows that classifying countries or cultures remains complex. The approach shows a lack of an overall scheme and even when common variables exist, it seems that random and coincidental similarity weighs strongly on most variables used in the model. The results emphasize the need for more research in order to support the model.

This article analyses the concept of skills and also investigates the skills needed by organizations in Human Resources as a strategic area. The relevance of \purpose is to identify the skills to be developed in Human Resources Courses in Higher Education. The skills needed by the organizations were identified through document analysis based on prospective studies developed in industry between 2011 and 2014. The research problem considered the analytical dimension of skills development in organizations anchored to the following research questions: What are the skills needed to be developed in Higher Education Courses to transform the Human Resources function strategic for organizations? This study is centred on the research of more relevant skills which can contribute to transform the Human Resources function strategic for organizations contributing for the improvement of their performance and competitiveness in the market.

Higher Education in India remains heavily critiqued for not meeting stakeholder expectations. Enhancing overall quality and effectiveness remain the priority areas for institutions which battle existential concerns and student disconnect in a rapidly changing and competitive landscape. Strategic management has been employed by a variety of industries to articulate a future vision and outline specific short-term and long-term goals with a view to drive competitive advantage. Higher education institutions globally and especially in the USA have led the adoption of formal strategic management frameworks with a high degree of success. This paper reviews the evolution of strategic management in higher education worldwide. The Indian higher education space is specifically examined for application of the strategic management practice. Finally, a strong case is made for institutionalizing the use of strategic management in India to cope with the prevailing challenge.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the international financial reporting standards (IFRS) implementation on earnings management behavior in countries with high investor protection and strong legal enforcement. It does this by looking at a sample of 199 public listed companies from seven selected countries over a period of 15 years (before and after IFRS adoption). The results of this study suggest that in high investor protection countries, earnings management in general and accrual-based earnings management (AEM) in particular are more implemented during the IFRS application period than during the national generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) application period. The study also suggests that earnings reports are more manipulated when firms face financial distress. However, it does not have enough evidence to conclude that real earnings management (REM) is more or less practiced after the transition to IFRS and whether there is a substitutional relationship between REM and AEM.

This research paper examines competencies and career advancement of 338 managers in two different countries: the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. The descriptive-correlational survey method has been utilized. Research findings show that managerial competencies are similar across the two countries. It also reveals that managerial competencies are also a strong predictor of career advancement. There is limited research on the impact of culture on competencies and career advancement in non-Western countries. Thus, this research study benchmarks the similarities and differences of the impact of culture and competencies in career advancement at the managerial level in these two non-Western countries.

With China becoming the world’s largest economy, it must somehow manage the existing human capital. The problem lies in the lack of managerial talent currently located in China. This paper attempts to look how China is currently recruiting managers and examines the factors hindering the recruitment of Chinese-born and expatriate managers. China is recruiting managers using the same methods as the Western world. However, a strong emphasis is put on a factor known as guanxi. The shortage of Chinese-born managers can be attributed to financial reasons and the lack of education and government commitment. China’s culture is a major factor hindering the success of expatriates as well as the organizational structure in China because of the socialist culture. These issues must be addressed to attract managers into China to successfully compete in a globalized economy.

Human resource management (HRM) plays a critical role in any organization. It attributes to the fact that human resources are the most important asset an organization has. Employees are mandated to transform company strategies and goals into tangible outcome and for this reason, they provide a source of competitive advantage to an organization. The study utilized case study method by describing the HR practices that includes career and development programs, employee performance and evaluation system, and staffing functions of a telecommunication company in the UAE through an interview with the HR manager. The purposively selected telecommunication company has claimed to have achieved tremendous success due to its strong leadership and commitment to quality. Although the company has made strides in its HR practices, there is a need to improve to maximize the potential of its workforce.

