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Companion animals and social media are two important factors of social interaction and well-being among the older population. This study aims to compare social media use and/or having companion animals with respect to sociodemographic variables in conjunction with loneliness, social isolation, depression, satisfaction with life and satisfaction with social support.

This cross-sectional study involves a sample of 250 older community-dwelling adults. The questionnaire comprised sociodemographic, companion animals and social media questions and scales to assess social isolation, loneliness, satisfaction with life and social support and depression. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Four groups emerged: “companion animal/s, no social media” (37.6%); “none” (33.6%); “social media and companion animal/s” (14.4%); and “social media, no companion animal/s” (14.4%). Social media users (with or without companion animals) are the youngest and with higher levels of education; caregivers of companion animals (no social media use) are in-between in terms of age and level of education; and those without companion animals and no social media users are the oldest and with less formal education.

This research examines and compares two key influencers of older adults’ well-being and social interaction (social media and companion animals), that have been researched mostly separately. Findings underlined the cohort effect in the use of social media, suggesting that future older adult cohorts will use more social media whether they have or do not have companion animals.

Academics’ perceptions of the motives of the introduction of quality management are still rarely investigated, particularly in Central Asian countries. Thus, this paper aims to understand the internal dynamics of organisational change within higher education institutions.

The paper presents evidence from an online survey of academics from three Kazakh national universities. Their perceptions are presented with a quantitative descriptive approach using means and standard deviations.

The results show that academics perceive institutional (e.g. regulations, professional standards, existing norms, etc.) and instrumental explanations (e.g. institutional learning, improvement, intra- and inter-organisational competition, etc.) of the introduction of quality management as equally important. This contradicts existing evidence from surveys of other groups within higher education institutions.

In addition to evaluating the literature, the paper combines institutional and instrumental reasons for the introduction of quality management in Kazakh universities. Taking a perspective centred on academics, the results indicate that scholars’ assessments reveal a comparatively low variance regarding the importance of quality management. Based on these results, the paper suggests that empirical studies need to be broadened with comparative perspectives from different organisational contexts, groups and administrative traditions.

This paper aims to propose an assessment framework to evaluate companies' innovation capability in the context of industrial clusters.

The assessment framework was built based on the Graph-Theoretic Approach (GTA) to measure the influence of the factors and sub-factors of innovation capabilities. To quantify the level of interdependence between factors and sub-factors of innovation capability Delphi method was adopted. The authors developed five case studies in firms from an Information and Communications Technology and Creative Economy cluster in Northeastern Brazil to test the framework's applicability.

The results showed that identifying and evaluating the factors of innovation capability allows a larger understanding of what affects these capabilities to a greater or lesser extent and contributes to strategic decision-making.

The framework evaluates the innovation capability of each firm, not providing an index for the whole industrial cluster. Besides, the framework does not consider the innovations developed by the companies through the innovation's capabilities. As the Delphi technique was adopted to analyze the levels of influence or interdependence between factors and sub-factors of innovation capability, different experts may lead to different results.

Among the managerial implications, the authors can highlight the innovation capability index as a practical performance measure to stimulate improvement initiatives regarding innovations in industrial clusters. Besides, as the proposed framework is generic, research organizations, public institutions and regional governments can adopt it to analyze innovation capabilities in cluster-based companies.

Previous industrial cluster studies have concentrated on knowledge transfer as the main attribute influencing innovation capabilities. The literature also presents assessment frameworks focusing on qualitative analyses or innovation capabilities outcomes (patents and products). Differently, the authors proposed a quantitative assessment framework considering specific factors (and sub-factors) of innovation capabilities in industrial clusters.

The office market in São Paulo has been in recession since the year 2000. This situation came up due to two main factors: [i] the very aggressive attitude of developers during the period that comprises the year 1999 until 2000. At that time there was a very strong perception among investors that a new expansion era for new office buildings in São Paulo was about to begin and, moreover the Brazilian economy had started its recovery; [ii] The intense retraction of the Brazilian economy along with the political transition in 2002, which was mainly caused by the deterioration of the expectations in relation to the economic policies that would be performed by the new government.The recovery of the economic activity in the office building market firstly depends on the macroeconomic growth in Brazil and within the São Paulo metropolitan area. On the other hand, the expansion of the activity in the office buildings sector relies not only on the developers’ expectations of how and when the current vacant units will be rented, but also on the potential risk‐return composition of new buildings to be developed in the next years. This paper describes the economic scenario in which investment decisions to build new office buildings for rent in our local market are made and we also simulated both the necessary period of time for investments in the São Paulo office market to recover attractiveness and the time interval for the increase in the occupation rate absorb the actual vacant spaces. These simulations have taken place based on projections for the Brazilian GNP increase and they showed that for an annual increment of 4.5%, in 3 years could be reached both, attractiveness for new investment and occupation of vacant areas. For a 2.0% annual growth, the absorption of vacant spaces will take 4 years from now and new investment would be attractive only in 2012. Besides, we discuss the market prices fluctuations on the inflexion point where the transition from one phase of the real estate cycle (recession‐non attractiveness) to another (recovery‐attractiveness) occurs.

