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The need for improved building performance is global and has led to numerous international collaborations. Since 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Energy in Buildings and Communities Program (EBC, formerly ECBCS) has completed two building commissioning research annexes, recognizing the role of the building commissioning process in meeting energy conservation goals. Annex 40 established a common understanding of the commissioning process and initiated research that became the basis for the development of national guidelines and automated tools. Subsequently, Annex 47 focused on advancing the use of technology in commissioning and the work developed and ideas exchanged in Annex 47 were foundational in enabling numerous positive impacts internationally. This paper describes research results from these annexes 1 and discusses the impact of both in four areas: 1) commissioning support software tools, 2) cost-benefit methodology, 3) guidelines and standards, and 4) industry associations and research conferences. The paper concludes with a discussion of current commissioning industry research and policy needs.

The ability to form spatial representations of object locations is an important component of successful spatial navigation. Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that environmental features that have a salient coordinate axis (e.g., a rectangular building or a geometrical room) may provide a reference frame for the encoding of object-location information. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the brain networks engaged when object-location representations are stored with respect to an extrinsic reference frame. Participants learned the layout of an object array in an active, virtual-navigation paradigm. A square mat positioned on the floor of the virtual arena acted as the extrinsic reference frame. Knowledge of the spatial arrangement of the object array was probed while participants underwent fMRI, using a spatial judgment task that required them to imagine orientations of the learned array that were either aligned or misaligned with the geometry of the mat. Consistent with previous findings, participants responded faster and were more accurate when the imagined orientation was aligned, as opposed to misaligned, with the extrinsic reference frame. Analysis of the fMRI data revealed important differences in brain activity between the two conditions. Significantly greater activity was observed in the aligned condition compared with the misaligned condition across a bilateral network of brain areas that included the inferior occipital gyri, inferior and middle temporal gyri, and fusiform gyri. By contrast, activity in the misaligned condition was significantly greater than in the aligned condition in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex, and in the right anterior prefrontal and anterior insular cortex. These results suggest that retrieval of spatial locations that are aligned with an extrinsic reference frame involve direct access to detailed and accurate representations within the ventral visual pathway, whereas spatial locations that are misaligned with this reference frame are only weakly represented and require active inferential processes through the recruitment of prefrontal cortical networks. Our findings are consistent with a "reference direction" account of spatial memory, which posits that inter-object spatial relationships are primarily encoded with respect to specified reference directions.

Several cortical and subcortical circuits have been implicated in object location memory and navigation. Uncertainty remains, however, about which neural circuits are involved in the distinct processes of encoding and retrieval during active navigation through three-dimensional space. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses as participants learned the location of a single target object relative to a small set of landmarks. Following a delay, the target was removed and participants were required to navigate back to its original position. The relative and absolute locations of landmarks and the target object were changed on every trial, so that participants had to learn a novel arrangement for each spatial scene. At encoding, greater activity within the right hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus bilaterally predicted more accurate navigation to the hidden target object in the retrieval phase. By contrast, during the retrieval phase, more accurate performance was associated with increased activity in the left hippocampus and the striatum bilaterally. Dividing participants into good and poor navigators, based upon behavioural performance, revealed greater striatal activity in good navigators during retrieval, perhaps reflecting superior procedural learning in these individuals. By contrast, the poor navigators showed stronger left hippocampal activity, suggesting reliance on a less effective verbal or symbolic code by this group. Our findings suggest separate neural substrates for the encoding and retrieval stages of object location memory during active navigation, which are further modulated by participants' overall navigational ability.

A considerable body of evidence supports the notion that cerebellar lesions lead to neuropsychological deficits, including impairments in working-memory, executive tasks and verbal fluency. Studies employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and anatomical tracing in primates provide evidence for a cortico-cerebellar circuitry as the functional substrate of working-memory. The present fMRI study explores the activation pattern during an n-back working-memory task in patients with an isolated cerebellar infarct. To determine each patient's cognitive impairment, neuropsychological tests of working-memory and attention were carried out. We conducted fMRI in nine patients and nine healthy age-matched controls while they performed a 2-back task in a blocked-design. In both groups we found bilateral activations in a widespread cortico-cerebellar network, consisting of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 44, 45), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 9, 46), parietal cortex (BA 7, 40), pre-supplementary motor area (BA 6) anterior cingulate (BA 32). Relative to healthy controls, patients with isolated cerebellar infarcts demonstrated significantly more pronounced BOLD-activations in the precuneus and the angular gyrus during the 2-back task. The significant increase in activation in the posterior parietal areas of the cerebellar patients could be attributed to a compensatory recruitment to maintain task performance. We conclude that cerebellar lesions affect remote cortical regions that are part of a putative cortico-cerebellar network.

