David A. Hills – författare

Each year from 1978 through 1987 the Center for Creative Leadership hosted an event called Creativity Week, during which a select group of researchers and practitioners would get together for a high-energy exchange of ideas on organizational creativity. Discussions explored such themes as individual innovation, creativity and teamwork, structuring the organization for innovation, and the relation of innovation to culture and technology. This book, which offers papers based on many of the best Creativity Week presentations, is thus a record of recent thinking, both practical and theoretical, on how organizational effectiveness can be improved.

Each year from 1978 through 1987 the Center for Creative Leadership hosted an event called Creativity Week, during which a select group of researchers and practitioners would get together for a high-energy exchange of ideas on organizational creativity. Discussions explored such themes as individual innovation, creativity and teamwork, structuring the organization for innovation, and the relation of innovation to culture and technology. This book, which offers papers based on many of the best Creativity Week presentations, is thus a record of recent thinking, both practical and theoretical, on how organizational effectiveness can be improved.

This book, which has only one very distant forerunner authored by David A. Hills with David Nowell, represents a very big step that is the quantification of these problems and represents the twenty-five years’ worth of work which have gone on at Oxford since the first book on the subject. Fatigue (popularly ‘metal fatigue’) is the primary failure mode of all machines, engines, transmissions and indeed almost all mechanical devices. The propagation of cracks is well understood and is treated in the subject Fracture Mechanics. By contrast, the nucleation of cracks is very hard to quantify and this remains the case with so-called ‘free initiation’ and, to a lesser extent, at cracks nucleated from stress raising features. But the third form of nucleation, where cracks start from the edges of rubbing components, that is, at joints, is potentially a very much better-defined environment, and therefore, the problem is amendable to attack by applied mechanics and experiment. The contents are of value both to those embarking on research on the subject and to practitioner in industry.

This book, which has only one very distant forerunner authored by David A. Hills with David Nowell, represents a very big step that is the quantification of these problems and represents the twenty-five years’ worth of work which have gone on at Oxford since the first book on the subject. Fatigue (popularly ‘metal fatigue’) is the primary failure mode of all machines, engines, transmissions and indeed almost all mechanical devices. The propagation of cracks is well understood and is treated in the subject Fracture Mechanics. By contrast, the nucleation of cracks is very hard to quantify and this remains the case with so-called ‘free initiation’ and, to a lesser extent, at cracks nucleated from stress raising features. But the third form of nucleation, where cracks start from the edges of rubbing components, that is, at joints, is potentially a very much better-defined environment, and therefore, the problem is amendable to attack by applied mechanics and experiment. The contents are of value both to those embarking on research on the subject and to practitioner in industry.