DESIGN INNOVATION PROCESS RESPONDS TO UNMET NEEDS CREATED BY COVID-19

This article presents a recent case study of the development and bringing to market of a new product through the design process of the author, Dan Brown, Ph.D. (Brown Sr.), a product design practitioner and academic with over 40 years of innovation experience, and his son Brown Jr., a business entrepreneur. This case explores how they collaborated as an entrepreneurial team to design and commercialize a novel PPE face shield using Brown Sr.’s Differentiation by Design research process. The article focuses on how design creates value and competitive advantage in markets by examining a recent case study of successful new product development arising from the COVID-19 pandemic -- providing adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).When seeking advantage in the practice of innovation, there is a creative quest that product design and development practitioners must address through their design process. Truly innovative and competitive new products are rare, as their design efforts often fall short of the original design aims. Brown Sr.’s past research has revealed that this creative quest often appears at the intersection of the existing knowledge boundaries of the user as well as the many less prominent stakeholders in the new product experience.Often framed as unmet stakeholder needs, this knowledge boundary appears when existing practice knowledge proves inadequate, but the development objective remains. These knowledge gap opportunities appear through detailed research of the problem, existing solution benchmarks, and stakeholders. They can also appear when the designer-researcher looks for them specifically. Finding these knowledge gaps and creatively conceiving advantaged solutions into competitively advantaged spaces or white spaces is the goal of this design process.This Case shares successful marketplace outcomes with Brown Sr.’s past research cases resulting from their design and development approaches. With a combined quantitative and qualitative research focus, this autobiographical case study builds on the insights available to the researcher. Autobiographic cases provide unique access to rich quantitative evidence of the design narrative and marketing histories gained from an insider’s view of industry practice.Competitive advantage and its role in innovation in the real-world laboratory of the marketplace provide the context for researching the process of this design-focused strategy. The process starts with reframing the fundamental problem, which was, in this case, how to rapidly produce millions of face shields in a matter of months; the Browns teamed up to create a viable and scalable shield solution for the masses.

Novel Use of Low-Dose Radiotherapy to Modulate the Tumor Microenvironment of Liver Metastases

Despite multiple therapeutic approaches, the presence of liver metastases carries a guarded prognosis, urgently necessitating further clinical and scientific research to develop curative interventions. The liver is an immunoprivileged organ that suppresses the effectiveness of immunotherapies in patients with hepatic metastases. Cancer immunotherapies have been successfully bolstered by low-dose radiotherapy (LDRT), which is capable of reprogramming the tumor microenvironment (TME) from an immunosuppressive to an immunostimulatory one. Likewise, LDRT may be able to revoke the immune privilege enjoyed by the liver, permitting successful immunotherapies there. Here, we first review challenges that face the treatment of liver metastases. We next outline emerging preclinical and clinical evidence supporting enhanced systemic tumor control of LDRT in the context of cancer immunotherapy. Finally, we will discuss the rationale of combining liver-directed LDRT with immunostimulatory strategies to overcome immune resistance and achieve better clinical response. This notion is supported by a recent case study in which a patient who had progressed following T cell therapy experienced a complete response after LDRT to the liver.

Boosting Production in the Llanos Orientales Colombia Basin, with an Approach to the Usage of the Completion Fluid. A Recent Case Study