In the early part of the twenty-first century, public and private sector organisations are under pressure due to population growth, financial constraints, resource scarcity, social justice and climate change. These challenges are felt by public and private sector organisations alike in some form and need to be addressed. To meet the challenges and take the available opportunities, government must actively pursue initiatives to adopt Knowledge Management (KM) tools, techniques and philosophies. There is, however, a paucity of empirical research on the key KM practices that have been implemented in the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)—which is the core rationale for this paper. This paper is based on a thorough review of the empirical literature, exploring the importance of KM, the structure of the MOJ and the key drivers of and challenges to implementing KM strategies within KSA public sector organisations. It is concluded that managing knowledge is a complex process because it is usually linked to long-term time horizons, a high level of uncertainty and impacts that are often difficult to quantify. If public sector organisations do not fully comprehend what drives the need for managing knowledge, they may fall into the trap of creating inefficient strategies and operational plans.

Leadership has undergone enormous development over the past 30 years. Effective leadership carries direct emphasis on productivity, loyalty, and talent management. This study depicts the notion of the current leadership practices in the Arab world, and what solutions should exist to such practices. This study will delineate the relation between Middle East culture and the leadership style practices. In addition, this study will represent the personality types/leadership styles depicted in the pictures of animals.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the issue of gender diversity on corporate boards in New Zealand companies. Despite the increased interest in diversity on corporate boards, very few studies have focused specifically on the issue of gender diversity in the corporate boards. This benchmark study contributes to the literature of corporate governance by analysing the presence of women on corporate boards in New Zealand. The research results indicate that women are severely underrepresented. The situation becomes more serious when we observe that in New Zealand more than 90 % of the companies listed on the New Zealand stock exchange lack any female voice on their board. The figures depicting female directors as a proportion of total directorship spotlight the need for New Zealand government and companies to develop effective strategies to increase the representation of females on corporate boards.

Purpose: This paper contributes to the job-crafting theory of Wrzesniewski and Dutton (The Academy of Management Review 26(2):179–201, 2001) by exploring the effects of age on job-crafting behaviors (i.e., task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting) and on job-crafting motivations (i.e., the need for personal control, the desire to create and sustain a positive self-image, and the need for human connection).Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 younger and 15 older employees (n = 31) at a socially responsible non-profit organization in the Netherlands. The qualitative data were analyzed in two major steps: (1) identifying job-crafting motivations and behaviors in older and younger employees and (2) identifying and comparing the differences in the job-crafting motivations and behaviors between older employees and younger employees.Findings: We found that both older and younger employees are likely to engage in job-crafting behavior to assert control over their jobs and to create a positive self-image. However, younger employees may have two different motivations (personal control and positive self-image) for engaging in such job-crafting behavior. Whereas both younger and older employees engage the most in task crafting, younger employees are more likely to engage in all three types of job-crafting behavior; additionally, we found that the three different forms of job-crafting behavior of younger employees occur in conjunction with one another.Research limitations/implications: This study contributes to the original job-crafting model of Wrzesniewski and Dutton (The Academy of Management Review 26(2):179–201, 2001) by including the effect of age in the model, and by demonstrating the importance of studying the three original main job-crafting motivations and behaviors separately from one another.Practical implications: This paper addresses the multigenerational challenges of the contemporary workforce. It demonstrates that managers may play a pivotal role in stimulating older employees to engage in job-crafting behaviors by informing them about job-crafting strategies and providing them with more opportunities to engage in job crafting.Originality/value: This paper is original in that it re-examines, refines, and enriches the job-crafting model of Wrzesniewski and Dutton (The Academy of Management Review 26(2):179–201, 2001), which is receiving a growing interest among researchers and business practitioners.

Scholars and business practitioners have provided valuable insights into the clustering phenomenon and its impact on firms’ performance. Nonetheless, supporting evidence from the chemical industry remains underreported. Chemical enterprises undertake collaborative forms to overcome the weaknesses faced by individual organizations in an attempt to tackle production efficiency and operational risks. This paper provides a simulative comparison of output commercial value, employment, and pollution levels between a chemical cluster (consisting of five medium-sized chemical plants) and a standalone aluminum smelting plant, using the case study approach. The research objectives are related in identifying which option: (a) provides more total value of commercial products (production output multiplied by market prices) per megawatt (MW) of electricity, (b) creates more jobs per megawatt, and (c) has lower level of pollutants. The research approach combines quantitative secondary data and a set of in-depth interviews among managers of the chemical plants and other knowledgeable persons or field experts. Consequently, the study makes a relevant contribution to the cluster literature and proposes some useful recommendations for policy-makers and individual chemical firms. The empirical findings of the simulative comparative case study are not sufficient for making generalizations about any kind of cluster or industrial sector.

