Knowledge-based Activity Research Articles

180 years of Hungarian police science

Aim: The purpose of this study is to present the most important international and domestic events in the history of policing, which were decisive in the formation and development of domestic policing. Methodology: The present study was prepared by processing the content of hundreds of publications of domestic and international law enforcement literature, analyzing their ideas, placing them in chronological order, and comparing domestic and international events. Findings: It has now become apparent that policing has clearly become a knowledge-based activity throughout its history, which is now taught within BA, MA and doctoral schools. Value: The study provides assistance in that policing researchers, educators and those engaged in policing activities can draw on the literature of domestic or international policing to mature their decisions and for their daily work.

Do resource-constrained early-stage firms balance their internal resources across business activities? If so, should they?

This article investigates whether resource-constrained early-stage firms perform better if they allocate their resources to various in-house business activities (e.g., marketing, R&D, etc.) rather than to one activity, and if they do, we explore why. We use the resource orchestration theory lens to formulate and then analyze a budget-constrained resource-allocation model that guides hypothesis development. The hypotheses focus on the performance of resource allocation strategies and are tested on a sample of 4,928 early-stage firms from the Kauffman Firm Survey dataset. We find that the relationships between firm performance and each pure strategy—aimed to allocate all of the firm’s resources to either a market- or knowledge-based activity—are inverted U-shaped, meaning that the firm achieves superior performance with a balanced strategy that distributes its resources between the two activities. This study shifts the focus from established firms (with adequate resources) to resource-constrained early-stage firms to extend the literature advocating for a balance between market- and knowledge-based activities thereby shedding light on the importance of the product-market fit for superior performance.

Clinical and Research Applications of the Electronic Medical Record in Multiple Sclerosis: A Narrative Review of Current Uses and Future Applications.

The electronic medical record (EMR) has revolutionized health care workflow and delivery. It has evolved from a clinical adjunct to a multifaceted tool, with uses relevant to patient care and research. A MEDLINE literature review was conducted to identify data regarding the use of EMR for multiple sclerosis (MS) clinical care and research. Of 282 relevant articles identified, 29 were included. A variety of EMR integrated platforms with features specific to MS have been designed, with options for documenting disease course, disability status, and treatment. Research efforts have focused on early diagnosis identification, relapse prediction, and surrogates for disability status. The available platforms and associated research support the utility of harnessing EMR for MS care. The adoption of a core set of discrete EMR elements should be considered to support future research efforts and the ability to harmonize data across institutions.

The epidemic within the pandemic: Behavioral health and substance use in the face of COVID-19

The epidemic within the pandemic: Behavioral health and substance use in the face of COVID-19

Characteristics of Prescription Drug Use Among Individuals With Multiple Sclerosis in the US Medicare Population.

Few studies have characterized the full spectrum of prescription drug use for individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). The objective of this study was to describe patterns and expenditures for disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) and other prescription drugs among Medicare beneficiaries with MS. Using Medicare claims data in 2014, we identified a cohort of Medicare beneficiaries with 12 months of continuous eligibility and 3 or more MS-related inpatient, outpatient, or prescription claims. We quantified the number, type, and costs of prescribed DMTs and other medications for MS-related symptoms. Medication costs were calculated according to whether beneficiaries received additional subsidies, which eliminate most out-of-pocket costs. Of 43,283 Medicare beneficiaries identified with MS, 70% were DMT users. Most used self-administered DMTs (67%), and 3% used natalizumab; 93% received a supportive care medication. Among the 82% of individuals without subsidies, the annual median total and out-of-pocket DMT costs were $56,794 (interquartile range [IQR], $44,837-$62,038) and $4566 (IQR, $849-$5270), respectively. The most commonly used supportive care drugs were antidepressants (62%), opioid analgesics (50%), antispasticity drugs (47%), and anticonvulsants (46%). Annual median total and out-of-pocket costs for these drugs were $15,134 (IQR, $6571-$19,620) and $255 (IQR, $56-$877), respectively. Most Medicare beneficiaries with MS using DMTs face considerable out-of-pocket costs. Beneficiaries also used a significant number of medications potentially used for MS-related symptoms, although total and out-of-pocket costs were modest.

On the individual and organizational capacities supporting impact assessment: the case of the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board

Impact assessment (IA) processes rely on the ability of assessment boards and their assessors to gather, synthesize, and interpret knowledge from a variety of sources, making IA a knowledge-based activity. IA boards in northern Canada operate in a context that prioritizes pluralism, where Indigenous knowledge is a key element of decision-making and the ability of practitioners to interact with knowledge—research capacity—affects process effectiveness, credibility, and legitimacy. Drawing on common principles from existing research capacity frameworks, we identify the dimensions of capacity most relevant to more fully realizing inclusive impact assessment processes. We then examine the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board (YESAB) as a specialized environmental governance organization with assessors whose research capacity directly impacts process outcomes. Results show that while common dimensions across knowledge-based disciplines, such as sufficient resources (e.g., financial support), are often addressed in the YESAB context, others unique to IA, like contextual understanding, require further examination. The interaction between individual and organizational research capacity is a complex balance between investing in individuals and investing in organizational supports. The proposed framework facilitates multi-scalar supports for individual assessors and assessment bodies alike to navigate balancing technical and value-driven knowledge in assessments.

