Search Results (411)

Living Labs offer immersive learning in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), yet their core nature and value for competency development remain underexplored, particularly from the perspective of lab leaders. To address the knowledge gap, this study examines the perspectives of lab leaders on the potential of living labs as dynamic learning settings. Specifically, it explores two dimensions: (1) how living labs structure learning processes, and (2) the influence of collaboration with societal partners on learning outcomes, framed by the Quadruple Helix Model (academia, industry, government, and community). The study adopts a qualitative research design via semi-structured interviews with seven laboratory leaders across five well-established living labs in Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences. Interview transcripts were analyzed using Julius.ai and in vivo coding to identify and categorize themes. The respondents highlighted that in their experience, combining physical and digital settings often facilitates experiential, reflective, and innovative learning while equipping students with practical skills and competencies that improve their employability. Furthermore, the respondents reported that engagement with stakeholders fosters co-creation and well-rounded innovation. These collaborations also help ensure that the living labs can effectively sustain their operation, offering students the opportunities to engage in globally relevant issues such as digital transformation. Nonetheless, obstacles include resource limitations, maintaining enduring teamwork, and adjusting to rapid technological changes. The paper concludes that living labs serve as supplementary instruments and their adoption can help match academic learning curricula and practices with industry needs, while also enhancing student learning in preparation for the world of work. Full article

Grounded in the knowledge-based view and the emerging logic of digital knowledge governance, this study investigates how blockchain adoption strategies reshape inter-firm knowledge-sharing and sustainable innovation. A game theory and decision-optimization model is developed to capture the interplay among blockchain cost, knowledge trust, and collaboration incentives under four adoption scenarios between knowledge creators and users. The results uncover a double-threshold mechanism: when blockchain costs are high, the technology suppresses collaboration by increasing coordination frictions; yet as costs fall below a critical level, blockchain shifts from a trust-reinforcing tool to a catalyst for co-creation efficiency and joint environmental performance. Interestingly, partial adoption can yield a trust paradox-enhancing local reliability but diminish system-wide innovation synergy. As adoption diffuses, the equilibrium dynamically evolves from non-adoption to asymmetry and eventually bilateral digital trust, producing higher social welfare and resilience. Among asymmetric modes, creator-led adoption consistently outperforms user-led adoption, underscoring the strategic value of upstream knowledge transparency. The findings extend the knowledge-based view to the context of digital trust architecture and provide actionable insights for policymakers and firms seeking to build trust-based, knowledge-driven, and digitally sustainable innovation ecosystems. Full article

This study explores how demystifying Earth Observation (EO) through co-creation pathways and local language can enhance flood resilience and environmental governance in African informal cities. Using case studies from Maiduguri and Hadejia, Nigeria, the research employed a transdisciplinary mixed-methods design combining rapid evidence assessment, surveys, participatory workshops (n = 50 stakeholders) integrating simplified Sentinel-1/2 demonstrations, indigenous knowledge mapping, and pre-/post-engagement surveys on EO familiarity. Non-expert participants were trained to interpret satellite data using local language, linking distant teleconnections with local flood experiences. The findings revealed significant gains in EO literacy and improvements in interpretive confidence, gender-inclusive participation, and policy engagement. Localizing the curriculum enabled participants to translate technical EO concepts into locally meaningful narratives, fostering cognitive empowerment and practical application in flood preparedness and advocacy. The study demonstrates that data democratization is not only a matter of open access but also of open understanding. It advances a conceptual model linking Demystification, Literacy, Empowerment, Co-Production and Resilience, positioning EO as a social technology that bridges scientific and indigenous knowledge systems. The findings contribute to debates on decolonizing environmental science and propose a potential participatory framework for integrating EO into community-based adaptation, legal accountability, and policy reform across Africa’s rapidly urbanizing landscapes. Full article

Construction sites implement various safety management activities, including toolbox meetings, risk assessments, and safety knowledge assessments, to reduce accidents. Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-based assessments are widely used to evaluate worker safety competencies. However, the effectiveness of MCQ assessments depends critically on distractor quality; incorrect options must be plausible enough to challenge uninformed respondents while remaining clearly distinguishable from knowledgeable ones. Manual distractor creation requires substantial expertise and is prone to inconsistency, whereas large language models (LLMs) often generate options that lack domain relevance. This paper proposes context-aware multipath adaptive safety scoring (CoMPASS), an algorithm that integrates construction safety domain knowledge with LLM capabilities for MCQ distractor generation. CoMPASS operates through two pathways: CoMPASS-H leverages a hierarchical hazard factor ontology for hazard identification questions, whereas CoMPASS-R uses hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for risk control questions. An evaluation using 50 real construction accident cases with a robotic assessment test (RAT) using frontier LLMs as virtual examinees demonstrated that CoMPASS-R achieved a 90% quality pass rate, whereas all baseline methods failed to meet the composite quality criteria. The proposed framework provides a scalable approach to generating assessment content that supports effective safety management at construction sites. Full article

