Browsing by Author "Baets, Walter"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Creating the conditions for entrepreneurial learning within an inclusive and scalable African business education ecosystem
    (2019) Hosken, Christopher; Baets, Walter
    Entrepreneurship is key to growing and uplifting emerging economies like South Africa. There exists an extremely high failure rate amongst entrepreneurs in this country, this coupled with a lack of support for entrepreneurs, creates the conditions where an entrepreneurial culture cannot thrive. Entrepreneurship and education can be South Africa's most significant tools of liberation and unlock exponential growth which can, in turn, address the socio-economic problems that exist. This research aims to understand what the critical educational and support elements are that drive entrepreneurial learning and development. This research aims to discover what is required to create meaningful learning experiences for entrepreneurs and how this learning can be turned to practice and drive entrepreneurial growth. This growth may play a key role in addressing some of the gaps that exist between South Africa's entrepreneurial potential and its current state. Online and virtual education technologies, pedagogies and methodologies are explored as the core proponents of these learning experiences. Different models are explored and analysed in their distinct contexts to discover what it takes to create these learning experiences. New models of entrepreneur education and the supporting technology are examined to help understand how entrepreneur education programmes can create meaningful learning and development that produces and support high potential entrepreneurs. The research primarily explores an innovative model of an online entrepreneurship education offering that attempts to exponentially improve the impact of traditional models. An adapted design thinking methodology is applied; this allowed the study to examine various models and phenomena through a hyper-practical lens. This methodology supported the research process in uncovering what challenges exist for an education model of this nature to develop meaningful learning and development opportunities for entrepreneurs. 5 The impact of this research could be widespread in assisting with the understanding of how entrepreneurs learn and apply knowledge. The literature reviewed aimed to provide a view of what trends exist in social entrepreneurship globally and South Africa, and how these trends link to meaningful entrepreneurial learning and practice. This research is unique in that it takes a nascent concept such as virtual ecosystems in the social entrepreneurial context and explores how a model in which deep learning experiences are present for entrepreneurs, affects meaningful development and entrepreneurial outcomes. This research focuses on building theory through qualitative data sources collected through the research instruments of interviews, questionnaires, observations, discussions and practical prototyping.
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    Design and validation of a leadership model for South African higher education
    (2018) Walters, Cyrill; Baets, Walter
    Although universities have not historically focused on their own organisational leadership as a subject of academic enquiry, there has been much academic substantiation of leadership knowledge as theory. My PhD dissertation was designed to explore the current typology of leadership in South African universities and to validate a conceptual model proposed in the dissertation. The model is based on complexity science and Ken Wilber’s theory of holism, and employs such key concepts as values, personal development, and mechanistic and holistic performance. The rationale for this study was the researcher’s desire to explore the qualities required of those in higher education leadership positions, in order for them to meet demands to widen access to education as well as to contribute to the social, cultural, and economic development of South Africa. The selected sample was composed of personnel occupying the senior management positions of Vice-Chancellor (VC) and/or Principal and/or Rector; Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC) and/or Vice-Principal; and Faculty Dean. The primary data collection methods were both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative results of the Cassandra© survey and the qualitative findings utilizing semi-structured interviews were merged at the interpretation stage. The data were analysed, coded, and organized according to the research questions. Significant findings were that the current funding crisis was a major challenge within the sector; however, fee-free higher education for all in the current economic context is neither equitable nor likely to be affordable in the medium term. The research revealed weakness in the understanding and practice of diversity within the sector. The strengths of staff who work directly with leaders were found to be wanting, as they are not always adequately skilled to do their jobs. Innovation was not a priority for leadership and the sector did very little to provide the space for innovation. Complexity science provides a useful tool for the analysis of leadership in higher education. Finally, a cogent model of leadership for South African higher education institutions is described, synthesized and presented.
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    Exploring emergence in corporate sustainability
    (2019) Maitland, Roger; Baets, Walter
    As the impacts of climate change intensify, businesses are increasingly committing to ambitious sustainable development goals, yet an enduring disconnect remains between corporate sustainability activities and declining global environment and society. This study adopts a complexity view that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has played a key role in creating many of the sustainability issues now faced by humanity. This dissertation departs from the premise that sustainability needs to be integrated into an organisation and uses a complexity view to argue that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence. Whilst many studies have examined how sustainability can be integrated into a business, less is known about corporate sustainability as an emergent process. To address the knowledge gap, this research answered three questions: (1) How does sustainability emerge in financial institutions? (2) What is the role of coherence in the emergence of sustainability? and (3) What conditions enable the emergence of sustainability? A mixed method sequential design was used. In the initial quantitative strand of the research, a holistic business assessment survey based on integral theory was implemented in two financial services organisations in Southern Africa. The results were analysed using self-organising maps and explored in narrative interviews in the subsequent qualitative strand of the research. The study makes three contributions to our understanding of emergence in corporate sustainability. First, by proposing four modes by which corporate sustainability is enacted; these elucidate how integral domains are enacted in corporate sustainability. Second, by clarifying the process of emergence by articulating how zones of coherence emerge between embodied and embedded dimensions. Third, by explaining how the shift to corporate sustainability occurs by means of four conditions. These contributions serve to advance our understanding of corporate sustainability as a fundamental shift in the functioning of an organisation towards coevolutionary self-organisation. It is recommended that corporate sustainability is holistically cultivated to support emergence and self-organisation, rather than being integrated through a linear process of change.