This conceptual paper attempts to build on the argument that innovation in tourism is a less focused topic in business and academic research. The growing interest in the practice and business of spiritual tourism cannot be ignored. This interest motivates the research aiming to present spiritual tourism as an innovation in tourism, specifically in India and Pakistan. In this unique study, the innovation in tourism is appreciated and analyzed from dimensions of product, process, and people, falling under the umbrella of architectural and revolutionary innovation. Hence the three elements of the tourism product: people, places, and events are adapted to align with the spiritual tourism as a tourism innovation. India and Pakistan are selected as the two countries since both carry the status of multifaith-purpose spiritual tourism destinations. This original research emphasizes on recognizing spiritual tourism as an innovation in tourism based on its products and services illustrating architectural and revolutionary innovation. The paper concludes with a matrix mapping elements of spiritual tourism with the dimensions of tourism innovation, hence filling a gap in the literature on tourism innovation and spiritual tourism. A relevant empirical study of travelers visiting India and Pakistan for spiritual tourism is a palpable future study.

The literature has observed that business-to-business (B2B) selling is transitioning to relational partnerships with customers and long-term collaborations with suppliers to achieve a competitive advantage and reduce costs. Studies have made it clear that personal similarities between the initial salesperson and buyer can improve cooperation in buyer–seller interactions, and this interactional aspect offers value to customers. According to recent studies, the way salespeople initiate a partnership with their contact people is an important part of relational value formation. Nevertheless, this subject is rarely discussed in the literature. This study addresses this gap by adding personality theory and the theory of transformational leadership to illustrate how different customers with different personality types want to be treated by salespeople before and during buyer–seller interactions. This study recommends using these theories in buyer–seller interactions to meet the customers’ relational, interactional and behavioural needs.

Tourism in Dubai is an integral part of the Dubai government’s strategy for a sustainable future. Dubai being the most populous among the seven Emirates of United Arab Emirates serves as a gateway for tourism, business, investment, and education. Educational tourism is becoming a popular destination in major key cities around the world and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is one of the leading destinations in that aspect. Dubai’s reputation in the tourism industry is remarkable as it offers better infrastructure, quality of life, and most of all a very safe place for education, tourism, and more. Educational tourism in Dubai plays significant role in knowledge management across society. This research study examines the suitability of Dubai as the frontrunner as education hub in United Arab Emirates and in the GCC region. Understanding the diversity makes it a multicultural educational hub for education and tourism.

Using a quantitative approach, this study was aimed at determining teacher’s perceptions of principals’ creative leadership practices for enhancing the effectiveness of secondary schools in Klang District in Malaysia. Premised on the Generativity Theory, the eight main core skills of challenges, broadening, capturing, manages teams, models core competencies of creativity expression, provides resources, provides work environment, and positive feedback and recognition, were examined to explore the concept of creativity in leaders. The model of High Performing School (HPS) was used to measure the School Effectiveness. A total of 250 teachers from these ten schools participated in the survey. The data was collected and analyzed. The findings revealed a moderate correlation between school principals’ creative leadership practice and school effectiveness, followed by multiple regressions’ analysis indicated creative leadership practices dimension; Encourage Capturing received the strongest weight in the prediction. This study offers a dynamic perspective for school principals to practice creative leadership as the key factor for transforming school into an effective school.

In recognition of the synergies gained from the formation of family entrepreneurial teams, FETs have lately come under extensive examination. This chapter investigates the antecedents of FET formation from the perspective of the theory of planned behavior. Results confirm the significant influence of positive attitude, perceived behavioral control, and, to a lesser extent, subjective norms. Further investigation of the influence of subjective norms on FET formation revealed interesting conclusions.

