Cancer Clinic Redesign: Opportunities for Resource Optimization

Ambulatory cancer centers face fluctuating patient demand and deploy specialized personnel who have variable availability. This undermines operational stability through misalignment of re-sources to patient needs, resulting in overscheduled clinics, high rebooking rates, budget deficits, and wait times exceeding provincial targets. We describe how deploying a Learning Health System framework led to operational improvements within the entire ambulatory center. Known methods of value stream mapping, operations research and statistical process control were applied to achieve organizational high performance that is data-informed, agile and adaptive. Caseload management by disease site emerged as an essential construct that incorporates disease site teams into adaptive, reliable care units, clinically and operationally. This supported clus-tering interdisciplinary teams around groups of patients with similar attributes, while allowing for quarterly recalibration. Systematic efforts were made in the negotiation required to im-plement changes that impacted physicians, nurses, clerks, and administrators. Feedback mecha-nisms were created with learnings curated and disseminated by a core team. The change aligned financial expenditures to the regional demand for specialized services and smoothed clinical operations across 5 weekdays and 2 centers. The impact was predictable, optimized expenditures, increased efficiencies across human and physical resource deployment and improved disease site collaboration in patient care.

The legitimacy of corporate entrepreneurship: a structured literature review

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is essential for today’s firms and currently a topic of considerable interest within the business community. Although the magnitude of related studies has increased over the last years, research on CE is missing an integrated concept and a research agenda for understanding the dynamics of resource deployment and withdrawal, resulting from legitimacy within the organization. The objective of this study is to examine the determinants influencing the provision and withdrawal of resources in the context of corporate entrepreneurship and identify the underlying strategies for gaining legitimacy. Analyzing more than 30 years of research, we provide a multidimensional framework synthesizing the state-of-the-art of resource allocation and withdrawal in CE. Our findings suggest that CE entities undertaking legitimation efforts, to be perceived as a meaningful and trustworthy organizational element and receive active and passive support, is very important. Based on the structured literature review, we propose a legitimacy perspective on the resource dynamics in CE settings, to further advance our understanding of resource deployment and withdrawal within organizations.

What Can Neural Activity Tell Us About Cognitive Resources in Aging?

A reduction in cognitive resources has been originally proposed to account for age-related decrements in several cognitive domains. According to this view, aging limits the pool of available cognitive supplies: Compared to younger adults, elderly exhaust the resources more rapidly as task difficulty increases, hence a dramatic performance drop. Neurophysiological indexes (e.g., BOLD response and EEG activity) may be instrumental to quantify the amount of such cognitive resources in the brain and to pinpoint the stage of stimulus processing where the decrement in age-related resources is evident. However, as we discuss in this mini-review, the most recent studies on the neurophysiological markers of age-related changes lack a consistent coupling between neural and behavioral effects, which casts doubt on the advantage of measuring neural indexes to study resource deployment in aging. For instance, in the working memory (WM) domain, recent cross-sectional studies found varying patterns of concurrent age-related brain activity, ranging from equivalent to reduced and increased activations of old with respect to younger adults. In an attempt to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent findings of brain-behavior coupling, we focus on the contribution of confounding sources of variability and propose ways to control for them. Finally, we suggest an alternative perspective to explain age-related effects that implies a qualitative (instead of or along with a quantitative) difference in the deployment of cognitive resources in aging.

Desert Locust Schistocerca gregaria Forskål (Acrididae): Biology, Management and Strategies: A Review

Early 2020 witnessed the emergence of global agrarian crisis with the widespread burgeoning of destructive migratory pest, Desert Locust (Schistocerca gregaria) in East Africa, Southwest Asia, Pakistan and India. Characterised by the ability to eat ravenously, breed exponentially and migrate rapidly; locust swarms has led to substantial agrarian disaster. The current official strategy is to control the upsurges to evade plague. Though it may seem attractive and efficient, it is sensible only if the numbers are relatively low. The socio-economic and environmental challenges posed by the unprecedented locust outbreak has prompt the scientists worldwide to emanate an effective preventive management strategies that rely on updated knowledge of pest biology, ecology and behaviour along with efficient monitoring, data management, analysis, forecasting, resource deployment and control techniques. In addition, the integrated network of field teams, decision makers, analysts, rural governing bodies and farmers potentially offers better compliance of pest management strategies.