This arcticle highlights the importance of a systematic step change approach to the formulation of completion fluids in the Llanos Basin (LLAB), Colombia, when formation-freshwater is to be used as control - completion (C&C) fluid. The results demonstrate that the process used reduced the formation damage statistics from 41% of the wells drilled to only 16%, boosting production and establishing a best practice for future drilling and completion (D&C) campaigns in the region. An initial sample of 19 wells was considered to evaluate the damage caused by using formation-freshwater as C&C fluid. Formation-freshwater was selected only considering the fluid density (wellbore pressure), ignoring the negative effects it can have on formation damage. 41% of the wells were damaged, as evidenced by pressure build up. Some of the main damages on the pay-zone in an oil well are due to emulsion blocking, change in wettability, swelling and migration of clays, incompatibility of fluids, and scale formation. A detailed design of completion fluids has a positive influence over well productivity by mitigating formation damage before starting the production stage. The methodology used was aimed at designing the C&C fluid through a step-by-step approach, consisting of: 1) Laboratory tests supported with mineralogical data and oil and formation water properties and 2) Physical-chemical analysis of reservoir fluids and water for mixing purposes. The process involved testing different formulations and then their implementation in the field. The initial tests were conducted in a total of 5 wells in 4 fields. Changes were identified in the formulation to achieve optimal fluid design for each field and then the selected fluid was extended to a total of 24 wells. This was the first time a thoroughly designed completion fluid was used in the region. The results point towards the need to include surfactants, mutual solvents, and brines to substantially reduce formation damage. The application of new completion fluids enabled the operational teams to optimize the process by steps. The implementation of customized completion fluid reduced the formation damage as evidenced through productivity analyses and pressure build up tests. Only 16% of the wells presented formation damage. The process applied to reduce formation damage of the Llanos Basin led to a systematic approach for the analysis stage, which may be applied in other areas, where the utilization of formation-freshwater is an issue. The particularly short time frames and best practices derived from the learning curve of this case are worth to be shared with other operators.

919Step-by-step guidance on prospective meta-analyses

Focus of Presentation In a prospective meta-analysis (PMA), studies are included before their results are known. This can reduce risk of publication bias and selective outcome reporting, and enables researchers to harmonise their research efforts. Despite rising numbers, there is little guidance on how to conduct PMA. We, the Cochrane PMA Methods Group, developed step-by-step guidance based on a scoping review, and expert opinions and experiences. Each step is illustrated with a recent case study. Findings We describe seven steps for conducting PMA. After developing a protocol (Steps 1), a systematic search for eligible planned/ongoing studies should be conducted, including a search of registries, medical databases and contacting stakeholders (Step 2-3). These studies are then invited to form a collaboration (Step 4), ideally including a steering and data analysis committee. Next, important study features such as common core outcomes and confounders are agreed upon (Step 5). This reduces heterogeneity and increases the number of available outcomes for meta-analysis. Certainty of evidence is assessed by adapting tools such as GRADE (Step 6). Results should be reported using adapted versions of reporting tools such as PRISMA (Step 7). Conclusions/Implications PMA reduce many problems of traditional retrospective systematic reviews and meta-analysis. Updated guidance and recent technical advances will help increase their numbers further. Key messages PMA are ‘next generation systematic reviews’ that allow for greatly improved use of data, whilst reducing bias and research waste. This step-by-step guidance will enable more researchers to conduct successful PMA.

An Insider’s Take on Data Curation: Context, Quality, and Efficiency

This commentary describes how context, quality, and efficiency guide data curation at the University of Michigan's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). These three principals manifest from necessity. A primary purpose of this work is to facilitate secondary data analysis but in order to so, the context of data must be documented. Since a mistake in this work would render any results published from the data inaccurate, quality is paramount. However, optimizing data quality can be time consuming, so automative curation practices are necessary for efficiency. The implementation of these principles (context, quality, and efficiency) is demonstrated by a recent case study with a high-profile dataset. As the nature of data work changes, these principles will continue to guide the practice of curation and establish valuable skills for future curators to cultivate.

MASP Methodology as an effective tool for improving organizational processes

The objective of this work is to demonstrate the methodology and analysis of problem solving and its effectiveness for the improvement of the organizational processes proposing that the method can be applied in any sector of the market and not exclusively in the industries. This will be done through the use of search for articles related to the topic addressed in different sectors of the market and a comparative table showing the results after the implementation of the method. The Masp steps will consist of 8 phases that are related to the 4 steps of the PDCA cycle, which are: problem identification, observation, analysis, action plan, action, verification, standardization and conclusion. For the development of the research, the bibliographic source was used with the use of articles and books to understand the topic applied in general and specifically based on recent case study articles to evaluate its effectiveness and flexibility.