The growth of entrepreneurship in Malaysia and the number of enterprises being created in the last decade are evidence of sheer amount and variety of supporting mechanisms and policies established by the government. These include funding, physical infrastructure, trade advisory and support, and entrepreneurship education to ensure that challenges in the national and global markets can be faced and abated with equipped knowledge and support. To nurture and sustain entrepreneurial education and related initiatives, the Malaysian Government has pushed forward the transformation of teaching and learning focusing on entrepreneurial skills in the National Higher Education Action Plan 2007–2010. Thus, the most significant endeavor is the emergence of a formal entrepreneurial education at the local higher education institutions (HEIs) in Malaysia. In the past 5 years, entrepreneurship education has grown dramatically in Malaysia resulting to 19 universities offering entrepreneurship education and training. Furthermore, in the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015–2015, the government’s aspiration is to instill an entrepreneurial mindset throughout Malaysia’s higher education system. Such programs introduced at the tertiary level are to encourage the young generation to delve themselves into becoming “job creators” rather than “job seekers” by channeling and realizing their untapped potential to innovate creating economic and commercial value. Positive outcomes from entrepreneurial education would be perceived as a reduction in unemployment levels and job-seeking exercise by university graduates. However, there was a reported increase in the unemployment rate in 2015 of 3.1 % amounting to 400,000 unemployed individuals who have completed their studies in the last 6 months despite being given entrepreneurship education. This chapter intends to discuss the government’s role and initiatives in ensuring that the entrepreneurship education addresses the importance of self-reliance, willingness, and the level of interests of students at universities to embark on entrepreneurship venture upon graduating, thus reducing the dependency of graduates to be employed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of women entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study examines similarities and differences among culturally diverse women entrepreneurs in the UAE. More specifically this chapter explores how motivation drivers change over time in reaction to market environment, as well as how social support interplays in combating the challenges women entrepreneurs face in this competitive marketplace. Furthermore, the study seeks to provide the foundation for further examination of women entrepreneurs because of their growing and forceful presence and influence in the UAE.

Each year numerous new small businesses confidently enter the marketplace but a vast majority of these firms will fail to survive beyond their tenth birthday. Past studies have focused on a variety of external factors such as geographic location and industry size. Despite the effects these variables play over time, a great amount of decisions are made internally and thus it is imperative to consider their impact on survival rates. Young firms with little experience can be heavily disadvantaged when attempting to gain funding within financial markets. Evidence indicates that a vast number of new small firms are forced to rely on equity financing, specifically in the form of internal resources. Beyond retained earnings, firms must rely on social networks in an attempt to solidify relationships with potential investors. Firms require capital to fund future growth but face barriers as turning a profit initially can be quite challenging. This chapter takes an in-depth look into one crucial internal variable, financing, and statistically analyzes its effect on the survival of small entrepreneurial ventures. The objective entails uncovering the causation for such internal downfall and providing such an insight may greatly assist small firms to compete and grow in their respected industries, therefore substantially increasing their chance of survival.

The purpose of this chapter is to propose an approach to structure literature review along robust theoretical lenses leading to conceptualization of work motivation in case of temporary organizations. The chapter is in response to studies calling for a “seamless” theory of work motivation spanning across different management disciplines, without being confined to a specific theoretical stance. We use job design perspective from industrial/organizational psychology literature as a point of departure. We present a comprehensive review of these theories highlighting their premises. Then we focus on the literature on work motivation in case of temporary organizations. We map this literature to the theories in order to consolidate the theoretical corpus underlying work motivation. Various facets of job design that constitute motivating nature of work are identified.

This chapter presents an expanded structure for a conglomerate business setting. It considers the foundation of small entrepreneurship projects inspired by the need of creating sustainable businesses and managed by ambitious youth entrepreneurs. Conglomerates refer to the widely diversified companies operating in a number of distinct lines of businesses or classes of products and services, bonded financially, within the same overall firm. We design a revised conglomerate business structure in which supply and demand are interlocked by small entrepreneurship projects bonded financially in a three-structural-line setting within the same overall parent company. The project is based on hospitality as it became one of the most important business fields in today’s businesses. Managing conglomerate bussiness is associated with many challenges that need more investigations and researches. Managing such diversified business group is one of the great challenges in this chapter. Also, it’s usually costly to set up small entrepreneurship projects especially in Middle East and Gulf countries compared to other countries that encourage the establishments of youth entrepreneurship businesses.

