Search Results (7)

To address the pressing challenges of quality and sustainability in agricultural product supply chains, this paper proposes a multi-stakeholder collaborative governance framework. Adopting the perspective of collaborative governance and sustainability, the paper develops an evolutionary game model of the Chinese agricultural product supply chain. This model involves four key stakeholders: agricultural enterprises, the government, NGOs, and consumers. It integrates sustainability principles to ensure that the decisions of each stakeholder contribute to the quality and safety of agricultural products while also promoting long-term environmental and social well-being. The simulation results demonstrate the critical importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration in strengthening governance and promoting sustainability. Based on these findings, the government is advised to implement technology-driven oversight mechanisms, such as AI-based inspections and blockchain traceability. Additionally, a tiered penalty system should be established, escalating penalties for repeat offenders. Regulatory cost-sharing mechanisms can also help ensure continuous enforcement without imposing excessive financial burdens on any single party. NGOs play a vital role in exposing corporate violations and can be more effective through targeted financial support and crowdsourced monitoring platforms. Consumers, as active participants in governance, should be incentivized with reward-based reporting systems and verified compliance feedback, which influence enterprise reputation. Public–private sustainability partnerships and real-time transparency platforms can further facilitate active participation from all stakeholders. By implementing these measures, the regulatory framework can evolve from traditional enforcement to a dynamic, data-driven governance model, fostering long-term sustainability and risk reduction in agricultural production. Full article

This article discusses issues related to sustainable heritage management in China and problematises two dichotomies in heritage practices and research: the ‘Eastern/Western’ approaches and the tangible–intangible divide. It addresses these issues by examining the dramatic ‘make-over’ project of Guangrenwang Temple in Shanxi Province, China. The ‘make-over’ project transformed a small rural temple with a ninth-century timber structure into an architectural history museum, with a combination of private, public, and crowd-sourced funding. A real-estate corporation played a significant role in the project’s initiative and organised a large-scale national and international publicity campaign around the project. Previously unknown to most laypeople in China, the temple attracted much debate since the project’s completion, revolving around its ‘cultural legitimacy’, the design’s appropriateness, the sustainability of the revitalisation, and the implications of the project to its ‘heritage value’ and authenticity. This article traces the opinions, actions, and effects of the temple’s heritage assemblage and reveals the causal powers contributing to the emergence and transformation of associations within. It further questions the project team’s claims regarding the project’s effects on the historic setting’s authenticity and its long-term social impact on the relationship between the temple and its community. It reveals five controversies regarding the choice of its curation theme, architectural language, decision-making, and management models. The complexities manifested in the actors’ actions and effects demonstrate the ambiguous boundaries between the tangible and the intangible, and the perceived ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ approaches. Full article

Improvements in communication and networking technologies have transformed people’s lives and organizations’ activities. Web 2.0 innovation has provided a variety of hybridized applications and tools that have changed enterprises’ functional and communication processes. People use numerous platforms to broaden their social contacts, select items, execute duties, and learn new things. Context: Crowdsourcing is an internet-enabled problem-solving strategy that utilizes human–computer interaction to leverage the expertise of people to achieve business goals. In crowdsourcing approaches, three main entities work in collaboration to solve various problems. These entities are requestors (job providers), platforms, and online users. Tasks are announced by requestors on crowdsourcing platforms, and online users, after passing initial screening, are allowed to work on these tasks. Crowds participate to achieve various rewards. Motivation: Crowdsourcing is gaining importance as an alternate outsourcing approach in the software engineering industry. Crowdsourcing application development involves complicated tasks that vary considerably from the micro-tasks available on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. To obtain the tangible opportunities of crowdsourcing in the realm of software development, corporations should first grasp how this technique works, what problems occur, and what factors might influence community involvement and co-creation. Online communities have become more popular recently with the rise in crowdsourcing platforms. These communities concentrate on specific problems and help people with solving and managing these problems. Objectives: We set three main goals to research crowd interaction: (1) find the appropriate characteristics of social crowd utilized for effective software crowdsourcing, (2) highlight the motivation of a crowd for virtual tasks, and (3) evaluate primary participation reasons by assessing various crowds using Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS method. Conclusion: We developed a decision support system to examine the appropriate reasons of crowd participation in crowdsourcing. Rewards and employments were evaluated as the primary motives of crowds for accomplishing tasks on crowdsourcing platforms, knowledge sharing was evaluated as the third reason, ranking was the fourth, competency was the fifth, socialization was sixth, and source of inspiration was the seventh. Full article

