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Natural disasters cause serious operational risks and disruptions, which further impact the food supply in and around the disaster-impacted area. Resilient functions in the supply chain are required to absorb the impact of resultant disruptions in perishable food supply chains (FSC). The present study identifies specific resilient functions to overcome the problems created by natural disasters in the FSC context.

The quality function deployment (QFD) method is utilized for identifying these relations. Further, fuzzy term sets and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) are used to prioritize the identified problems. The results obtained are employed to construct a QFD matrix with the solutions, followed by the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) on the house of quality (HOQ) matrix between the identified problems and functions.

The results from the study reflect that the shortage of employees in affected areas is the major problem caused by a natural disaster, followed by the food movement problem. The results from the analysis matrix conclude that information sharing should be kept at the highest priority by policymakers to build and increase resilient functions and sustainable crisis management in a perishable FSC network.

The study suggests practical implications for managing a FSC crisis during a natural disaster. The unique contribution of this research lies in finding the correlation and importance ranking among different resilience functions, which is crucial for managing a FSC crisis during a natural disaster.

This chapter outlines the context behind the “Designing Empowerment” initiative at the Industrial Design program at Virginia Tech. It makes a case for using design thinking and innovation as a catalyst for positive change in our society. With more than 4 billion of us living below poverty line, how do we even begin to make a sense of the challenges faced by majority of humans? What are the design opportunities, if there are any, and how do we go about creating a set of guidelines that can be used to do exploratory research and create compelling solutions? The chapter offers examples of initiatives that have worked, provides evidence of their effectiveness, and presents an argument for using design thinking and innovation as a tool to address some of the most pressing issues: alleviating poverty, providing better education, and improving basic health services for all human beings.

Brent B. Allred is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA. He earned his Ph.D. in Strategic Management/International Business at The Pennsylvania State University. His current research interests are in technology sourcing and patent rights. He has published in various journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, the Journal of International Management, Academy of Management Executive, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Creating visibility in the supply chain (SC) helps in making it resilient. Integrating the SC with Industry 4.0 key enabling technologies creates visibility and sustainability in SCs. It also fosters intelligent decision-making, thereby making a SC smart. However, how Industry 4.0 technologies affect key performance indicators (KPIs) of a resilient SC and may help achieve sustainability is rarely studied.

Sixteen KPIs were identified from the literature review and analyzed using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) using expert opinions. Further, a sensitivity analysis was conducted for the KPIs by varying the weightage of the criteria. Later, KPIs results were analyzed, and (1) how and which Industry 4.0 technology helps improve the KPI? (2) Resilience relationship with sustainability? were discussed.

The analyses show that the time-oriented (TO) is an essential criterion and organizational (OR) is the less important comparatively. Lead time, time to market and risk assessment frequency are the top KPIs that need a focus. Blockchain, Big Data and Cyber-physical systems enhance KPI's value and, in turn, foster economic, environmental and social sustainability of the SC and help in better decision making in terms of smart contracts, better forecasting and enhanced real-time information sharing.

Identification of the KPIs, the impact of Industry 4.0 technologies and the impact on sustainability; this kind of interplay is rarely evident in the literature. Understanding the findings of this research will help managers develop smart systems that may work intelligently to overcome risks associated and enhance sustainability. Academicians can use the findings and conduct future research that can overcome the limitations of this research.

This research aims to improve the performance and productivity of low-level technology organizations using lean tools – value stream mapping (VSM). In order to investigate the application of VSM in low-level technology organizations, this study takes footwear manufacturing organizations as a case study.

Identifying a suitable organization was the first step for conducting the case study, followed by product family identification. Time and motion studies are used to determine the cycle time and identify the value-adding and non-value-adding activities, respectively. After making necessary observations and calculations, the current state map was developed. Different improvement proposals were identified, and the future state map was constructed.