This research focuses on developing a standard benchmarking tool and database that can be used by SMEs in the UAE to evaluate themselves against their competitors. The project presents an adaptation of an existing tool, QuickView, already in use in the USA. The short-term objectives of the project are to determine whether QuickView could be usable in the UAE, and to test whether SMEs in the UAE could be evaluated against the 4000 US SMEs on the QuickView database. Eventually, the goal is to help SMEs in the UAE improve bottom-line performance by transforming their practices for competitive advantage.

The start-up ecosystems in Germany and in the USA are different in several dimensions and they have a huge impact on the success of start-ups. In this study the factors that affect the start-up ecosystems are compared. What start-ups consider as critical to their success and how this varies based on the location of the start-ups are analyzed. Using the developed scoring mechanism, the study compares the relative scores of various success factors between the German and American start-ups to identify areas for improvement. The findings suggest that Germany is successful in implementing co-working spaces and incubators but it lacks on accelerator programs. Further, it needs to develop a better support system for their start-ups while the German start-ups themselves need to focus on building a stronger internal team in order to boost the start-up ecosystem.

The objective of this chapter is to present the case of a young entrepreneur from India. Rahul Gupta is the founder of Rays Experts, a solar energy entrepreneurial venture. The solar energy sector, according to a study by AT Kearney (Unni et al. Solar power and India’s energy future (Publication). Retrieved December 31, 2015, from ATKearney website: http://www.atkearney.in/documents/10192/692844/Solar Power in India—Preparing to Win.pdf/b6b34499-8285-4813-9d66-ecdc293a8537, 2013), is slated to become worth billions of dollars over the next 8 years. It is a clean source of energy that provides not only a fillip to employment and economic growth but will also never run out. When only very few start-ups grow in the infrastructure sector in India, Rays Experts is giving large solar plant ventures a run for their money in just 2 years. Aspects related to the unique capital structure (it has no long-term debt on its balance sheet), financial management (playing with fixed costs), and unique business model are presented and analyzed in this case. Accounting ratio analysis has been used as a tool to understand company’s financial strength. In a country like India that is still developing a successful entrepreneurial venture like Rays Experts, with no debt on its balance sheet, would provide very useful learning in terms of the methodology adopted for starting a successful venture with organic growth in the capital-intensive industry. It also sheds some light on the problems that a start-up can face in case of absence of external funding or debt.

Micro and small enterprises have gained increasing attention in the innovation literature. However, empirical studies on the factors that influence the innovative performance of these enterprises are still at infancy. Exceptional innovative performance of MSEs may be determined by the personality trait of the business owner/manager. This study is a pilot survey conducted on a few numbers (N = 38) of micro and small manufacturing, service and retail enterprises in Kano, Nigeria. A questionnaire was distributed to explore the potential influence of personality trait on micro and small enterprise innovation performance. Cronbach’s alpha test is employed to measure the internal consistency of the instrument. The findings of this study encourage further testing and conclude that most measures have high reliability scores ranging from .63 to .89. This suggests the possibility of applying the instrument among MSEs in Kano, Nigeria.

Academic studies on global franchising had focused initially, from the late 1970s to the 1990s, on developed economies, including North America, Western Europe, and Australia, while over the last decade the research focus has moved to include transitional and emerging markets, such as the Asian economies of China and India. Only recently has academic research on franchising shifted towards developing Southeast Asian markets (Dant and Grünhagen, J Market Channels 21(3):124–132, 2014). The literature on scholarly research into franchise activities in the developing markets of Southeast Asia remains in its infancy (for notable exceptions see Binh and Terry, J Market Channels 18(2):147–163, 2011; Binh & Terry, 2014; Grünhagen, Le, & Ho, 2014).

