International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2012

Mobile innovations have been seen as one of the success stories of ‘base of the pyramid’ (BOP) business models. Nevertheless, deeper analysis of their commercial scalability has been lacking. This article focuses on the Information and Telecommunications (ICT) and mobile boom in Kenya, which is a major economic driver in the whole country. The article describes how social needs are seen as a basis for innovating technological solutions and what strategies are used to make them commercially viable. The article is based on empirical data on the Kenyan mobile industry where companies are designing socially oriented technological innovations for low-end consumers. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion on successful BOP entrepreneurial models and innovations.

Enterprises pay increasing attention to environmental concerns in their manufacturing activities with regard to their supply bases, making green supply chain management (GSCM) a hot topic for academic research and industrial practices. Some researchers become interested in investigating the pressures, practices and performance of GSCM among large enterprises with little research targetted at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The objective of this article is to identify whether different SMEs of different categories operating in the Chinese context vary significantly from each other in terms of their GSCM practices. A questionnaire survey administered through e-mails is used for this study and the respondents were chosen randomly from an SME fair in China. Data received from the recipients were processed on SPSS to conduct ANOVA to verify the proposition. The findings confirm that SMEs from different industrial sectors differ in their GSCM practices. This can be accounted for by factors including differing GSCM pressures or drivers.

The conservation and sustainable use of forest resources is emerging as an issue of great national and global concern. Forest resources worldwide, and particularly in developing countries, are prone to various threats. In the past few decades, recording of forest benefits was one of the major prioritized concerns. Proper forest resource valuation and accounting would help better understanding of the stock and flow of the forest resources and thus represent the status of forests resources not only in quantitative/qualitative terms but also in monetary terms. The article presents two case studies to highlight the conventional system of forest resource accounting (FRA); estimate the values of various forests goods and services; and reflect on the extent of distortion in the existing system of FRA. It also presents an approach for improving the conventional system of FRA through incorporation of unrecorded forest benefits.

This article is based on a case study and aims to describe patterns of change in highly information and communication technology (ICT)-oriented family firms that operate in health-care sector. In particular, we ask how to manage organizational change due to ICT implementation. What is the role of leaders in this organizational change? Theoretical insights for the analysis come from different contributions due to the literature of organizational studies and information systems. To answer to these questions, we will move away from the thought of ICT as a critical success factor and focus on the evaluation of the dynamics that can lead to the achievement of organizational innovation. The findings are intended to provide family firms and small-medium health-care organizations with a cognitive framework for changing organizational behaviour through innovation.

Over the last three decades there has been a growing interest in Research-and-Development (R&D)-based businesses in Iran. To date, no effort has been made to develop a comprehensive guideline based on a conceptual model to underpin the development of R&D-based businesses in Iran. This article is a preliminary attempt towards such an effort. Based on an empirical study, the article attempts to explore the factors affecting the initiation and development of R&D businesses in Iran.