Designing complex product systems across firms poses significant organizational challenges. While much research has focused on how interdependencies between system components can hamper the integration of collective efforts, the fact that complex systems consist of multiple hierarchic levels has received less attention. A basic decision that firms face, however, is how much complexity to outsource. The hierarchic nature of complex systems can guide this decision – which system levels to design in-house, and which to contract out? In this paper, we use an in-depth study of the aircraft manufacturer Airbus’ A350 program to understand the organizational consequences of this decision. We find that allocating higher-level design tasks to suppliers entails a tradeoff: on the one hand, it shifts the locus of dealing with complexity and reduces the outsourcing firm’s “coordination load” – its share in ensuring the alignment of actions; on the other hand, it can deteriorate cooperation within the supplier network and thus increase the firm’s “cooperation load” – its burden of aligning interests. Outsourcing higher-level design tasks, we argue, can backfire by creating conditions that are toxic to dealing effectively with complexity: (a) the supply network becomes more stratified, requiring competitors to cooperate while changing bargaining positions in adverse ways; (b) suppliers have to absorb the uncertainty of unstable design requirements, which reinforces the negative implications of (a). If organizing effectively implies reconciling specialization with coordination and cooperation, this tradeoff may impose a limit to the interfirm collaboration in complex systems design.

We study the phenomenon of “company builders” – a recent type of business incubators that create new ventures in a factory-like manner, i.e., with a focus on efficiency and scale, and by using standardized processes and shared resources. To characterize this novel organizational form and delineate it from existing incubator models, we conceptualize incubator organizations as hybrid governance structures along key dimensions of the market-hierarchy spectrum. We contextualize and extend our conceptual arguments through an in-depth study of Rocket Internet, the incubator that pioneered an extreme company builder strategy by replicating successful Internet business models. We argue that while traditional incubators lean toward the market end of the market-hierarchy spectrum, company builders are truly hybrid organizational forms in that new ventures are assembled and scaled up in a centrally-coordinated manner. Referring to cooperation and coordination as basic organizational challenges, we discuss the stability, advantages, and pitfalls of the company builder model, as well as its applicability to other domains. Our findings make contributions to work on organizing venturing processes, novel organizational forms, and business model replication.

How do organizations learn from a drastic failure? We distinguish between ad-hoc and systematic reactions and discuss their effectiveness for dealing with two basic challenges: (1) identifying and solving the problems that caused the failure; and (2) changing the organization accordingly. We apply this conceptual perspective to illustrate the dynamics of learning from the drastic failure that occurred during the development of the Airbus A380 “superjumbo.” Our findings echo extant observations that efforts to redesign organizational behavior in an ad-hoc manner are often insufficient. Instead, the organizational system must provide a scaffolding that allows experiencing a critical event in a rich and systematic manner. When seen from a dynamic perspective, however, we find that even imperfect ad-hoc efforts may play a vital role. By enforcing changes, providing stability, and raising awareness, they can act as a helpful prelude to more systematic problem solving and change.

Ideas from employees are a major source of value creation in firms, yet the merits of rewards for incentivizing the generation of ideas are highly contested. Using a computational model, we show that firms can improve performance by offering low-powered rewards for the selection and implementation of employee ideas. Low-powered incentives provide a sufficient stream of good ideas, but few exceptional ones. Higher-powered incentives, in contrast, do not systematically translate into exceptional ideas either, but generate an excessive number of good ideas. Performance-based rewards thus appear to be a blunt tool to harness the long tail of innovation. We develop propositions to guide empirical research and discuss their implications for strategy and organizational design.

The emergence of pure Internet-based service providers has put many integrated telecommunications firms – industry incumbents that provide services on their own infrastructure – under massive pressure. While various pure service providers enjoy high performance, the products offered by the incumbents often cannot compete on either price or user experience. Conventional wisdom, however, might suggest the opposite: that coordinating both infrastructure and services might allow the incumbents to reap synergy effects and create superior products. To address this issue, this paper applies a complex systems perspective to the telecommunications industry. It conceptualizes telecommunications firms to be searching for good configurations of interdependent service and infrastructure activities that need to fit together to achieve high-performing product systems. Using a simulation model, the paper shows that integrated operators can indeed take advantage of the interdependencies between the infrastructure and the service domain, resulting in superior product performance. Integrating infrastructure and services, however, can backfire: Because learning about both domains and their interdependence requires more time, performance in the short run will be lower than that of pure service providers that can focus on adapting their service-related activities to an infrastructure that is beyond their control. The paper characterizes the conditions under which these effects can arise and concludes with implications for management and policy.

It is a central tenet in design theory that decomposing complex systems into modules allows the module-level units to search independently for new alternatives. Yet as complex systems are at best near-decomposable, modular decompositions contain inter-modular interdependencies, some of which may be unknown, ignored, or incompletely understood. As decisions made in one module may thus affect the value of decisions made in other parts of the system, decentralized search in modular systems requires coordination. Using an agent-based simulation model, this paper explores how integration efforts - aimed at assessing the fit of the modules and providing performance feedback to the module-level units - help to address these coordination requirements. In particular, the paper examines the role and interdependence of four contingency factors in shaping the value of integration: the structural properties of modular decompositions, the degree of module-level exploration, the time horizon, and the coordination frequency. For instance, I show that the value of integration is particularly distinctive when systems consist of many modules, when the modules are strongly coupled internally or among each other, or when the module-level units search broadly for new alternatives. I also find that constant integration efforts denote the best short-term strategy. In the long term, however, temporary integration - repeated changes between module-level autonomy and coordinative intervention - yields the highest overall performance, suggesting that decentralized organizations may benefit from temporarily neglecting their need for coordination.