Keynote Speakers

Cristina Sousa

ISCTE – Campus Universitário de Lisboa 

Topic of Speech and outline to be known.

 

Jay Lebowitz 

Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, USA

“Applying Knowledge Management, Intuition-based Decision Making, and Analytics in These COVID-19 Times”

 

Julee Hefner 

The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, USA

What needs to happen in the new Knowledge Economy?

For more than a decade, dramatic changes have constantly been shaping the business environment. It used to be true that a worker could expect to have one career and develop one set of skills for their working lifetime. Job mobility was limited. Organizations updated systems could remain stable and competitive, with little attention paid to workers. Organizations often did not realize the impact of intangible, tacit assets within the knowledge worker.

As organizations became more globally based, they depended increasingly on explicit assets, and they were left behind. The new knowledge worker has become autonomous. The new asset in this economy is knowledge. Changes in the knowledge economy are seen in three areas: first, within the knowledge worker – intellectual capital, second, the process of remaining sustainable – updating competencies, and third, the interrelationship of the global marketplace.

The need to constantly update knowledge within organizations for strategic and competitive advantage requires a new mindset and adoption of unlearning models.

In this keynote presentation, the new leader will be expected to create an environment to support knowledge workers. It is the process of challenging old assumptions, updating the current mind-set, and collaborative exchange within teams, suppliers and customers that will allow for sustainability. We explore how we can make this mindset shift and other changes to remain competitive in today’s everchanging knowledge economy.

 

Luz Maria  Gonzalez

 Bosch, Paris, France.

Topic and outline to be announced soon.

 

Nadir Kolachi

 University of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Different theories, emerging concepts and diversified applications in modern education (A case of evaluations & recommendations)

_Contents & Contexts
_Theories & Concepts
_Practical Corporate methods
_Technology integration in learning
_Interdisciplinary Industry linkages & curriculum collaboration
_Professional development with ethical sense of care & ownership

The speech will cover different theories being taught at Business schools, emerging concepts that are interlinked with other disciplines and diversified applications in modern educational system around the world.  The speech will also cover the digital integration in modern education. The speech will focus on the following parameters that are required by educators, policy makers and scholars around the world.

 

Robert B. Mellor

 Kingston University, London

Knowledge-sharing in the development of Science and Technology Parks

Tech Entrepreneurship is of immense value in regional development and the national economy. Tech Entrepreneurship is partly dependent on economically sheltered environments known as Science and Technology Parks (STPs), who actively seek innovators and also encourage innovation amongst the constituent firms, including by networking and knowledge spill-over between the inhabitants, Universities and sources of capital. The low success rate (~20%) of STPs led us to use the ideas of Stiglitz to investigate how STP architecture can best cope with a changing and challenging innovation environment, through start-up to early maturity and full maturity. Results from using econometric methods (SEM, Monte-Carlo etc) show that it is very beneficial to have a central Cluster Initiative (CI) controlling the decision-making process (“star, hierarchy”) in the early stages of STP development, where potential gains and losses are relatively modest. However in the early maturity stage with commitment to a high-growth trajectory, a high quality of decision–making is required amongst managers and decisions are best taken by the CI with the input of more knowledgeable on-cluster firms. The situation where CI is supported by good-quality knowledge-sharing decisions from on-cluster firms – an ambidextrous situation – is superior when good innovations abound and the STP has acquired some maturity. However, in environments with a surfeit of poor-fit innovations, this becomes a high-risk strategy with high potential losses and indeed in this situation, retaining a hierarchical (CI only) decision process is most helpful, even when the quality of decision–making amongst CI managers is as poor as coin-flipping.

To summarise, STP development from small is not linear but Y-shaped: A successful strategy involves the start-up STP attracting enough small innovative firms which – in turn – attract larger firms, whose detailed sector-relevant insight improves CI decision-making. The most valuable ratio includes the CI and only any two of the larger firms; including more decision-makers does not improve the quality of decisions much but does drive the transaction costs up exponentially. If the STP cannot attract larger firms with experienced management, then the STP is best served with the CI continuing alone but, especially under conditions of growth and expansion, the cost of poor decisions will increase until eventually market failure ensues.

 

Susanne Durst

Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia) and  University of Skövde (Sweden).

Topic – Knowledge Management in (Covid-19) Turbulent Times

 

VINESSA Naidoo

Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa

Topic of Keynote Speech to be announced soon