Integrating Sustainability and Lean: SLIM Method and Enterprise Game Proposed

: Sustainability and leanness are organizational approach concepts for more efﬁcient activities and increased competitiveness. This paper presents a study and an application of the concepts of sustainability and lean, with the purpose to capitalize on the beneﬁts of the two concepts’ tools when used together in an industry and education activity. A literature review was carried out to evaluate qualitatively and empirically the concepts of sustainability, lean, and enterprise games, and the possibility to integrate the ﬁrst two concepts into a new tool applied into an enterprise game. An online survey was done to identify which tools are used within companies in the region, how and what training methods they used, and what the reported beneﬁts are. The survey results were used to design a new tool integrated in a new enterprise game (SLIM) developed by the authors. The game was tested and validated in educational laboratory with students and actual employees from companies. The game follows the frame of an enterprise game, considering the simulation of enterprise classical functions. The game’s purpose is to improve the activity in successive rounds. A scorecard is used to ﬁll in and compute the key performance indicators (KPIs), and a new indicator is proposed (SLIMx). Applications of the instrument/game include: students’ training in an educational laboratory; lifelong learning; professional training in companies; and professional perfection/reconversion of potential employees and the unemployed. The SLIM game was simulated in a team of 15 players over three rounds, with teachers playing the role of the supervisor. A number of possible improvements have been identiﬁed. The next step is testing it in enterprises with various ﬁelds of activity. SLIM has proven to be an effective solution to improve organizational efﬁciency and motivate players to gain new knowledge.


Introduction
Currently, there are a number of management approaches that contribute to increasing competitiveness and business development capacity. Some businesses are targeting environmental practices to improve process activities and improve public image. Many businesses are concerned about the tools, methods, and techniques that help streamline process resource utilization. Most are involved in corporate social responsibility activities to improve their public image. These CSR activities are complementary to processes streamlining actions. Sustainability is addressed in many companies [1][2][3]. The three dimensions of sustainability are addressed: social, economic, and environmental. Some organizations address cumulatively the three responsibilities, others partially. Involvement in sustainable development is not mandatory at the national or international level. Sustainability reporting is also optional [4], but many businesses report their sustainability to improve O R I G I N A L P A P E R Firm-level investment in the extractive industry from CEE countries: the role of macroeconomic uncertainty and internal conditions Abstract This paper investigates the impact of external and internal conditions on firms' investment in CEE countries, applying a panel data analysis, over the timespan 2008-2014. We use AMADEUS statistics for 412 companies and we focus on the extractive industry. The external conditions are associated with the macroeconomic uncertainty related to the economic growth and price level, while for the internal conditions we have retained as explanatory variables the leverage and liquidity ratios. The firms' investment dynamics is computed as the growth rate of fixed assets. Our results obtained using static and dynamic estimators, show that both external and internal conditions influence the firms' investment decision. The inflation uncertainty has a positive and significant impact on investment, providing evidence in the favor of the growth-option theory. The liquidity has a positive and significant influence, while the impact of the leverage and economic growth uncertainty is significant only under the dynamic specification. Our results are robust under different specifications of macroeconomic uncertainty and sample structure.
Keywords Firm investment Á Extractive industries Á Macroeconomic uncertainty Á Leverage Á Liquidity Á CEE countries We thank the Associate Editor, Douglas Cumming, and two anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the participants of the 21st EBES Conference held in Budapest on January 12-14, 2017.

Introduction
This paper sustains that the entrepreneurship facilitators and their offer in the field of entrepreneurship education must to respond to the new economic context arising starting from few years ago because of the subsequent global recession and financial crisis. This new context has profound implications to the psychological, social, economic, cultural and also educational level because it changes the influences and in the same time challenges the intellectual assumptions of entrepreneurship [2]. The entrepreneurship education is influenced by economic and market driven changes, learners' expectations, government policy, changing technology, ethic and cultural changes etc. (see the Figure 1[9]).
These structural and attitudinal changes calling for better entrepreneurial skills and abilities for dealing with an uncertain future and current challenges, therefore educational institutions including universities have to reconsider their role as promoters of entrepreneurship.
In this new era the role of education is to shape ideas of what it means to be an entrepreneur, not to promote an ideology of entrepreneurship, and to create critical awareness that contributes to the accountability of the entrepreneurs to society.
In the same time the special challenge of entrepreneurship education is in the facilitation of learning to support the entrepreneurial process [2].

