In an earlier paper [Tien 2015], the author defined the concept of a servgood, which can be thought of as a physical good or product enveloped by a services-oriented layer that makes the good smarter or more adaptable and customizable for a particular use. Adding another layer of physical sensors could then enhance its smartness and intelligence, especially if it were to be connected with each other or with other servgoods through the Internet of Things. Such sensed servgoods are becoming the products of the future. Indeed, autonomous vehicles can be considered the exemplar servgoods of the future; it is about decision informatics and embraces the advanced technologies of sensing (i.e., Big Data), processing (i.e., real-time analytics), reacting (i.e., real-time decision-making), and learning (i.e., deep learning). Since autonomous vehicles constitute a huge quality-of-life disruption, it is also critical to consider its policy impact on privacy and security, regulations and standards, and liability and insurance. Finally, just as the Soviet Union inaugurated the space age on October 4, 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, the U. S. has inaugurated an age of automata or autonomous vehicles that can be considered to be the U. S. Sputnik of servgoods, with the full support of the U.

An increasing number of corporations are adapting their strategies to include projects aimed at achieving United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Nonetheless, the implementation of these projects revives a fifty-year old question about the impact of sustainable activity on corporate financial performance and sustainability outcomes. This paper proposes the analysis of the Switching Costs of sustainable projects as a way to identify areas of improvement for corporate strategies, thus responding to the urgent need for models and assessment tools able to achieve financial and sustainability objectives as claimed by both practice and academia. A conceptual framework relating the Switching Costs of sustainable projects to sustainability and corporate financial performance has been developed and applied in this research to a case-study company, Walmart Mexico and Central America. This paper addresses the challenge of recognising, collecting and gauging the effect of the changes, particularly those of an intangible nature, generated by the sustainable projects.

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In September 2016, the University of Greenwich Business School introduced its first portfolio of extended programmes. The majority of these programmes followed a common initial year, referred to for the remainder of this opinion piece as 'year zero'. The programme design for year zero was intended to launch students on their programme of study by introducing basic academic writing and communication skills, while also including general business-related content. On extended programmes, the benefits of generic foundation years such as year zero include the efficient use of resources. As all students are studying the same modules, it is easier for universities to forward-plan and to run larger lectures than would be possible if each programme had its own year zero with smaller student numbers. The reasons for the Business School's approach to programme design for this new initiative were therefore obvious and logical. There were economies of scale to be had, especially by basing year zero on existing foundation modules already available within the University, as the programmes could be set up relatively swiftly for the initial cohorts. This was very helpful, because, as these students would be recruited through Clearing 2016, there was no clear idea of expected numbers in the early stages of the recruitment cycle. However, in this piece, we argue that a bespoke year zero design, with a focus on a narrower range of subject-specific topics, enhances the experience of the students on our extended programmes and is worth the investment.The use of the plural 'cohorts' in the previous paragraph is deliberate, as it gets to the nub of the problem we encountered. Whilst, in the early days, we may have referred to all 'extended students' en masse, the students did not see themselves as a single group of 'general business' students. Their programme identities and departments were very important to them. Although the programme structures were set out clearly on the University's website, the students had not anticipated a quasi-generic foundation year plus three years; they had enrolled on to a four-year extended programme commencing with year zero. The students expected programme-specific content from the outset and, from the feedback we received from the first few weeks of term onwards, it became apparent that something had to be done. This opinion piece represents the views of colleagues from three departments within the Business School and demonstrates how we took a united approach to resolving the problem which we all encountered.Our response was twofold. First, we regarded the feedback as reflecting a serious and immediate problem, which we addressed by adding previously unplanned extra-curricular content into the year. One example was a trading competition in term one. In term two, the department with the highest number of extended students provided four weeks of taught sessions to its students on a programme-specific topic. This content, not assessed, was of a

Abstract-This research aims to address supply chain collaboration with a perspective of broader three-dimensional relationship, not a linear two-dimensional relationship discussed broadly in previous research. Case study was adopted for this research, and data collection was mainly conducted via interview. The research results highlighted that supply chain collaborations are common practice across all levels of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The results also indicated that the different strengthen levels of barging power among collaborative partners will influence the achieved advantages at different supply chain levels, including strategic, operational and political levels.