As a result, 56.3% cycle time reduction and 69.7% reduction in lead time were obtained, confirming its application in low-level technology organizations to improve their performance and productivity. This promising result indicates that a significant improvement can be achieved if VSM is applied in low-level organizations other than footwear industries, such as the clothing and furniture industries. Speed is investigated to be one of the parameters in motion study.

This study focuses on low-level technology organizations, specifically leather shoe manufacturing industries. But experiences gained from implementing this study are realistic and applicable in similar organizations.

Performance and productivity improvement are critical issues to be addressed in low-level technology organizations, especially in the leather footwear manufacturing sector. This can be achieved through VSM by identifying and removing the wastes. VSM can be applied to low-level organizations as well. VSM is a powerful tool that helps managers and practitioners in identifying wastes and opportunities for improvement.

The paper addresses applicability of VSM in the production process of low-level technology organizations with an original industrial case study in Ethiopia.

The purpose of this paper is to use Twitter analytics for analyzing the startup ecosystem of India.

The paper uses descriptive analysis and content analytics techniques of social media analytics to examine 53,115 tweets from 15 Indian startups across different industries. The study also employs techniques such as Naïve Bayes Algorithm for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm for topic modeling of Twitter feeds to generate insights for the startup ecosystem in India.

The Indian startup ecosystem is inclined toward digital technologies, concerned with people, planet and profit, with resource availability and information as the key to success. The study categorizes the emotions of tweets as positive, neutral and negative. It was found that the Indian startup ecosystem has more positive sentiments than negative sentiments. Topic modeling enables the categorization of the identified keywords into clusters. Also, the study concludes on the note that the future of the Indian startup ecosystem is Digital India.

The analysis provides a methodology that future researchers can use to extract relevant information from Twitter to investigate any issue.

Any attempt to analyze the startup ecosystem of India through social media analysis is limited. This research aims to bridge such a gap and tries to analyze the startup ecosystem of India from the lens of social media platforms like Twitter.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the contextual work factors in Ethiopia and to evaluate the relative influence of each of these factors on job satisfaction (JS) of employees.

The study draws on a sample of shop floor workers from the leather products manufacturing industry in Ethiopia. Data were collected using a structured survey questionnaire and focus group discussions. After testing scale reliability and validity, multiple linear regression was used for the analysis.

The study results suggest that the JS is mainly explained by extrinsic factors. Pay is found to influence overall job satisfaction (OJS) at least four times of other work factors. Training opportunity and ethnic diversity showed unexpected negative relationship with OJS.

Given the importance of understanding JS in labor-intensive industries, and paucity of research on the topic in Ethiopia, the study provides practical insights and groundwork that can guide practitioners to understand the drivers of JS in the region. Moreover, the study adds to the empirical literature that may yield important insights on organizational behavior for under-researched emerging economies, particularly for the eastern part of Africa, where nations share similar cross-cultural norms, economic and ethnic settings.

The learning outcomes are as follows:

1. enable students to appreciate how a platform company can navigate through diminishing network effects;

2. enable students to foresee the downside of scaling up a platform business;

3. enable students to appreciate the trade-off between an efficiency-centric and a novelty-centric business model for platform businesses; and

4. enable students to create a platform business model canvas for a company.

The teaching case discusses the dilemma of Akshay Chaturvedi, the founder of Leverage Edu, an artificial intelligence-enabled platform for students seeking admission to foreign universities. It had received nearly US$9.6m in funding until December 2021.

Chaturvedi wanted to make the best use of his funds, but was torn between turning Leverage Edu into an “efficient platform” and transforming it into a “novelty-centric platform”. The teaching note attempts to resolve Chaturvedi’s dilemma by analyzing competitors using the platform canvas model and determining how Chaturvedi could create and use network effects to Leverage Edu’s advantage. The case is based on secondary data that is freely available in the public domain.

This case is intended for MBA Entrepreneurship students taking a platform business elective. It can also be used in faculty and management development programs under the banner “Technology and Platform Businesses”.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.