Roy Green

The Handbook of Service Innovation

Bringing together some of the world’s leading thinkers, academics and professionals to provide practitioners, students and academicians with comprehensive insights into implementing effective service innovation. This book presents service innovation holistically and systemically across various service areas, including health, education, tourism, hospitality, telecommunications, and retail. It addresses contemporary issues through conceptual and applied contributions across industry, academia, and government, providing insights for improved practice and policy making. Featuring cutting-edge research contributions, practical examples, implementations and a select number of case studies across several growth service industries, this book also includes examples of failed service innovation attempts in order to demonstrate a balanced view of the topic and to make clear the pitfalls to be avoided. Culminating in a suggested step-by-step guide to enable service organization’s managers to understand and implement the concepts of service innovation and manage its evolutionary processes effectively, this book will prove a valuable resource to a wide reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience and marketing, and service management and innovation. Includes endorsements from professionals in the field of service innovation.

The future of management education in Australia: challenges and innovations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to undertake a survey of the external and internal forces changing the nature of business schools and business education. It aims to investigate how management education responds to increasing productivity, innovation and capability challenges, examine how MBA programs currently meet these demands, and how these courses might redefine their identity and delivery and finally explore how to deepen engagement between business schools and business stakeholders, and to balance the imperatives of relevance and quality.Design/methodology/approach – This is a survey of business schools and business education in the context of evolving educational and industry policy in Australia in response to an increasingly international and competitive economy. The different potential roles and strategies of business schools are examined, and future strategies identified.Findings – The paper finds that management education is facing insistent pressure to change internationally, and that b...

The ‘Death’ of Comparative Wage Justice in Australia

This paper examines the concept and application of comparative wage justice in the transition to a more decentralised wage bargaining system in Australia. Although it is widely assumed that comparative wage justice now has little or no role in the system, the paper demonstrates that it continues to be major factor in the adjustment of wage rates within and between awards, particularly as a result of the national wage case decisions of 1988–89. The question still to be determined is whether it will also have an application to the growing disparities between the award wage structure on the one hand and the outcomes of enterprise bargaining on the other, which are addressed in the ACTUs 1996 ‘New Living Wage Case’. The conclusion of the paper is that failure to apply the concept to these disparities will transform awards and tribunals into a ‘low pay ghetto’ with diminishing relevance to the overall dynamic of wage fixation.

Change and Involvement at the Workplace: Evidence from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey

The April national wage decision doubted whether Australias industrial relations parties as yet possessed the “maturity” to conduct enterprise bargaining. This view is consistent with the traditional role of the Industrial Relations Commission and with the conclusions of the 1985 Hancock Report, which provided the rationale for a permanent regime of centralised wage-fixing in Australia. It is also supported to some degree by the results of the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, which show that, despite the accumulating pressure for change, most workplaces currently lack the necessary ‘infrastructure’ for bargaining and consultation at enterprise level. In particular, the failure of Australian management to involve workers and unions in change may be seen as a major impediment to further workplace reform. The fundamental question which arises for industrial relations policy is whether to accept the situation as it is and hope for progress through the slow but steady implementation of award restructuring, or whether to provide an external impetus for the development of a workplace infrastructure through the establishment of a new framework for enterprise bargaining combined with legislation to promote information-sharing and consultation at the workplace. The central thrust of this article is that the latter approach will more effectively foster a ‘strategic bargaining’ culture in Australia.

Lean manufacturing as a high-performance work system: the case of Cochlear

This paper addresses the Special Issue call for Australian examples of innovative management systems that enable the production of successful products by drawing on a single case study: medical device manufacturer Cochlear. Through qualitative case study methodology, we examine the human resource management practices that complemented the implementation of lean manufacturing principles. We argue that in their implementation, Cochlear’s management team enriched the traditional understanding of lean and its focus on waste reduction, low cost and quality assurance by adopting people management practices as an integrated component of the overall management capability which allowed their people to grow and develop. The combination of lean and HR practices transformed Cochlear to a high-performance work system and positively impacted production processes and output. By examining a medical device manufacturer, an under-researched sector, our paper expands existing literature on lean manufacturing and provides implications for practitioners.

No Case to Answer: Productivity Performance of the Australian Construction Industry

This article examines the productivity performance of the Australian construction industry and identifies some of the key factors affecting productivity growth. It also critically assesses the recent Productivity Commission (1999) report on the construction industry. In particular, the article challenges the argument of the Productivity Commission that a high level of unionisation within the industry is adverse for productivity growth. Moreover, the recommendations of the Commission directed at increasing productivity within the industry are argued to exacerbate those structural features of the construction industry which impose a constraint on productivity growth. The primary data sources are national and international official economic data on the industry and a number of case studies of major city building projects undertaken by the authors. The study finds that the Australian construction industry is within the top three OECD countries in terms of construction output per person employed.

Management practices of Australian manufacturing firms: why are some firms more innovative?

Whilst many studies have focused on the adoption of individual or sets of innovative management practices (e.g. lean production), fewer studies have evaluated a diverse set of management practices and firm contextual factors which may limit (or enable) the accumulation of groups of innovations in organisations. The Australian manufacturing sector is a novel setting to investigate such issues due to, among other reasons, a protracted decline of the competitive position of the sector. In this paper, we use a data-set from the Australian government funded management practices benchmarking project which was part of the World Management Survey and empirically evaluate why some companies have more innovative management practices than others. The conceptual model developed draws mainly on innovation diffusion theory and prior empirical findings. We find that (1) firms which adopt clusters of better management practices have greater performance; and (2) several firm characteristics explain the adoption of better management practices, such as education level of employees and managers, firm size, ownership by a multinational firm, and diffused ownership structure. The study has practical implications for policy-makers and stakeholders who are interested in supporting the adoption of better management practices by firms to enhance productivity in the manufacturing sector.

The Temporary Agency Work Sector in Australia and Ireland: Modest, Growing and Under-recorded

Over the past two decades temporary agency work has increased in relation to most sectors and countries. This growth reflects the internationalisation of the agency business which, arguably, has come about due to demands for an ‘on-call just-in-time’ workforce. While temporary agency work possesses several conceptual and empirical challenges for researchers, it also poses challenges for regulators. This paper considers some of those challenges concerning various definitions, classifications and measurement of temporary work while comparing the Australian and Irish experience. It is concluded that while agency work in Australia and Ireland is modest, it is growing, and the conceptual and empirical problems associated with its under-recording pose difficulties for the design and implementation of a regulatory code for this sector.

Higher Education in Management: The Case of Australia

The strategic relevance of higher business education in Australia cannot be overstated. From a purely economic perspective, it has the lion’s share in one of Australia’s most valuable exports, education, generating around

The ICT Sector, Growth and Productivity: Ireland and Australia Compared

15 billion in revenues each year (Group of Eight 2014). Business schools train and accredit generations of business leaders, entrepreneurs and business professionals, who constitute the backbone of national economy and society. Their research offers useful intelligence on how to reinforce and reconfigure organizational and industrial capabilities, helping practitioners and policymakers.