An Extended Model for Disaster Relief Operations Used on the Hagibis Typhoon Case in Japan

This paper presents a generalization of a previously defined lexicographical dynamic flow model based on multi-objective optimization for solving the multi-commodity aid distribution problem in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The model considers distribution of the two major commodities of food and medicine, and seven different objectives, and the model can easily be changed to include more commodities in addition to other and different priorities between the objectives. The first level in the model is to maximize the amount of aid distributed under the given constraints. Keeping the optimal result from the first level, the second level can be solved considering objectives such as the cost of the operation, the time of the operation, the equity of distribution for each type of humanitarian aid, the priority of the designated nodes, the minimum arc reliability, and the global reliability of the route. The model is tested on a recent case study based on the Hagibis typhoon disaster in Japan in 2019. The paper presents a solution for the distribution problem and provides a driving schedule for vehicles for delivering the commodities from depots to the regional centers in need for humanitarian aid.

News Narratives across Borders: The Convergence of Interests and Patterns of Meaning in International Media Coverage of Disaster

Shared narratives emerge across transnational news, circulating meaning and contributing to how publics process and make sense of significant issues and events (Cottle, 2014; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen, Cottle, 2012). These narratives are also reflected in the spaces made possible by digital communication technologies, including social media, and the through the formation of transnational discursive communities. Disasters, or at least those that meet the criteria of proximity for Western media (Benthall, 1993; Gans, 1980), are exemplars of such global media events, where analogous narratives or frames are rendered in media coverage across national borders. The evidence from studies of national media, however, suggests that journalistic narratives to disaster tend to reinforce a discourse of difference between spectators and sufferers through the representations of those communities and societies affected by disaster (Bankoff, 2011; Joye, 2009). This chapter considers how difference is reinforced in transnational news narratives of disaster through the circulation of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the prominence of stereotypes are a consequence of the processes of domestication that shape the characteristics of news and the dominant news flows in the global media system. More specifically, that to enable accounts to resonate with audiences, news is often packaged and adapted to a national context (Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh, 1992), which can be achieved by using familiar images of different societies and cultures to provide a link for audiences when covering distant events (Tanikawa, 2017). At the same time, as news and information becomes increasingly deterritorialised the overlaying of cultural frames to inform and explain a disaster in one national context may evolve across media coverage in others, contributing to the development of shared narratives to a single event. This is facilitated, for example, by the flow of information from news agencies and international news organisations, in particular those emanating from the core (the West) to the periphery (Wu, 2003). To elucidate these mediation processes across borders, the chapter will draw on one recent case study of disaster journalism to consider how essentialist notions of Japanese culture emerged as a unified narrative across international news coverage of the tripartite disaster of March 2011, reflecting its position as a dominant Western discourse on Japan.

Within small things. Reflections on techno-social boundaries between prehistory and recent past during a Lebanese fieldwork

The village of Qleiaat, in the Mount Lebanon, has recently been the centre of archaeological activities aimed at studying late prehistoric and Early Bronze Age vestiges. But from the very beginning this research has also tried to investigate with purely archaeological means the remains of the recent past of the village, especially the pithoi used in the 19th-20th centuries for food storage, and the ruins left by violent clashes that took place in Qleiaat at the end of the Lebanese civil war. Through a reflection on the possibility of reconstructing physical frontiers starting from the archaeology of fossil techniques, this paper applies to a recent case-study an approach used until now only for prehistoric material culture. The aim is to recognize the frontier between the militias having clashed in Qleiaat in 1988-1990 on the basis of the chaînes opératoires of the pithoi.

The 'Inter-Disciplined' Exhibition - A Case Study

This article contributes to the analysis and transparency of the practical processes of interdisciplinary exhibition-making. It identifies the academic discourse on interdisciplinarity as having the potential to provide a meaningful input to the formation of theory on temporary exhibition-making. The subject of enquiry is a recent case study from Germany. It investigates the relationships and decision-making processes that underpinned the production of the interdisciplinary exhibition Weather Report – About Weather Culture and Climate Science (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2017/18), which combined curatorial perspectives from the fields of art, cultural history and science. It traces the curatorial process, from forming an interdisciplinary team and negotiating conceptual ideas and methods, to object choices, interpretation and exhibition design. I argue that the complexity of interdisciplinary exhibition-making calls for a more precise and practice-oriented application of what is an often generalized notion of interdisciplinarity. By discerning between multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity, and understanding the three terms as offering different qualities of interaction and integration, I suggest using these terms as a finer vocabulary for a detailed description and analysis of the practical processes of collaborative exhibition-making. Taking interdisciplinarity seriously also inevitably leads to the question of institutional consequences.