Moving toward health equity: A journey

Moving toward health equity: A journey

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Distributed education enables distributed economic impact: the economic contribution of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine to communities in Canada

BackgroundMedical schools with distributed or regional programs encourage people to live, work, and learn in communities that may be economically challenged. Local spending by the program, staff, teachers, and students has a local economic impact. Although the economic impact of DME has been estimated for nations and sub-national regions, the community-specific impact is often unknown. Communities that contribute to the success of DME have an interest in knowing the local economic impact of this participation. To provide this information, we estimated the economic impact of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) on selected communities in the historically medically underserviced and economically disadvantaged Northern Ontario region.MethodsEconomic impact was estimated by a cash-flow local economic model. Detailed data on program and learner spending were obtained for Northern Ontario communities. We included spending on NOSM’s distributed education and research programs, medical residents’ salary program, the clinical teachers’ reimbursement program, and spending by learners. Economic impact was estimated from total spending in the community adjusted by an economic multiplier based on community population size, industry diversity, and propensity to spend locally. Community employment impact was also estimated.ResultsIn 2019, direct program and learner spending in Northern Ontario totalled $64.6 M (million) Canadian Dollars. Approximately 76% ($49.1 M) was spent in the two largest population centres of 122,000 and 165,000 people, with 1–5% ($0.7 M – $3.1 M) spent in communities of 5000–78,000 people. In 2019, total economic impact in Northern Ontario was estimated to be $107 M, with an impact of $38 M and $36 M in the two largest population centres. The remaining $34 M (32%) of the economic impact occurred in smaller communities or within the region. Expressed alternatively as employment impact, the 404 full time equivalent (FTE) positions supported an additional 298 FTE positions in Northern Ontario. NOSM-trained physicians practising in the region added an economic impact of $88 M.ConclusionsBy establishing programs and bringing people to Northern Ontario communities, NOSM added local spending and knowledge-based economic activity to a predominantly resource-based economy. In an economically deprived region, distributed medical education enabled distributed economic impact.

Advancing racial justice in patient care encounters—yes, we can!

Advancing racial justice in patient care encounters—yes, we can!

New therapeutic agents marketed in 2020: Part 2

New therapeutic agents marketed in 2020: Part 2

“Early-stage financing diversity and firms’ export intensity: a cross-country analysis”

Drawing on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and a sample of more than 13,000 firms from 46 countries, we investigate the relationship between early-stage financing diversity and export intensity of both startups and established firms. We define early-stage financing diversity as the number of types of formal and informal external sources that provided the firm's seed capital. Based on the hypothesis that exporting is a risky and knowledge-based activity, we discover a positive relationship between early-stage financing diversity and export intensity. Notably, the study demonstrates that a country's financial development and degree of investor protection negatively moderate the baseline relationship.

New therapeutic agents marketed in 2020: Part 1

New therapeutic agents marketed in 2020: Part 1

Performance Measures to Assess the Success of Contemporary Science Parks

Although the science park (SP) concept is more than 50 years old, it has been continuously evolving and changing and new doubts, questions and needs have come to light. In order to understand and talk about the future of SPs, it seems necessary to understand their actual level of success. It is not a straightforward task as SPs are multi-owner organisations and definition of success will vary from one SP to another. Moreover, SPs have developed new roles and activities that are not easy to measure. Thereby, the aim of this paper is to fill in the gaps that exist in the literature on measuring the extent of success of contemporary SPs as individual organisations providing support for the benefit of its community. The paper proposes to measure SP success by means of a performance measurement system (pms). It offers a theory grounded tool to assess the effectiveness of SP actions and activities including knowledge-based activity. Additionally, the paper provides some strong evidence that SPs show characteristics in common with knowledge intensive organisations (kios) and therefore play an important role in orchestrating innovation ecosystems.

Proactively Guiding Patients Through ADL via Knowledge-Based and Context-Driven Activity Recognition.

Assisted Ambient Living (AAL) focuses on self-sufficiency, assisting disabled people to perform activities of daily living (ADL) by automating assistive actions in smart environments. Importantly, AAL provides opportunities for dynamically guiding patients with a cognitive decline through an ADL. Activity recognition is a pivotal task since it allows detecting when an ADL is started by recognizing its constituent activities. When dealing cognitive decline, activity recognition should also be able to detect when activities are performed incorrectly-e.g., performed out-of-order, at the wrong location or time, or with the wrong objects (e.g., utensils) - which is nevertheless not a common goal in activity recognition. Moreover, it should be able to cope with non-uniform ways of performing the ADL that are nevertheless correct. We present a novel knowledge-driven activity recognition approach, which employs semantic reasoning to recognize both correct and incorrect actions, based on the ADL workflow as well as associated environment context.

