David Louis Francis

• PhD
• Research Director at Richmond Consultants Ltd

Many governments, global management consultancies, university researchers and top executives have strongly advocated that either Innovation or Agility is essential for twenty first century enterprises (both commercial and not-for-profit). However, the similarities and differences between Innovation and Agility, and how they interrelate, has been ex...

This article has two objectives. First, is to provoke consideration as to whether a set of constructs known as ‘the Agile Paradigm’ provides a relevant model for organisation development in Higher Education Institutions as they confront a period of increasingly VUCA (volatile + uncertain + complex + ambiguous) conditions, a changing and threatening...

Era-redefining technological changes, huge geo-political realignments, deep environmental anxieties, new forms of competition and fundamental social changes are affecting organisations large and small. To respond to waves of ongoing change drivers managers are transforming their enterprises to be agile, but research has shown that agility can be dy...

Designed by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas is a complex urban ensemble of Outstanding Universal Value located in Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela. Modern ideals of urban planning and architecture, including the collection of the Synthesis of the Arts, gave this site national and global significance t...

Background Recruitment is a major challenge for many trials; just over half reach their targets and almost a third resort to grant extensions. The economic and societal implications of this shortcoming are significant. Yet, we have a limited understanding of the processes that increase the probability that recruitment targets will be achieved. Acco...

The manufacturing challenge Say the word “manufacturing” to most people and the chances are that they will conjure up images of belching smokestacks, urban sprawl, lines of unfriendly looking machinery – all with a uniform colour scheme based on very drab grey! As for the way people fit into this puzzle that image is probably best captured by the i...

Objectives: To identify factors associated with good and poor recruitment to multicentre trials. Data sources: Part A: database of trials started in or after 1994 and were due to end before 2003 held by the Medical Research Council and Health Technology Assessment Programmes. Part B: interviews with people playing a wide range of roles within fo...

Publicly funded clinical trials require a substantial commitment of time and money. To ensure that sufficient numbers of patients are recruited it is essential that they address important questions in a rigorous manner and are managed well, adopting effective marketing strategies. Using methods of analysis drawn from management studies, this paper...

Securing and managing finances for multicentre randomised controlled trials is a highly complex activity which is rarely considered in the research literature. This paper describes the process of financial negotiation and the impact of financial considerations in four UK multicentre trials. These trials had met, or were on schedule to meet, recruit...

A commonly reported problem with the conduct of multicentre randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is that recruitment is often slower or more difficult than expected, with many trials failing to reach their planned sample size within the timescale and funding originally envisaged. The aim of this study was to explore factors that may have been associ...

It has been suggested that the social sciences would benefit if researchers forged a high-level, creative and dynamic interdependence between theory and research, rather than having them remain as relatively separated domains. This has been termed ‘adaptive theory’, as models, frameworks and conceptual schema are seen as evolving and generative. Ad...

Innovation is often described in terms of changes in what a firm offers the world (product/service innovation) and the ways it creates and delivers those offerings (process innovation). Arguably this definition is insufficient since it does not take into account two other areas where innovation is possible-market position and business models. Marke...

A paradox in innovation management is that firms deploying what is generally recognised 'good practice' can find themselves under threat through disruption caused by some form of discontinuity in their operating environment. Routines suited to dealing with 'steady state' innovation differ from and may even conflict with those needed to explore and...

Widespread recognition of the strategic imperative posed by a turbulent external environment has brought into focus a key challenge for firms – that of increasing involvement in innovation by the staff in the organisation. Much research has suggested that organisations that mobilise a large proportion of their staff to participate in innovation can...

Innovation is often described in terms of changes in what a firm offers the world (product/service innovation) and the ways it creates and delivers those offerings (process innovation). Arguably this definition is insufficient since it does not take into account two other areas where innovation is possible-market position and business models. Marke...

For various reasons organisations can enter a condition that presents them with a “transformational imperative”. This happens when “old” ways of doing business cease to deliver sustainable competitive advantage and usual ways of “putting things right” fail to restore business viability. In this article, we review ten companies that experienced at l...

The problem facing enterprises in the late 20th century can be seen as the latest version of two long-standing puzzles to do with responding to demanding internal and external environments. The continuing search for solutions to these puzzles leads to investment in innovation - via R&D, technology transfer, etc. But evidence suggests that the key r...

Competitive advantage increasingly rests upon a dynamic capability to compete successfully in an environment of frequent, challenging and, often, unpredictable change. Sustaining competitive advantage through price alone is no longer a viable strategy for most firms. Firms need to succeed in markets where a range of non-price advantages are expecte...

The problem of manufacturing in the late twentieth century can be seen as the latest version of two long-standing puzzles to do with responding to demanding internal and external environments. The continuing search for solutions to these puzzles leads to investment in innovation - via R&D, technology transfer, etc. But evidence suggests that the ke...

In developing CI capability, organisations need to move to a level of development in which strategic goals are communicated and deployed and where improvement activity is guided by a process of monitoring and measurement against these strategic objectives. Policy deployment of this kind is more prevalent in Japanese examples and in a handful of cas...

Innovation which requires the acquisition of new or improved technologies involves a technical and managerial learning process and it raises the policy question of how best to encourage and enable relevant learning. The absence or lack of experience in this domain is a particular problem for smaller firms (SMEs) and for enterprises in economies in...

Much discussion in the new product development (NPD) literature is concerned with describing blueprints for more effective systems for managing the process. Features of the emergent pattern of good practice in NPD include cross-functional team working, early involvement, effective project management arrangements and learning systems. However, there...

Agile organizations take more decisions more frequently than non- agile organizations. This places stress on top managers who can be overwhelmed by the quantity of decisions to be taken and be asked to make judgments on matters that they do not understand fully. Problems of decision-making are particularly significant for the management of innovati...

This paper presents a reference model of 18 components and 56 elements of innovation capability derived from a grounded-theory study of 107 innovative organizations. The reference model defines the range of organizational factors that enabled an organization to be innovative. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the re...

Every now and then a disruptive event happens, such as the invention of the internet, that changes markets, industries, even societies. Successful well-managed companies thrive in mature markets by focusing on doing what they do, just a little bit better. Consequently, when a disruptive event, such as new technology or a regulatory change comes alo...

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