We continue to present to you the latest book published by the EMBA community, this collection of case studies largely focused on business operating in Romania and on the Romanian economic environment, outlining not only the penetration of new business trends and the adoption of new processes and management procedures but also the growth and transformation of the Romanian business community.
The reader will see not only the transformation taking place across small, medium, and large size companies operating in Romania but also how managers and business leaders understand these transformations, how they approach new practices, how they address gender inequality, and other stringent issues that hamper the development of sustainable business models and how they make sense of a fast-changing world where old models are disrupted and new business architectures and ideas emerge.
The third part of this book is about technology and entrepreneurship. For more details, please order the book here. If you want to meet the authors and discuss with them the challenges and opportunities that Romanian entrepreneurs and managers are facing, join us for the book launch on Monday, 26th of April from 18:00 (RO Time) on Zoom or Facebook live.
In the first paper, Nurturing an Innovative Entrepreneurship Culture, through a Community of Practice, Would Improve the Local Business Development Success, Cătălina Vescan studies the emergence of new communities of practices that can improve and enhance the entrepreneurial drive of the Romanian business environment. The purpose of this research was to find out if changing the current local entrepreneurs’ mindset, through nurturing an innovative entrepreneurship culture, is possible and could improve the local business development success. For this matter, the Communities of practice concept is considered as a physical setting that provides the necessary environment to nurture an innovative entrepreneurship culture. As demonstrated in the literature review, Romania has a weak entrepreneurship culture and an even smaller percentage of innovative entrepreneurship. Also, in the researched context, the development of Communities of practice is one of the right approaches, but it is acknowledged that there are also other ways.
The findings of this research indicate that networking and applied knowledge bring value to the entrepreneur’s businesses. Communities of practice create an environment that enables the creation of innovative entrepreneurship culture, offering the applied knowledge and networking needed. Finally, improving business development success.
The second paper moves the discussion towards The Future of Designing Buildings in Romania – The Next 10 Years. The author, Victor Liviu Pop talks about the adoption of new innovative technologies in the domain of civil building design. The author took the opportunity of writing this paper to combine two very important areas of interest: one being the field where he currently is active – architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) for civil buildings and the other, passion for advanced technology, a hobby that withstood the test of time.
The purpose of the paper is to present the methods used in the past in the AEC design field, the technologies that are currently used, and the technologies that could radically change the way the civil design will be done in the not too far away future.
In the third chapter of this section, Introducing the Perception of Sustainable Performance in Agile Software Product Development Teams, Florian-Udvari Antal-Arpad, uses an emic perspective (measuring the perception of employees) in the assessment of team performance within an agile organizational structure working in the IT industry. He shows how IT workers in Romania have developed their own understanding of agile and grafted it on a local cultural and organizational context. For almost two decades Agile software development methodologies became the industry standard, organizations stating that they work in an Agile way, arguing as having a faster return on investment, better quality products thus higher end-user satisfaction. Up until now, nobody could answer how Agile a team or organizations is. There is a gap in the literature when a team has reached a maximum sustainable pace.
The purpose of this research is to determine how to introduce the perception of team performance in an agile organization. A framework resulted to set up an agile team in such an environment to reach a high-performing state that is sustainable.
About the authors
Cătălina is a Creative Project Strategist, always paying attention to the customers’ needs and planning for success. Currently, she is Product Owner in the Culture & Performance Department at E.ON Romania. She has held various project management positions in the past 6 years in Cultural Change Programs, Customers Experience, Marketing, and IT areas, and she’s a promoter of Service Design Thinking and the Agile way of working. In her roles, she is a high achiever demonstrating excellent leadership and team management skills, enjoys a good challenge, and she is determined to find solutions for every problem using Lean tools.
As for her last academic achievements, Catalina graduated in 2020 with “Distinction” the Executive MBA program from the University of Hull (UK). Having a self-driven personality with small but steady steps, she is committed to bringing a positive change to her community.
Antal wrote his first lines of code back in 1986 while still in elementary school, which explains his passion for software development. In the past 20 years of his professional experience, he worked his way up from software developer to lead several teams in parallel and bringing value in middle management positions. Collaborating both with startups and multinational corporations like Siemens, Oracle, Emerson, and Ascom resulted in the creation of innovative software products, sometimes backed up with custom hardware. Effectively bridging the gap between the business and technical worlds was his way of focusing on cost-effective results through streamlined collaboration.
Antal graduated an Executive MBA at the University of Hull (UK) with “Distinction” in 2020, has a PMI-PMP (Project Management Institute - Project Management Professional) title since 2020 and ScrumAlliance - CSM (Certified Scrum Master) certification since 2014, engineering and through studies diploma from Technical University of Cluj obtained in 2001 and 2003, several technical, leadership and management training in between.
Currently, he is on a sabbatical to care for his kids in such difficult times, but still open for exciting positions like leading a PMO or CIO/COO roles where his extensive knowledge and experience can be shared through mentoring and coaching peers and guide them in creating and reaching a shared vision towards a high performing organization, where the only constant is the continuous change. You can reach him by email at Această adresă de email este protejată contra spambots. Trebuie să activați JavaScript pentru a o vedea.
Victor has held different top management and teaching positions over the last 12 years of experience. In his years of experience, he was engaged in different industries: internet service provider, web development, media production, and construction (both in design and execution). Victor Pop currently holds a Teaching Assistant at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca – Faculty of Construction and also holds the position of Chief Executive Officer at Conpac Arhitect, a family-owned business in civil engineering.
Victor has an Executive MBA degree from the University of Hull (UK), graduated in 2019 with “Merit”, and a Ph.D. Diploma in civil engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca – Faculty of Construction obtained in 2013. He published 3 books as co-author and book coordinator, in the civil engineering field as well as in social studies.