Intervention of resource allocation strategies on spatial spread of epidemic

Medical resources are crucial in mitigating the epidemic, especially during pandemics such as the ongoing COVID-19. Thereby, reasonable resource deployment inevitably plays a significant role in suppressing the epidemic under limited resources. When an epidemic breaks out, people can produce resources for self-protection, or donate resources to help others. That is, the exchange of resources also affects the transmission between individuals, thus, altering the epidemic dynamics. To understand factors on resource deployment and the interplay between resource and transmission we construct a metapopulation network model with resource allocation. Our results indicate actively or promptly donating resources is not helpful to suppress the epidemic under both homogeneous population distribution (HOD) and heterogeneous population distribution (HED). Besides, strengthening the speed of resource production can significantly increase the recovery rate so that reduce the final outbreak size. These results may provide policy guidance towards epidemic containment.

INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: EVIDENCE FROM EMERGING MARKETS

<p>This article answers calls for research into the field of international entrepreneurship (henceforth IE) in the context of emerging economies. In doing so, the research simultaneously heeds appeals for greater methodological variety to broaden the scope of inquiry in the field of international business research. Drawing on internationalization and entrepreneurial process modelling theory, this multiple-case study provides unique insights into the phenomena of IE in emerging market settings. It elaborates upon the processes behind IE’s discovery of opportunities; it extends our understanding of IEs resource deployment; and it identifies sources of competitive advantages among IEs in emerging markets. Insights gained from this empirical study were translated into propositions corroborating, elaborating, and challenging existing theory and assumptions. Above all, this research questions our understanding of institutional and transaction cost theory in the internationalization processes of IEs.<br></p>

INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: EVIDENCE FROM EMERGING MARKETS

<p>This article answers calls for research into the field of international entrepreneurship (henceforth IE) in the context of emerging economies. In doing so, the research simultaneously heeds appeals for greater methodological variety to broaden the scope of inquiry in the field of international business research. Drawing on internationalization and entrepreneurial process modelling theory, this multiple-case study provides unique insights into the phenomena of IE in emerging market settings. It elaborates upon the processes behind IE’s discovery of opportunities; it extends our understanding of IEs resource deployment; and it identifies sources of competitive advantages among IEs in emerging markets. Insights gained from this empirical study were translated into propositions corroborating, elaborating, and challenging existing theory and assumptions. Above all, this research questions our understanding of institutional and transaction cost theory in the internationalization processes of IEs.<br></p>

Webcare as a signal: exhaustive-selective webcare strategy and brand evaluation

Purpose Keeping in mind the growing significance of online reviews, management of responses to the customer reviews – webcare – is becoming important in recent times. How a firm responds to online reviews can send a signal to the readers of the reviews contributing to their brand evaluations. From a strategic perspective, a firm should decide if they should respond to all reviews or respond to only a select few reviews. This study aims to provide an understanding of how exhaustive and selective webcare influence brand evaluations. It also explores the role of review balance and review frame, which potentially act as moderators, on such influences. Design/methodology/approach Three scenario-based experiments were used to manipulate the webcare strategy (exhaustive-selective) and the potential moderators (review balance and review frame). The 910 participants of the single-stage experiments were identified using an online panel managed by UK-based Prolific Academic. Findings Exhaustive webcare is found to be the most effective strategy for influencing brand evaluations in all conditions. Also, two interesting results were found, which can have practical implications. A selective negative strategy is as effective as an exhaustive webcare in almost all cases, and a selective positive webcare is as good as not having a webcare in nearly all cases. Changes in webcare effectiveness due to the influence of review balance and review frame were established. Research limitations/implications With the review reader perspective and focus on brand management, this study may trigger enquiries into effects of webcare strategies on brand evaluations and other outcomes such as word-of-mouth. The interaction effects of the various strategies adopted together on brand evaluation and loyalty have not been explored and would be of interest to academicians and managers. Practical implications Firms need to plan a careful resource deployment while responding to the online consumer reviews as responding to a select few reviews may yield the same effects as that of exhaustive webcare. Brand managers may find responding only to positive reviews futile, as it could be as good as having no webcare. Also, the strategy of responding to reviews needs to be adapted based on the online review platform where the set in which the review is read is different. Originality/value This is one of the few studies focusing on the effects of webcare on brand evaluations from a review reader perspective as against the dominant reviewer perspective. This research also presents hitherto unexplored effects of an exhaustive-selective webcare strategy on brand evaluations.