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    A non-linear approach to modelling motivation in the workplace using artificial neural networks
    (2012) Jaquet, Jean-Michel; Baets, Walter
    The standard business conception of the employee is as a blank slate machine motivated through a behaviourist system of reward and punishment. In contrast to this conception, studies of human evolution, neurology and cognition suggest that motivation emerges from the interaction of a complex and non-linear system of variables. This two-part study uses a conceptual model of work motivation based on systems and complexity theory to identify and interpret the significance of outlying variables in the motivations of groups of working professionals with different career orientations. In the first part of the fieldwork, fifty respondents from each of four career orientations (business managers, professional creative artists, entrepreneurs and students studying in creative fields) completed a self-assessment tool in which they indicated their strength of agreement or disagreement with the presence of fifteen motivation variables in their pursuit of a work goal. The responses of each career group were clustered using artificial neural network analysis and outlying motivation variables within clusters that differed significantly from the mean were identified. In the second part of the fieldwork, the meanings of outlying variables were interpreted by focus groups representing each of the four different career orientations. While on average, respondents agreed that all motivational variables were fulfilled in their pursuit of a work goal, unsupervised artificial neural network clustering identified between two and four clusters of respondents within each career group that showed responses differing significantly from the mean. These were mainly in the form of disagreement with fulfilment of one or more variables of motivation. Focus groups were able to identify with and provide context to these outlying responses.
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    The observing self as a catalyst for behaviour change and wellbeing: Effective personal informatics system design to promote behaviour change in the changing health paradigm
    (2017) De Villiers, Stephanie; Baets, Walter; Marks, Jonathan
    The current study is a user-centred enquiry into how wellness-related personal informatics (PI) systems can be more effectively designed to better promote lasting behaviour change and sustained wellbeing in the context of the changing health paradigm. Until recently, the Western biomedical model with its disease focus has been effective in delivering health care; however, this paradigm does not efficiently support a system in crises - the contemporary health care system which is confronted with complex challenges of modern lifestyle diseases and behavioural disorders. Enabled by the technological revolution, a Systems Medicine model - a preventative, personalised, predictive and participatory (P4) approach - is emerging and PI systems play a significant role in realising this pre-clinical, patient-centric, behaviour-focussed shift in health care. This viewpoint paper argues that design strategies applied in PI systems to promote behaviour change play a vital role in supporting health outcomes, specifically, persuasive and mindful user experience (UX) strategies. By applying a phenomenographic research methodology, a user-centred approach is taken to understand qualitatively different ways in which PI systems (and their inherent design strategies) are experienced by users, to inform more intuitive design of PI systems that balance behaviour change strategies to support more lasting shifts and sustainable states of wellbeing. Drawing together ideas from systems medicine, complexity theory, persuasive and mindful design approaches in conjunction with phenomenography, this study aims to understand experiential nuances to offer implications for the future design of health care through PI systems. The theory built through the research process is applied in a prototype design, which is presented as an example of a PI system design that balances persuasive and mindful strategies and aims to promote lasting behaviour change and enduring states of wellbeing more effectively.
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    Organisational practices and individual innovation behaviour: a non-linear approach to modelling the emergence of corporate entrepreneurship
    (2018) Hind, Colene; Baets, Walter; Henning, Sanchen
    Background: Successful corporate entrepreneurship is credited with various positive organisational outcomes and achievements. At the wellspring of corporate entrepreneurship is the individual member of the organisation tasked with innovative behaviour. Corporate entrepreneurship emerges within the interface between innovative individuals and the organisational system they function in. Classical theorising that follows reductionist approaches in the pursuit of pure causality has failed to explain the emergence of corporate entrepreneurship within the dynamic and non-linear processes that constitute the complexity embedded in organisations. Research statement: Corporate entrepreneurship as an emergent process within an organisation comprises various elements that when studied through classical theories and methods fail to explain the process as a whole. An alternative theory and method is needed if corporate entrepreneurship is to be understood as a complex, dynamic and non-linear phenomenon. Method of analysis: A two-phase sequential explanatory mixed method of analysis is employed. Quantitative data, that was gathered using existing measuring instruments, includes variables related to human capital and organisational practices and individual innovative behaviour. The data is presented to the Self-Organising Maps software, which utilises the principles of Artificial neural networks to cluster it. Phase 2 comprises a qualitative exploration with subject matter experts, of outlying cluster patterns produced by the quantitative results. Findings and conclusions: Theoretically, the study describes the relevant concepts of corporate entrepreneurship and organisational practices and complex adaptive systems theory as they pertain to the study. Empirically, the study maps the emergence of innovative behaviour in a manner that explores an alternative to mainstream purist causality. The study produces a conceptual framework that can be contextually adapted and applied in practice to gain understanding into the emergence of corporate entrepreneurship. The study concludes that our understanding of the emergence of corporate entrepreneurship can be enhanced through the use of methods that allow for the non-linear and dynamic nature of the phenomenon, rather than methods that attempt to reduce it.
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    The Rise of Emergent Corporate Sustainability: A Self-Organised View
    (2021-05-13) Maitland, Roger; Baets, Walter
    Escalating climate crisis activism highlights the potential of self-organised approaches in sustainability to address the disconnect between corporate sustainability activities and globally declining ecological systems. This paper argues that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence which may enable organisations to address this disconnect by creating a context supportive of emergence within the organisation rather than reacting to pressures from outside. An exploratory mixed-methods case study was used to explore how corporate sustainability emerged in two financial services institutions. This article develops the idea of corporate sustainability as a co-evolutionary process of emergence and presents a framework to assist organisations to cultivate sustainability. It adopts a complexity view and posits that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has contributed to the sustainability issues faced by humanity. This study suggests that the paradigmatic assumptions that have contributed to the sustainability crisis must be interrogated to create an environment which is conducive to the emergence of corporate sustainability. Through examining corporate sustainability as an emergent process, this paper sheds light on how businesses can foster conditions in which a self-organised response to sustainability challenges is distributed across the organisation whilst being embedded in the containing system.