This paper stems from a research project carried out for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to make an inventory of national standards education policies. Twenty countries - sixteen Asia-Pacific economies and four European nations – have been investigated. The paper relates...

This paper explores whether the manager’s physical office work environment can stimulate the manager’s creativity. A total of 60 managers from a large manufacturing company participated in the study. They rated the creativity potential and physical elements of office environments shown in 25...

Purpose – To show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operations management, and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them. Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must be present in order to have a desired...

Literature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant to the detriment of the others. Various factors and forces have been identified to explain this phenomenon. Yet, sometimes no dominant design emerges at all and multiple competing designs...

Existing studies of supplier involvement in new product development have mainly focused on project-related short-term processes and success-factors. This study validates and extends an existing exploratory framework, which comprises both long-term strategic processes and short-term operational...

Purpose: This paper examines the claim that the application of human factors (HF) knowledge can improve both human well-being and operations system performance. Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using a general and two specialist databases to identify empirical studies addressing...

Managers usually associate ergonomics with occupational health and safety and related legislation, not with business performance. In many companies, these decision makers seem not to be positively motivated to apply ergonomics for reasons of improving health and safety. In order to strengthen...

We analyze the impact of (alliance) network exposure on the speed and extent of adoption of the business model as being one explanatory factor for diffusion controlling for actor specific characteristics and embeddedness in the network. In order to explain how existing national regulation...

The non-stationary gamma process is a non-decreasing stochastic process with independent increments. By this monotonic behavior this stochastic process serves as a natural candidate for modelling time-dependent phenomena such as degradation. In condition-based maintenance the first time such a...

International standards setting organizations have different language selection policies. These policies have, besides their financial aspects, also an important cultural/ political dimension. The standards setting organizations are either bilingual (English/ French), or unilingual (English), or...