Most universities have developed entrepreneurial learning known as academic entrepreneurship (AE) by introducing entrepreneur-related courses for cross-discipline students. In order to increase student’s opportunities in developing business skills, Institute of Higher Education (IPT) in Malaysia encourages entrepreneurial program in higher academic institutions. The government supports the effort to reach the vision of Malaysia’s Economic Transformation Program (ETP) by 2020 in enhancing entrepreneurship abilities. Moreover, academic entrepreneurship has rooted in many global universities whereby the entrepreneurship subjects are introduced across the board regardless of faculties in order to provide basic entrepreneurial knowledge using adaptable learning pattern. The faculty entrepreneurship concept is applied in the teaching and learning process at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) by providing entrepreneurial courses for first-year students from all faculties. The course comprises Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and was initiated 5 years ago involving 12 faculties in UKM. These papers introduce basic elements of entrepreneurship and related skills to students in different disciplines. Its main objective is to promote and generate business interests and ideas among students by providing fundamental knowledge of entrepreneurship so that a career in entrepreneurship is deemed as a feasible career option. Changing mind sets of students to be a job creator rather than a job seeker is today’s challenge that can be overcome by dissemination of invaluable business tools and materials which is the core aspect of this course. Concepts and theories of entrepreneurship including team building, teaming and leadership, strategy and management aptitudes, marketing and market research, financial and legal principles, manufacturing or production processes, and oral presentation skills will be taught. The link between various components of a business will be demonstrated and identified through business simulation games performed by students themselves. Series of periodic seminars and recorded videos displaying experiences of local successful entrepreneurs are presented to inspire students to embrace values and challenges of an entrepreneur. A business pitching and business concept poster competitions are held to assess students’ understanding and reflection of the course content translated into these forms of “hands-on” activities.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between conflict management (CM) and job performance (JP). There are five styles of conflict management which are integrating, dominating, obliging, avoiding, and compromising. However, in this research the author only focuses on integrating, obliging, and compromising styles which are considered as our independent variables and job performance as our dependent variable. Accordingly, dominating (high concern for self and low concern for others) and avoiding (low concern for self and others) styles do not fit Malaysian culture. Data consists of respondents in the banking sector. Correlation analysis was used to support the findings. It was found out that obliging and compromising have a significant relationship with job performance while no relationship exists between integrating and job performance. It appears that the reserved and soft-spoken Malaysian would opt to sacrifice their goals (obliging) and can easily agree with the outcomes of the conflict management (compromise), as supported by research findings by Wang et al. (Manag Int Rev 45:3–21, 2005). The individualistic-collectivist culture characteristics indicate different approaches between Western and Asian managers in handling conflict management, Wang et al. (Manag Int Rev 45:3–21, 2005).

Estimation of the extent of volatility in stock markets induced by external shocks and the persistence of it is very important and has policy significance for the macroeconomic policy makers, central bankers, and the financial market participants. In the current study, we examine the overestimation bias of volatility and its persistence using EGARCH-M models for the Malaysian stock market composite index (KLCI), as well as three sub-sectoral indices. The empirical evidence shows that there are asymmetric responses by the stock indices whereby volatility originating from ascending versus descending stock market has different impacts. In addition, we have found that the volatility is highly persistent and the shock absorption capacity of the stock market has been underestimated. However, this finding suggests that there might have been some estimation bias due to misspecification of the model. This implies that the policy makers and market participants must exercise caution in drawing conclusions from this class of models.

Technology has changed the way marketers interact and engage with customers and data. New and exciting technologies are emerging but there is little consensus about their relative importance beyond the initial hype. Augmented reality (AR) is one such technology that has the potential to facilitate dialogue and interaction between physical and digital worlds potentially leading to the creation of value for both customers and organizations. In this chapter we propose that AR can also aid the research process and generate deeper and more meaningful customer insights which will aid the reduction of customer-perceived risks. This chapter emphasizes the importance of AR in marketing and seeks to encourage discussion of the potential uses for AR in overcoming traditional limitations in marketing and customer research.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the US business cycle is affected by fluctuations in futures price while controlling for other macroeconomic and financial variables. We examine the usefulness of futures volatility to predict whether or not the US economy will be in a recession.Our study builds on two research veins. The first is comprised of many studies that attempt to predict business cycles by using a range of economic variables. Many of these studies emphasize the role of financial variables in macroeconomic forecasts (Estrella and Mishkin, Review of Economics and Statistics, 80(1):45–61, 1998). This role has been certainly exacerbated during the recent financial crisis of 2007–2009.The second vein originates within the literature which widely recognizes the role of financial variables such as prices of financial instruments as leading indicators (Estrella and Mishkin, Review of Economics and Statistics, 80(1):45–61, 1998). In US data for example, equity returns and the short-term interest lead GDP growth by one or two quarters (Backus et al., Asset prices in business cycle analysis (manuscript), 2007). Commodities, combined with stocks, are one of these financial instruments that were involved in the macroeconomic forecasts.Our study examines futures volatility as predictors of US recessions. The volatility of this instrument could be an indicator of the economic situation. This study aims at either confirming or invalidating that periods of economic downturns are characterized by a high volatility in the index futures market.