Crowdsourced deliveries or crowdshipping is identified in recent literature as an emerging urban freight transport solution, aiming at reducing delivery costs, congestion, and environmental impacts. By leveraging the pervasive use of mobile technology, crowdshipping is an emerging solution of the sharing economy in the transport domain, as parcels are delivered by commuters rather than corporations. The objective of this research is to evaluate the impacts of crowdshipping through alternative scenarios that consider various levels of demand and adoption by public transport users who act as crowdshippers, based on a case study example in the city of Volos, Greece. This is achieved through the establishment of a tailored evaluation framework and a city-scale urban freight traffic microsimulation model. Results show that crowdshipping has the potential to mitigate last-mile delivery impacts and effectively contribute to improving the system’s performance. Full article

As data of aircraft movements have become freely accessible on a large scale through means of crowdsourcing, their open source intelligence (OSINT) value has been illustrated in many different domains. Potentially sensitive movements of all stakeholders outside commercial aviation are potentially affected, from corporate jets to military and government aircraft. Until now, this OSINT value was shown only on historical data, where automated analysis on flight destinations has been effective to find information on potential mergers & acquisition deals or diplomatic relationships between governments. In practice, obtaining such information as early as possible is crucial. Hence, in this work, we predict the destinations of state and corporate aircraft on live data, while the targets are still in the air. We use machine learning algorithms to predict the area of landing up to 2 h in advance. We evaluate our approach on more than 500,000 flights during 2018 obtained from the OpenSky Network. Full article

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a real challenge for courier companies on a global scale and has affected customer behavior worldwide. This paper attempts to propound a new methodology in order to predict the effect of courier companies’ e-commerce on customers’ risk perception regarding their online behavior after the outbreak, and the final effect of their behavior on the global ranking of the company’s website, utilizing passive crowdsourcing data from five world-leading courier companies as representative examples of their respective business sectors. The results will allow supply chain risk management (SCRM) managers to make effective strategic decisions regarding the efficient allocation of resources to mitigate the corporate risk to their organization during a novel crisis. In our paper, we monitored five key performance indicators (KPIs) over a 24-month period (March 2019–February 2021) as the first of a suggested three-level analysis process using statistical analysis and fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques. We propose that courier service companies should manage the risk of a potential novel crisis by improving the reputation and brand name of the company, since customers tend to trust an established brand. Full article

Crowdsourcing provides companies with access to widespread knowledge pools and constitutes a well-established inbound open innovation practice. More recently, some companies have introduced the approach of open innovation within their company boundaries. Using internal crowdsourcing (IC), companies can apply open innovation principles to overcome information silos. Multinational corporations often have thousands of employees around the globe, embedded in divisions and virtually separated from each other. Although a large proportion of companies nowadays use social IT to mitigate problems of distance, only a few companies can access their employees’ wisdom effectively—let alone efficiently. With almost 100,000 employees worldwide, SAP possesses significant resources, which IC can help to unlock and develop. In this business case study, we report the findings of our investigation of five IC implementations at SAP. Based on interviews and secondary data, we analyze the process and related governance tasks of the different IC approaches. The applications for IC range from the search for new and sustainable business models to an approach that uses crowdsourcing for the competence development of SAP’s employees. Our paper contributes to our understanding of open innovation and crowdsourcing by conceptualizing IC as a form of internal open innovation. Further, from our observations, we derive six lessons learned to support managers in implementing and executing IC initiatives successfully. Our findings will subsequently help managers to increase the innovation capabilities of their companies, create more sustainable business models, further the entrepreneurial mindset of their employees and thus provide a competitive advantage. Full article