Global software development (GSD) holds various challenges and problems for team members. When confronted with a contextual change in their working environment, individuals have to adapt to the new situation. This includes the adaptation of working styles, behaviors, and methods. Additionally, new challenges, especially those based on the virtual work and cultural background of team members, have to be addressed. By conducting explorative expert interviews, we identified challenges and potential solutions for individuals when encountering contextual change with a focus on competences. We identified that the lack of competences was seen as a major influence factor for a variety of common challenges to GSD. The identification of underlying factors of challenges could allow for focused development of interventions to overcome these challenges. Furthermore, we identified factors influencing the adaptation of competences to the given context and provided insight into the process of competences adaptation. This is the basis for the future development of a set of internationalized GSD competences.

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Abstract. Open educational resources (OER) have a high potential to address the growing need for training materials in management education and training. Today, a high number of OER in management are already available in a large number of repositories. However, users face barriers as they have to search repository by repository with different interfaces to retrieve the appropriate learning content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is not generally supported. The European co-funded project OpenScout addresses these barriers by intelligently connecting leading European OER repositories and providing federated, skillbased search and retrieval web services. On top of this content federation the project supports users with easy-to-apply tools that will accelerate the (re-) use of open content.

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PurposeThe present study intends to foster understanding of how a traditional manufacturer can utilize the “simple rules” approach of managerial heuristics to facilitate its smart solution development (SSD) process.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses an in-depth single case research strategy and 25 senior manager interviews to understand the application of simple rules in smart solution development.FindingsThe findings reveal process, boundary, preference, schedule, and stop rules as the dominant managerial heuristics in the case and identify how the manufacturer applies these rules during the innovation process phases of ideation, incubation, transformation, and industrialization for attaining project outcomes.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes to the new service development (NSD) literature by shedding light on simple rules and how managers may apply them to facilitate SSD. The main limitations stem from applying the qualitative case study approach and the interpretative nature of the study, which produces novel insights but prevents direct generalization to other empirical cases.Practical implicationsThe resulting framework provides guidelines for managers on how to establish formal and clear simple rules that enable industrial solution providers to approach decision-making in smart solution development in a more agile manner.Originality/valueThe study comprises one of the first attempts to investigate managerial heuristics in the context of SSD and puts forward a plea for further NSD research applying psychological conceptualizations to enrich the simple rules perspective.