Working capital management is a function of management to decide the optimum level of the various items of working capital. Though the current assets do not help increasing productivity, they are very much important in carrying a successful business. Too much of working capital may lead to idle current assets and increase carrying cost of current assets and it reduces the profit. On the other hand, if too low working capital is maintained the business faces liquidity risk and may lead to bankruptcy. This study aims to investigate the relationship between profitability and the various components of current assets of Tabreed. Pearson simple correlation technique and multiple regression analysis were employed. The study showed that working capital turnover ratio, cash turnover ratio and debtors turnover ratio have positive association with return on investment and other ratios such as current ratio, quick ratio, current assets-to-total assets ratio, current assets-to-sales ratio, and inventory turnover ratio have negative association with profitability.

Small and large organizations use available technologies to manage business activities and assist in decision making. Most organizations operate their business activities efficiently using various information systems (IS). These systems are used to collect data and process it according to the analyst, manager, or business owners’ needs. Among the existing systems, the organization normally used financial information systems (FISs) to accumulate and analyze financial data for optimal financial planning and forecasting decisions and outcomes. FIS closely linked with all aspects of administrative in the organizations. This system is an integral part of business and is fundamental for stability, sustainability, and growth of an organization. In recognition of the importance of FIS, various countries and international organizations started to invest in such systems. This system is increasingly being used to improve transparency in the organizations and as a result FIS can play an important role in fighting corruption in public finance systems. This chapter aims to investigate and to identify the existing IS strategies that are used in fighting financial corruption. The finding reveals that there are a number of IS strategies to combat corruption but among those FISs possess the ability to contribute effectively towards anticorruption efforts. At the end, this chapter identifies five factors of FIS that contribute to anticorruption strategies. This study could play a significant role in explaining the complex relationship between the related factors and the quality of FISs to facilitate the anticorruption process.

Recent changes in China’s copper demand have lately received much attention due to its close relationship to the country’s economic activity. Although an emerging market, China accounts for around 40 % of the world’s copper demand and the USA is the third biggest market for exports, making it imperative to assess the relationship between copper futures prices and a newly proposed Chinese dollar index. The purpose of this study is to analyse if changes in the copper futures prices can be used as a market timing tool to predict movements in the Chinese dollar index, and vice versa. To enhance the predictive market timing ability, an adaptive relative strength index model is used to track changes in market conditions better. The analysis is conducted using both daily and weekly data over the June 2007–December 2015 period. Findings will suggest if the technical analysis tool can be used to forecast copper prices based on changes in the Chinese dollar index, or if accurate forecasts can be made on the Chinese dollar index based on movements in copper’s prices, over different frequency intervals. More importantly, this would have policy implications in that it would reveal whether global copper prices can be affected by Chinese Yuan’s movements against other major global currencies, suggesting a need for regulatory bodies to relook at the effect of non-fundamental factors on commodity and currency markets.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has implemented its long-term vision 2021. The main goal of this vision is to diversify the economic activity to edge up on the back of non-oil sector, despite the fact that UAE’s economy is considered one of the most diversified economies across the region. The significant drop in oil prices in addition to performances of other global markets represents a challenge for Dubai stock market. This may have an important effect on the share prices of Dubai stock market and its performance. In this chapter, we collect market data for oil prices, US NASDAQ Composite, and DFM from the official website of Dubai Financial Market (www.dfm.ae) and (www.nasdaq.com) to explore the patterns of pre-after the global financial crisis performance and to observe the performance of the Dubai financial market in comparison to NASDAQ. We also look at the impact of drop in oil price on the performance of DFM. Our results support that the DFM performed well after the crisis. However, the lower oil prices have reversed this situation.