This study examined how social media content influences value co-creation among organic product consumers through the mediating roles of environmental awareness, green truth, and environmental attitude. Grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, social media content is conceptualized as a stimulus, environmental awareness, green trust, and environmental attitude as internal organism states, and value co-creation as the behavioral response. A cross-sectional quantitative design was applied using a 20-item questionnaire administered to 739 organic-product consumers. Data were analyzed using partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that social media content does not directly affect value co-creation but significantly influences environmental awareness, green trust, and environmental attitude. Environmental awareness and green trust positively affect both environmental attitude and value co-creation, and environmental attitude emerges as the strongest direct predictor of value co-creation. These findings confirm the mediating role of cognitive and attitudinal mechanisms in transforming digital sustainability content into collaborative consumer behavior. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable consumption by integrating communication, cognitive, and attitudinal variables in a single explanatory model. Practically, the findings suggest that sustainability communication strategies in digital environments should prioritize credibility and environmental knowledge to foster consumer participation in value co-creation. Full article

This article introduces Memetic/Metaphorical Digital Twins (MDTs) as a novel extension of Digital Twin typologies by twinning conceptual schemes, complementing Industrial, Human, and Cognitive Digital Twins. MDTs embed cultural, organizational, and semiotic knowledge into digital frameworks, enabling the recombination and evolution of knowledge structures across disciplines. Drawing on Schlaile’s economic perspectives and Mavromatidis’s architectural lens of entropy and constructal thermodynamics, this study demonstrates how MDTs can address systemic challenges in communication, knowledge transfer, and design. A Digital Community Platform, under development for supporting decentralized Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS), provides the operational foundation, integrating iterative KM cycles to support knowledge co-creation. Its logic and logistics substitute the traditional document paradigm with a memetic approach by utilizing memes as replicable, adaptive knowledge units, thereby mimicking biological evolution and ecosystem resilience in digital platform environments. It aims to offer distributed, decentralized, bottom-up, affordable, knowledge-worker-centric applications prioritizing personalization, mobility, generativity, and entropy reduction; its mission is to serve a knowledge-co-creating community characterized by highly diverse individual Abilities, Contexts, Means, and Ends (ACME) facing increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous futures (VUCA). A Boundary Object Taxonomy to Omnify Memetic Storytelling (BOTTOMS) is proposed to further structure atomic units of meaning—such as memes, mythemes, narratemes, and reputemes—into a unified framework for authorship and dissemination. The article situates MDTs within a design science research paradigm, outlines current implementation progress, and identifies future developments, including AI-supported curation, personalized metrics, and expanded boundary objects. Together, these contributions position MDTs as a universal framework for adaptive, transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation. Full article

Relationship and sexuality education research has largely centred on adult perspectives, particularly in exploring home-based sexuality education. This study shifts the lens to youth voices by examining how adolescents from LGBTQ+ families in South Africa experience and actively participate in home-based sexuality conversations. Using arts-based collage-creating methods with the adolescent participants, youth interpretations of sexuality learning in LGBTQ+ family homes were explored. The findings reveal that youth are not passive recipients but active co-creators of family sexuality knowledge, developing critical literacies about heteronormativity through ongoing and responsive home-based conversations. Youth identified home as a distinct pedagogical space characterised by safety, personalisation, ongoing responsive dialogue, inclusivity of diverse sexual and gender identities, and responsiveness to their developmental needs. However, youth also navigate tensions between LGBTQ+-affirming home environments and heteronormative public spaces, developing sophisticated strategies for managing these boundaries. This study contributes empirical evidence for valuing informal sexuality education spaces and positions youth from LGBTQ+ families as knowledge producers whose experiences can inform more inclusive, dialogue-based approaches. The findings have implications for supporting family-based sexuality education and challenging adult-centric assumptions about youth capacities in sexuality learning. Full article