The purpose of this paper is to simulate possoble scenarios of São Paulo’s office market recovering. In 2006, a previous paper that dealt with the same issue was published which the authors propose to analyse here. After eight years, the São Paulo office market is starting a new phase within its cycle. Then, the first part of this paper, as in Rocha-Lima and Alencar (2006), describes the economic scenario in which investment decisions are made for developing office buildings in the Brazilian market. Afterward, the authors simulated both the necessary period of time for investments in the São Paulo office market to recover attractiveness and time for the increase in the occupation rate to absorb the current vacant spaces.

These simulations were carried out using simple linear regressions models using the Brazilian gross domestic product (GDP) as explanatory variable to prices and vacancy rates dependent ones.

The authors have found that the vacant space can be fully re-occupied in the beginning of 2021 or mid of 2022, according to the GDP growth rate, and, from this moment on, the demand for new spaces may grow, and, moreover around 2019, investments may become attractive again in this market.

This paper offers an alternative approach for estimating office building scenarios, especially when the database of the market is scarce. It also permits to evaluate an investment strategy for emerging markets within next years, particularly in São Paulo, Brazil.

This paper aims to propose an automated framework for agile development and simulation of robotic palletizing cells. An automatic offline programming tool, for a variety of robot brands, is also introduced.

This framework, named AdaptPack Studio, offers a custom-built library to assemble virtual models of palletizing cells, quick connect these models by drag and drop, and perform offline programming of robots and factory equipment in short steps.

Simulation and real tests performed showed an improvement in the design, development and operation of robotic palletizing systems. The AdaptPack Studio software was tested and evaluated in a pure simulation case and in a real-world scenario. Results have shown to be concise and accurate, with minor model displacement inaccuracies because of differences between the virtual and real models.

An intuitive drag and drop layout modeling accelerates the design and setup of robotic palletizing cells and automatic offline generation of robot programs. Furthermore, A* based algorithms generate collision-free trajectories, discretized both in the robot joints space and in the Cartesian space. As a consequence, industrial solutions are available for production in record time, increasing the competitiveness of companies using this tool.

The AdaptPack Studio framework includes, on a single package, the possibility to program, simulate and generate the robot code for four different brands of robots. Furthermore, the application is tailored for palletizing applications and specifically includes the components (Building Blocks) of a particular company, which allows a very fast development of new solutions. Furthermore, with the inclusion of the Trajectory Planner, it is possible to automatically develop robot trajectories without collisions.

This paper aims to map literature about innovation capabilities (IC) taking into consideration industrial clusters to propose a conceptual framework that synthetizes the main factors and subfactors responsible for ICs; in addition, the paper also proposes a research agenda.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was performed; academic papers were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.

The authors provide a descriptive analysis followed by a thematic synthesis, in which we present 05 enablers and 20 critical factors (CF) of IC in clusters. The proposed framework emphasizes what needs to be done or improved to increase IC in cluster-based companies. Based on this systematic review and the framework proposed, the authors identified opportunities for future research.

The enablers and CF identified through SLR were not validated empirically. Therefore, future studies on the current topic are required to validate the framework by investigating which factors are more relevant to cluster-based companies that intend to improve their innovative performance.

The present findings have important implications for the identification of the factors and subfactors that may contribute to the development of IC, which may help managers and decision-makers in recognizing which factors are the most responsible for business innovation.

The paper identifies enablers related to the development of IC in industrial cluster and presents a research agenda. The framework represents a guideline for companies to achieve better innovation performance.

This paper aims to reflect on the relevance of the Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) of the European University Association (EUA) to universities' quality improvement. It aims to analyse IEP follow‐up reports to determine whether the programme contributes to the development of a quality improvement culture.

The structure and contents of 22 follow‐up reports were analysed to assess the IEP programme. All reports were subject to content analysis using adequate software (NVivo 8 with a 242 nodes tree), the main goal being to evaluate progress made since the original evaluation.

The reports analysed and the work by other authors show that IEP can constitute a useful approach towards the universities' quality improvement. IEP evaluations generally give a precise account of problems faced by each university, identifying its strong and weak points, opportunities and threats, and presenting clear recommendations and suggestions for improvement. If properly discussed inside the university, these evaluations can form the basis for an improvement plan.

In general, follow‐up teams recognise the difficulty to distinguish changes caused directly by EUA teams' recommendations from others caused by external pressures.

The follow‐up process has as its main rationale the idea that a second review can assist a university evaluating progress made since the original evaluation. The reports analysed show that changes have always happened to a certain extent after the first evaluation.

This paper makes a contribution to the understanding of the effects of institutional evaluation over institutional quality culture.