This study tries to develop a new internal rate of return (IRR) approach assuming constant and positive cash flows. The traditional IRR method is implicitly based on trial and error that needs two initial guesses and slowly converges to the solution. The development so far was based on Newton–Raphson methods that reduce the two guesses to only one guess with quadratic convergence. However, this development has many limitations such as divergence at inflection points and pitfalls like division by zero. The progress of our study so far is to eliminate the initial guess with assumption of equal series of positive cash flows. Further, the expected finding of the new approach will assist practitioners and academics to compute the IRR accurately as the rate of return on the declining balance of the investment, analogous to the YTM on a premium bond and the contract rate on a fully amortized loan.

Historically, international projects are prone to both endogenous and exogenous risks. And the World Bank international projects and programs are not immune to similar risks. What is important though is the ability of project managers to identify the sources of endogenous and exogenous risks and how to leverage proactive or predictive project risk management strategies. Arguably, predictive project risk management is the lifeline for successful projects and programs. Managing portfolio of risks in international projects is imperative for the World Bank’s mission of economic development and poverty eradication in developing countries. Inability to identify sources of risks attached to projects and programs can contribute to missed opportunities. It can also discourage the World Bank and other international agencies from approving or awarding future development projects and programs. Although in spite of the growing menace of risks in development projects and programs, project managers have little or no knowledge of project risk management. This chapter proposes a multi-attribute decision support approach to model and analyze the risk for the World Bank projects and programs in Nigeria.

Islamic finance has continued to expand and demonstrate its resilience in the current more challenging international financial environment. However, this expansion has been confined in terms of debt-based contracts, rather than employing equity-based contracts such as a Musharakah contract. Principally Islamic finance promotes transactions that are based on profit and risk sharing through Mudarabah (partnership of work and capital) and Musharakah (joint venture) contracts, thus encouraging participatory finance and promoting participation in the risk-reward and financial results. However, statistics suggests that the industry has put more weight on the debt-financing instruments. There are several reasons and rationales put forward by the Islamic banks for the non-existence of the Musharakah contract. The majority of Islamic banks have limited themselves to low-risky trade-financing assets. This research paper analyse the Musharakah financing and reasons why Islamic banks tend to avoid such financing models from mainly two facets: Shari’ah perspective and regulatory perspective. Shari’ah perspective will highlight the main Shari’ah issues and minimum Shari’ah requirements that need to be observed while employing Musharakah contract in Islamic banks, while the regulatory perspective will underscore the significance of risk management dimension, minimum capital adequacy and Shari’ah-compliant securitisation related to Musharakah exposures. Finally the chapter concludes on the role of implementing IFSB standard in solving the risk exposure in Musharakah financing and the role of regulatory authority in implementing equity-based contract (Musharakah financing).

There is a dramatic shift in the investment preference of investors from conventional to Shariah-complaint companies in the last decade. This study provides evidence on the performance measurement of Karachi Meezan Index which represents Shariah-complaint stocks in comparison to KSE 30 which represents conventional stocks registered under Pakistan Stock Exchange formerly known as Karachi Stock Exchange. Daily index prices are incorporated in the analysis from 21 March 2012 to 7 September 2015. Independent sample t-test model is employed to measure the difference in the risk and return of each index. Regression analysis is used to study the relationship between stock return and financial ratios. Results showed that KMI stocks generate higher average return and lower risk as compared to KSE 100 index. Moreover, KMI 30 index shows higher risk-adjusted return of Treynor ratio as compared to conventional counterpart. In regression analysis, net income margin shows a significant negative relationship with KSE 30 index return. However, DER shows negative relationship with KMI 30 index but not significant.

This chapter presents the results of phase one of a two-phase research work about the opportunities and challenges of Islamic banking in Lebanon. It is motivated by the fact that in 12 years, only four Islamic banks are operating in the country with less than 1 % market share.Phase one is an open-ended exploration using interviews with ten key informants and industry experts in a qualitative approach. In phase two (in process), the panel of key informants will be expanded and the interviews will be structured and semi-structured.It is hoped that this research will contribute toward better development of the Islamic banking industry in the country.