Authentic learning is widely recognised as critical for graduate employability, yet embedding it across curricula presents challenges, including resourcing, time for redevelopment, and managing large-scale cultural change. Scalable approaches require pilot studies to explore how authentic learning principles can be implemented and scaffolded effectively. This paper presents a case study of an Australian university’s co-created ‘Authentic Learning Blueprint’, designed to embed industry/community engaged learning throughout the learner’s experience. Phase one involved a team of educators, drawing on insights from learners, and employer feedback to co-develop the Blueprint. The Blueprint allows learners to progress through scaffolded stages, Novice, Associate, and Emerging Practitioner, gaining discipline-specific and industry-ready skills through real-world project briefs and work-integrated learning experiences. The Blueprint distributes teaching and learning responsibilities across learners, educators, and industry/community in a three-way partnership model. Learning experiences were designed to reflect knowledge and skills relevant to professional practice. In phase two, the proof-of-concept was applied to two design units, one undergraduate and one postgraduate, and we tested acceptance and scalability, with positive student feedback. Phase three showcases how the Blueprint then informed curriculum redesign within the design school’s flagship course, including trials of ungraded assessment to further support authentic learning. The findings demonstrate that a co-created, scaffolded approach integrating industry-engaged experiences from enrolment to graduation can bridge the gap between academia and professional practice. This study contributes a practical framework for embedding authentic learning at scale, offering insights for institutions seeking to enhance employability through curriculum innovation. Full article

This research aims to record hotel owners’ perceptions as subjective measures of the degree of integration of local traditional cheese varieties in the hospitality sector. Within the context of cheese tourism, this specific type of alternative tourism is operationalized through B2B co-creation among tourism businesses and cheese factories, serving as a framework for perceived business development. Specifically, this study fills a gap in the literature by exploring the managerial views on the current state of cheese tourism in relation to the entrepreneurship strengthening, the opportunities, and challenges that could favor cooperation between the two sectors. Descriptive and inductive statistics were conducted, collecting primary data from hotels in the Peloponnese, Greece, which has a long tradition of cheese production. Regional tradition and star rating determine the integration of local cheese. While 4–5-star hotels leverage cheese heritage for differentiation and experiential services, lower-end hotels face cost and supply chain barriers, requiring supporting strategies and cross-sector partnerships. The study offers original knowledge for the development of specific strategic proposals for the use of cheese tourism through co-creation for business development of hotels. Future research is recommended to record the views of all stakeholders and correlate them with objective financial performance. Full article

This paper addresses the growing sustainability fatigue in advanced economies. By analyzing Amazon’s artificial intelligence (AI) agent strategy as a model for “Rational Sustainability”, the study identifies a self-propagating growth trajectory that reconciles economic rationality with value creation. It provides a theoretical and empirical framework to overcome technological saturation and strategic homogenization in the generative AI era. To ensure methodological transparency, the analysis was conducted through two distinct stages: (i) Techno-econometric analysis (macro-level): Using an empirical dataset of 160 countries (40 advanced, 70 emerging, and 50 developing) from 2014 to 2024, the study utilized regression models to quantify the correlations and elasticities between three key proxies: GDP per capita (Y); the Human Capital Index (HCI), representing Institutional Capacity Building (ICB); and the E-Government Development Index (EGI), representing Endogenous Institutional Evolution (EIE). (ii) Hybrid AI analysis (case study): Utilizing process-tracing research, the paper examines Amazon’s R&D structure and AI agent strategy. This qualitative and structural analysis identifies how Amazon co-evolves EIE and ICB to conceptualize tacit knowledge and operationalize it into a competitive advantage. The findings reveal a marked disruption of the co-evolutionary mechanism in advanced economies, where the elasticity of EGI to GDP has declined since 2019, leading to a withdrawal state. In contrast, Amazon’s model demonstrates that the co-evolution of EIE and ICB creates a self-propagating growth engine. This research concludes that “Rational Sustainability”—grounded in evidence, economic rationality, and clear trade-offs—offers a viable pathway for revitalizing sustainability strategies in mature digital economies. Full article

Digital transformation demands schools to act as learning organizations in order to rethink and reform their structures and practices. Using a mixed-methods design (quantitative analysis of code co-occurrences within 60 semi-structured group interviews and qualitative structural content analysis), the study examines how teachers who act as promoters for digital transformation facilitate organizational learning (OL) processes and how these processes can be described. While five OL processes emerge (collective sense making, knowledge creation and transfer, evaluation and feedback, experimentation and piloting, and external cooperation and knowledge import), each process is mainly shaped by a distinct promoter activity. Findings reveal that school-wide systematic structural conditions for OL processes, for instance formal evaluation and scheduled collaboration time for the whole teaching staff, are scarce, leaving many learning processes informal and project-based. The study concludes that sustainable digital transformation requires schools to institutionalize adequate structural conditions for OL activities and to empower promoters through both top-down mandates and bottom-up support, ensuring all OL processes become habituated routines. Full article

