Managing the skills blend in an innovation project can be hard. Often project teams are overloaded with business or with technical people, and there is little balance in the skills available.The Business Readiness Levels (BRL) allow you to: Manage the skills-blend in an innovation project, Demonstrate progress and balance in a project, Ensure investment to progress projects and manage risk, is done in an effective way.The BRL are a way to benchmark the current status of a business proposition - from concept to mature business in order to help manage risk and diagnose where to focus to close skills gaps

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you’ve likely never seen before, guiding readers (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world. This book also features over 50 case studies and real life examples from large corporations such as ING Bank, Audi, Autodesk, and Toyota Financial Services, to small startups, incubators, and social impact organizations, providing a behind the scenes look at the best practices and pitfalls to avoid. Also included are personal insights from thought leaders such as Steve Blank on innovation, Alex Osterwalder on business models, Nancy Duarte on storytelling, and Rob Fitzpatrick on questioning, among others.

Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization. In State of Readiness, Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence, the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.

In January 2004 NASA was given a new policy direction known as the Vision for Space Exploration. That plan, now renamed the United States Space Exploration Policy, called for sending human and robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In 2005 NASA outlined how to conduct the first steps in implementing this policy and began the development of a new human-carrying spacecraft known as Orion, the lunar lander known as Altair, and the launch vehicles Ares I and Ares V. Collectively, these are called the Constellation System. In November 2007 NASA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to evaluate the potential for new science opportunities enabled by the Constellation System of rockets and spacecraft. The NRC committee evaluated a total of 17 mission concepts for future space science missions. Of those, the committee determined that 12 would benefit from the Constellation System and five would not. This book presents the committee's findings and recommendations, including cost estimates, a review of the technical feasibility of each mission, and identification of the missions most deserving of future study.

We found that one of the most important things in coaching business startups is to determine key metrics that are easy to understand and can be agreed upon between Entrepreneurship track participant students, incubator coaches, departmental assistant lecturers and management . This is a necessity because without a metric that is easily understood and mutually agreed upon, there is often a misunderstanding in assessing the development of a startup which ultimately has a negative impact on the overall business incubation ecosystem.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

E-maintenance is the synthesis of two major trends in today’s society: the growing importance of maintenance as a key technology and the rapid development of information and communication technology. E-maintenance gives the reader an overview of the possibilities offered by new and advanced information and communication technology to achieve efficient maintenance solutions in industry, energy production and transportation, thereby supporting sustainable development in society. Sixteen chapters cover a range of different technologies, such as: new micro sensors, on-line lubrication sensors, smart tags for condition monitoring, wireless communication and smart personal digital assistants. E-maintenance also discusses semantic data-structuring solutions; ontology structured communications; implementation of diagnostics and prognostics; and maintenance decision support by economic optimisation. It includes four industrial cases that are both described and analysed in detail, with an outline of a global application solution. E-maintenance is a useful tool for engineers and technicians who wish to develop e-maintenance in industrial sites. It is also a source of new and stimulating ideas for researchers looking to make the next step towards sustainable development.