Design briefs in design-driven new product development

This study empirically examines the role of product design briefs as knowledge-based artefacts of cross-functional collaboration within design-driven new product development (NPD). Contemporary NPD is increasingly seen as a design-driven and knowledge-based activity where information sharing within team-based environments is critical to successful product design and development processes. However, the mere presence of inter-functional structures has not necessarily led to better outcomes for firms. By drawing on a proprietary sample of 80 product design briefs gathered from design-driven product-oriented firms, our results provide insight into how organizations create, codify and communicate knowledge from different functional areas and support flows of knowledge within NPD, specifically by: (1) providing an inventory of 51 information elements commonly present in product design briefs; (2) organizing these information elements into a parsimonious framework of strategic dimensions using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) alongside a widely-established taxonomy; (3) defining differences between information elements as rated by managerial ‘importance’ across three key functional areas of NPD: (a) design, (b) marketing and (c) engineering/ R&D/ development; and (4) providing a theoretic rationale for these differences and underlying strategic dimensions by integrating our findings with relevant literature.

Service recovery as an organizational capability

PurposeThis paper aims to explore and conceptualize service recovery as an organizational capability. It proposes a new construct labeled knowledge-enabled recovery effectiveness (KERE).Design/methodology/approachMeasures capturing the KERE construct were developed through domain identification, item pool generation using focus group interviews with managers involved in complaint management and content expert validation.FindingsA first pool of 73 items was generated and then reduced to 37 items. Focus group interviews confirm the theoretical relevance of the KERE construct. Recovery culture, recovery process and internal recovery resources are the different components of a firm’s knowledge that serve as inputs, or as a source of a firm’s service recovery capabilities.Research limitations/implicationsA quantitative study is needed in future research to assess the KERE’s construct structure and validity.Practical implicationsManagers may use the proposed scale to foster effective and relevant marketing strategies by setting clear policies that consider service recovery as a knowledge-based activity rather than a control targeted activity.Originality/valueThis research demonstrates the mutual dialogue between service recovery and knowledge-based capabilities. Also, it proposes a new concept labeled KERE and a raw scale to further understand firms’ aptitude in service recovery.

A Scalable Hybrid Activity Recognition Approach for Intelligent Environments

Human activity recognition is a key technology for ICT-based (infomation and communication technologies) assistive applications. The most successful activity recognition systems for intelligent environments in terms of performance rely on supervised learning techniques. However, those techniques demand large labelled data sets for specific sensor deployments and monitored person. Such requirements make supervised learning techniques not to scale well to real world deployments, where different sensor infrastructures may be used to monitor different users. In this paper, we present a novel activity recognition system, based on a combination of unsupervised learning techniques and knowledge-based activity models. First, we use a domain-specific data mining algorithm previously developed by Cook et al. to extract the most frequent action sequences executed by a person. Second, we insert knowledge-based activity models in a novel matching algorithm with the aim of inferring what activities are being performed in a given action sequence. The approach results on a scalable activity recognition system, which has been tested on three real data sets. The obtained performance is comparable to supervised learning techniques.

Impacts of innovation, productivity and specialization on tourism competitiveness – a spatial econometric analysis on European regions

Tourism is clearly a place-based activity, while in many advanced economies it is increasingly becoming a knowledge-based activity, with a high potential for the development of practice- and place-based innovation strategies. This study analyses whether and how regional systems of innovation influence the competiveness of tourism destinations in Europe. Impacts of both traditional production factors (physical and human capital), productivity, specialization and other contextual variables – related to the territorial capital of each region – on regional tourism performance of 237 European regions (NUTS 2) are analysed over a period of 8 years, using advanced techniques for spatial econometric analysis. The results reveal lower levels of productivity in those regions where tourism services are more labour intensive, while regions where education, innovation and productivity demonstrate higher levels are those where gross value added in tourism is less important for the regional economy. Policy implications are discussed, taking into consideration the principles for smart specialisation strategies in European regions and the possibility for cross-border regional cooperation. This work also confirms the research potential of spatial econometric analysis – and in particular spatial autocorrelation techniques – for tourism studies.

Conceptual modeling for the design of intelligent and emergent information systems

A key requirement to today's fast changing economic environment is the ability of organizations to adapt dynamically in an effective and efficient manner. Information and Communication Technologies play a crucially important role in addressing such adaptation requirements. The notion of `intelligent software' has emerged as a means by which enterprises can respond to changes in a reactive manner but also to explore, in a pro-active manner, possibilities for new business models. The development of such software systems demands analysis, design and implementation paradigms that recognize the need for `co-development' of these systems with enterprise goals, processes and capabilities. The work presented in this paper is motivated by this need and to this end it proposes a paradigm that recognizes co-development as a knowledge-based activity. The proposed solution is based on a multi-perspective modeling approach that involves (i) modeling key aspects of the enterprise, (ii) reasoning about design choices and (iii) supporting strategic decision-making through simulations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated though a case study in the field of marketing for a start-up company.