Phase 6 of the Sophimatics framework represents the culmination of a comprehensive research program integrating philosophical wisdom with computational sophistication to address fundamental challenges in artificial intelligence systems. Building upon the Complex-Time Recursive Model established in Phase 5, this phase introduces a human-in-the-loop iterative refinement methodology specifically designed for security-critical applications. Through systematic validation across real-world cybersecurity datasets, including NSL-KDD and CICIDS2017, alongside healthcare privacy scenarios using MIMIC-III derived data, we demonstrate that collaborative human–AI co-creation significantly enhances system performance across multiple dimensions, including interpretive accuracy, contextual fidelity, and ethical consistency. The proposed architecture implements three complementary feedback mechanisms: symbolic knowledge base refinement through expert-provided ontological corrections, neural parameter optimization guided by human evaluation of ethical alignment, and dynamic weight adjustment for value-system integration. Experimental results show substantial improvements over baseline approaches, with intrusion detection accuracy reaching 98.7% on NSL-KDD while maintaining 94.3% privacy preservation scores as measured by differential privacy guarantees. The healthcare privacy experiments demonstrate 97.2% sensitive attribute protection with only 2.1% utility loss compared to non-private baselines. Critical analysis reveals that human oversight mechanisms reduce false positive rates in ethical constraint violations by 67% compared to purely automated systems, while convergence analysis indicates stable performance after approximately 12–15 iterations across diverse application domains. These findings establish Phase 6 as an essential bridge between theoretical Sophimatics foundations and practical deployment in privacy-sensitive contexts, demonstrating that philosophically grounded AI architectures can achieve superior performance when augmented with structured human feedback loops. The work contributes both methodological innovations in human–AI collaboration and empirical validation, demonstrating the viability of Sophimatics principles for addressing contemporary challenges in data protection and cybersecurity. Full article

The transition towards circular economy models increasingly depends on entrepreneurial initiatives capable of integrating economic viability with social and environmental objectives. However, existing research provides limited explanation of how sustainable entrepreneurs mobilise shared knowledge and social innovation to navigate tensions between competing institutional logics in circular contexts. This study clarifies the role of shared knowledge and social innovation by explaining how circular sustainable value is created through circular business model development. This article develops an integrative framework based on a structured synthesis of the literature on sustainable entrepreneurship, social innovation, shared knowledge, institutional logic, and circular business models. The study does not rely on primary empirical data but focuses on theoretical integration across complementary research to advance conceptual understanding of circular value creation. The article proposes a three-stage framework explaining how shared knowledge is transformed into circular sustainable value through social innovation mechanisms. It illustrates how diverse knowledge inputs interact with institutional logics, how social innovation processes translate these inputs into collaborative practices, and how circular business models generate multidimensional value under conditions of institutional complexity. The framework offers guidance for entrepreneurs, policymakers, and ecosystem actors involved in circular economy transitions and helps clarify how collaborative knowledge practices and social innovation processes can support the design and implementation of circular business models. This article does not empirically test the proposed framework. The findings are limited to theoretical development. Future research is encouraged to examine the framework empirically through longitudinal case studies, comparative designs, or mixed-method approaches, and to operationalise its key constructs. Full article

A commitment to co-production in which social workers co-create research, knowledge, and practice with people from multi-disciplinary backgrounds and people with direct lived experience of accessing services, who are termed experts by experience (EbEs), underpins social work ethics and values. EbEs are understood to be people who use their experiences of accessing health and social care services to influence and change all forms of social work. Despite this, EbEs have, to date, had limited involvement in teamwork in social work practice, although their contributions to social work education, research and practice innovations, as peers in the team, are of growing significance. A narrative review was undertaken to explore the gap in the routine involvement of EbEs in different forms of social work practice-based teamwork. This narrative review identified three over-arching themes to understand how EbEs contribute to social work teamwork: involvement in team relationships and in decision-making, involvement in knowledge production, and involvement in health and social care practice innovations. However, it must be acknowledged that the everyday involvement of EbEs in social work, including in multi-disciplinary teamwork, apart from small pockets of mental health practice, such as peer support workers, is lacking. It appears that EbEs are involved in practice innovations, rather than everyday practice; therefore, despite social work’s political and ideological commitment to co-production, it is less advanced than is often claimed. Full article