The concept of Virtual Organisation Breeding Environment (VBE) is now understood as a fundamental entity to enable the formation of dynamic collaborative organisations especially Virtual Organisations (VOs). System theory fits well when dealing with dynamic and complex systems such as organisations. Therefore, the system theoretic or systemic view is adequate for analysing the internal and exte...

OBJECTIVE To describe the processes of establishing and running the Cancer Experiences Collaborative (CECo), and reflect upon the benefits and challenges of undertaking collaborative research in supportive and palliative care. DESIGN A descriptive analysis of a 5-year research collaborative initiated in 2006. SETTING Research groups at the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, N...

A number of literatures in management, innovation studies, economic geography, and so on point to “collaborative advantages” that can arise at multiple levels. We discuss conceptual, theoretical and methodological difficulties with this and related notions. Many of these difficulties stem from the multi-level nature of these constructs themselves, as well as from the fact that their antecedents...

The resource based view is an approach which emphasizes the organizations resources and capabilities in its strategy development. The approach has been applied mostly in the competitive private sector but it includes several important lessons which can be used also in the public sector which is struggling with resource problems. The public sector has to find those internal and also external res...

Many organizations in Jordan are currently frustrated with the benefit and value obtained from their investment in IT. An understanding of why Jordanian organizations do not benefit from IT investment can assist these organizations to explore the factors that organizations use to align IT with their business objectives. In-depth qualitative interviews with IT managers in Jordanian organizations...

The concept of a dual-image based scheme in information sharing consists of concealing secret messages in two cover images; only someone who has both stego-images can extract the secret messages. In 2015, Lu et al. proposed a center-folding strategy where each secret symbol is folded into the reduced digit to reduce the distortion of the stego-image. Then, in 2016, Lu et al. used a frequency-ba...

Natural images contain a lot of information imperceptible to the human eye. While it is of key importance to maintain the visible information in image reproduction processes, the imperceptible information can, with good benefit, be discarded. In order to identify the imperceptible information, a method for simulating this particluar aspect of the human visual system is required. In this paper w...

Typically, case-based recommender systems recommend single items to the on-line customer. In this paper we introduce the idea of recommending a user-defined collection of items where the user has implicitly encoded the relationships between the items. Automated collaborative filtering (ACF), a socalled ‘contentless’ technique, has been widely used as a recommendation strategy for music items. H...

The problem of having sufficient coverage is an essential issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN). A high coverage rate delivers a higher quality of service. The aim of coverage strategy is to ensure that there will be a minimum number of nodes (at least one node) with little redundant data to cover every point inside the interest area. This paper addresses the problems of coverage of WSN by pr...