Introduction
Worldwide there is evidence that there are approximately 1.3 million deaths / year due to road traffic. So automotive industry is under pressure to deliver new and improved systems for the safety of vehicles, ranging from airbag systems to extremely complex systems advanced driver assistance with prediction and accident avoidance capabilities (Moraru et al., 2014;Becker et al., 2017). From this need arose ISO 26262 (ISO 26262, 2011) as an adaptation of the generic standard IEC 61508. ISO 26262 is the standard for functional safety applications in road vehicles. The functional safety standard ISO 26262 is not intended to be used only for the systems related to safety of the vehicles but for all the E/E systems of a vehicle that could subject the vehicle occupants, other road users, pedestrians and vehicle technicians to unreasonable risk due to a malfunction. The implementation of this standard is complex and affects the entire product lifecycle management (Mauborgne et al., 2016). This standard provides requirements to perform functional safety assessments and provides automotive-specific analysis methods to identify the automotive safety integrity level. In literature it is found that "ISO 26262 is considered to represent the "state of the art" for the development of vehicle electronic systems, specifically of safety relevant systems in passenger vehicles (Ward D. et al., 2013). It is an important standard for

Abstract
Sustainability is a complex concept that is addressed by most companies, and is the direction of their development. Culture and education for sustainable development must start from higher education. At the level of higher education, the presence of sustainability subjects was mainly assessed in the curricula of study and also the understanding of the concept among students. In Romania these studies are not defined in depth. Also a comparative analysis of students' knowledge and understanding of the concept in business (after graduating higher education) was not made. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the current level of education for students and the business environment on the sustainability principles. The first objective of this paper was to review and present the previous research on ESD. The second objective was to identify and assess the current level of ESD in Romania. The enlargement of the European Union calls for specific action to be taken. People in the newly members (such as Romania) have often had to display a capacity for entrepreneurship in adapting to the transformation of their economies. Although the problems encountered in these countries and in the European Union Member States are often identical, particular attention will nonetheless need to be paid to building up, adapting and installing appropriate financial procedures.

METHODOLOGY
The qualitative studies consist of collecting and analyzing the elements which are basis of explaining the opinions, motivations and behaviors of individuals involved in the studied issue. We used a direct method of study, based on obtaining directly the information from the individuals involved in this study. The survey is an investigation done in order to find out the opinions of a given population, by interrogating a limited number of its members (a sample). The main stages of making a qualitative study by survey are: 1. Making up the sample; 2. Determining the sample size; 3. Drawing up the questionnaire; 4. Administering the questionnaire; 5. Processing and analyzing the data; 6. Drawing up the synthesis report.

Introduction
Entrepreneurship has been for a considerable time an important research field among scientists and practitioners. Some reasons supporting this prolonged and heightened interest in entrepreneurship are: the entrepreneurial activity revitalizes stagnated economies, represents a solution for unemployment problems, is a potential catalyst and incubator for technological progress, product and market innovation (Mueller and Thomas, 2000),

INTRODUCTION
Entrepreneurial intention is defined very pragmatic in the literature [1], as being the search for information that may be used to create new business. In the same context, Choo and Wong [2] and other authors argues that personal commitment to become an entrepreneur, to find a business, is actually the critical/key dimension of this search with significant impact on shaping entrepreneurial intention.
Intention is otherwise considered to be the only and the best predictor of behavior [3], individuals with plans to start new business finding their place much better in the entrepreneurial phenomenon in comparison with the persons who lack initiative. Therefore entrepreneurial intention may be considered essential in the case of studying and understanding entrepreneurial dynamics, because intention is the one which determines initial key characteristics for the new organizations [1] [4] [5].
In the last period there have been many advances regarding the study of entrepreneurial intention, vast majority of those being based on cognitive psychology principles, emphasizing the importance of cognition in the development process of the entrepreneurial intention. This way have been highlighted, on the one hand, the role and the importance of cognitive variables in the entrepreneurial process [6] and on the other hand, it had reached the conclusion that studying cognitive processes involved in developing entrepreneurial intentions could be made on the basis of some models [7] [8]. These models offer the possibility for studying correlations between variables like the perceived feasibility, entrepreneurial experience, perceived utility, entrepreneurial intention etc [9] [10]. One of the findings which are important to our research, obtained as a result of empirical testing of cognitive entrepreneurial models, is that entrepreneurial education is an important factor of influence in the process of cognition of feasibility and associated utility with the capacity to become an entrepreneur [11].
Even if there have been made important progresses, as regards studying entrepreneurial phenomenon, there are still many "unsolved mysteries" , one of the study suggesting as possible emergent axes of future researches, the following three questions [12]:  Why some people choose to become entrepreneurs and others do not?  Why only certain people recognize opportunities for new products and services that can be profitable and others do not?  Why some entrepreneurs have so much success in comparison to others? We believe that the answers to these questions can be found by focusing our research on two major axes of entrepreneurial phenomenon:  Influence factors (individuals, socials and environmental)  Entrepreneurial characteristics, considered as a group of variables, identifying and testing correlations between them. Therefore, in the first instance, the entrepreneurial intention, according to the social factors model, is conditioned by influence factors such as:  Social individual, such as: personal preparation, career stage, family experience [13], gained life experience, as well as the growth medium [14];  Contextual, environmental, such as: taxes level, career opportunities synchronization, social environment