Home  About us  Contact
 

Mutual Learning (mutual + learning)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

Absent and Accounted For: Absenteeism and Cooperative Learning,

DECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION, Issue 1 2006
G. D. Koppenhaver
ABSTRACT In a small section collaborative learning environment where student work teams promote mutual learning about investments, students limit the opportunity to learn from other students if they are absent from class. Absenteeism not only denies the student the opportunity to learn from others but also denies other members of the student's work team the opportunity to learn from the absent student. Other team members' absenteeism should be costly for individual performance if collaborative learning fosters learning and retention. The research finds that while absenteeism is detrimental to the student's own performance, absenteeism of other team members from team activities has a significant negative effect on both individual exam and homework scores. The conclusions validate the benefits of active learning and of encouraging attendance in collaborative learning environments in all disciplines. [source]

Legal Diversity and Regulatory Competition: Which Model for Europe?

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2006
Simon Deakin
In the European context, harmonisation of corporate and labour law, contrary to its critics, has been a force for the preservation of diversity, and of an approach to regulatory interaction based on mutual learning between nation states. It is thus paradoxical, and arguably antithetical to the goal of European integration, that this approach is in danger of being undermined by attempts, following the Centros case, to introduce a Delaware-type form of inter-jurisdictional competition into European company law. [source]

Introduction: Why Reflect Collectively on Capacities for Change?,

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 3 2010
Peter Clarke
,Capacity development' implies a promise of growing self-reliance, national ownership and sustainability, yet practice seems consistently to fall short of this emancipatory promise. This introduction argues for a reframing of capacity development for emancipatory social change. Articles in this IDS Bulletin show how understanding and practice must engage with complexity, appreciate the importance of specific culture and context, and continually address the role of power in shaping relationships, understandings and practices. Values and leadership are fundamental drivers of capacity development processes. This IDS Bulletin argues against a deficit approach based on linear causal logic and replicable ,best practice'. Instead, practitioners are encouraged to develop a detailed understanding of the culture and dynamics of specific contexts, to detect energies for positive change and work to connect and facilitate them. Learning is at the centre of the approach. Capacity development is understood as a collective process of learning in action for social change. Support for capacity development processes demands a critical development practice that implies mutual learning, with an emphasis on reflective and experiential approaches. However, this reframing implies enormous challenges for development practice, and therefore considerable personal and organisational commitment. [source]

Increasing Learning and Time Efficiency in Interorganizational New Product Development Teams,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2010
Ludwig Bstieler
Despite the growing popularity of new product development across organizational boundaries, the processes, mechanisms, or dynamics that leverage performance in interorganizational (I-O) product development teams are not well understood. Such teams are staffed with individuals drawn from the partnering firms and are relied on to develop successful new products while at the same time enhancing mutual learning and reducing development time. However, these collaborations can encounter difficulties when partners from different corporate cultures and thought worlds must coordinate and depend on one another and often lead to disappointing performance. To facilitate collaboration, the creation of a safe, supportive, challenging, and engaging environment is particularly important for enabling productive collaborative I-O teamwork and is essential for learning and time efficient product development. This research develops and tests a model of proposed factors to increase both learning and time efficiency on I-O new product teams. It is argued that specific behaviors (caring), beliefs (psychological safety), task-related processes (shared problem solving), and governance mechanisms (clear management direction) create a positive climate that increases learning and time efficiency on I-O teams. Results of an empirical study of 50 collaborative new product development projects indicate that (1) shared problem solving and caring behavior support both learning and time efficiency on I-O teams, (2) team psychological safety is positively related to learning, (3) management direction is positively associated with time efficiency, and (4) shared problem solving is more strongly related to both performance dimensions than are the other factors. The factors supporting time efficiency are slightly different from those that foster learning. The relative importance of these factors also differs considerably for both performance aspects. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the factors that facilitate a favorable environment for productive collaboration on I-O teams, which go beyond contracts or top-management supervision. Establishing such an environment can help to balance management concerns and promote the success of I-O teams. The significance of the results is elevated by the fragility of collaborative ventures and their potential for failure, when firms with different organizational cultures, thought worlds, objectives, and intentions increasingly decide to work across organizational boundaries for the development of new products. [source]

Consumer integration in sustainable product development

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 5 2007
Esther Hoffmann
Abstract Changes in production and consumption patterns are a crucial element of the sustainability agenda. Communication between product developers and users, and user integration in product development, can serve as a means for organizational as well as individual learning processes, resulting in sustainable product development. Recent approaches to innovation research describe the role of users in the innovation process as essential. However, conventional market research gives consumers a passive role as a mere object of research instead of considering them as possible innovators themselves. Improved methods, such as INNOCOPE (innovating through consumer-integrated product development), tested in this study with a cycle manufacturer and resulting in a new product, a pedelec, are needed for effective communication, activating consumers and enabling them to promote sustainability goals. Through co-operative product development processes key factors facilitating and obstructing the adoption of sustainable innovations may be identified. Such processes can enhance the emergence and diffusion of sustainable product innovations and different forms and bodies of knowledge can be combined. Integrating users' contextual everyday knowledge of the product with the technical knowledge of companies may lead to mutual learning, technical innovations and changes in consumer behaviour. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]