The Role of Crowdfunding in Delivering Entrepreneurship Within the Hospitality Sector: A Case Study Analysis

Over the last decade, crowdfunding, has emerged as a hugely disruptive force within the financial landscape worldwide. Crowdfunding, the process of raising relatively small sums of money from the crowd, via the internet, enables entrepreneurs, particularly at the innovative and new start-ups stage, to access much needed funding, overcoming a "funding gap”. The growth of crowdfunding has been phenomenal. In 2019, an estimated €14 billion was crowdfunded worldwide (Statistia 2020) and the forecast is for the sector to grow to €30 billion by 2025 (Mordo Intelligence, 2020). Initially, crowdfunding gained prominence through funding creative and artistic projects, but over the last number of years, this appeal has spread across a diverse range of businesses and sectors (Bradford 2012 and Research and Markets 2022). In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, crowdfunding offers entrepreneurs and businesses access to much needed seed funding, but also non-financial benefits in the form of market and product testing, media exposure and customer feedback. Crowdfunding is a relatively new domain for businesses in the hospitality sector. As noted by Belavin, Marinesi and Tsoukalas (2020), crowdfunding offers huge potential for the sector, who often face funding challenges thereby limiting new innovative start-ups, critical for the sector's long term viability. This case study examined how one entrepreneur in the hospitality sector, successfully crowdfunded an innovative business idea in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case traces the idea and the factors that shaped the decision to crowdfund. Additionally, the case examines the benefits and challenges involved in successfully crowdfunding the business idea and closes with the entrepreneur reflecting on the key learning from the experience. The contribution of this case study is twofold. Firstly, it serves to highlight the potential of crowdfunding as a funding source of enterprise development, particularly among new, innovative businesses. Secondly, it adds to the current debate, as noted by Belavin, Marinesi and Tsoukalas (2020), of the potential crowdfunding in fostering entrepreneurship and economic development within the hospitality sector. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All right reserved.

The Design and Utilisation of PanSim, a Portable Pandemic Simulator

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a clear and present need for urgent decision making. Set in an environment of uncertain and unreliable data, and a diverse range of possible interventions, there is an obvious need for integrating HPC into workflows that include model calibration, and the exploration of the decision space. In this paper, we present the design of PanSim, a portable, performant, and productive agent-based simulator, which has been extensively used to model and forecast the pandemic in Hungary. We show its performance and scalability on CPUs and GPUs, then we discuss the workflows PanSim integrates into. We describe the heterogeneous, resource-constrained HPC environment available to us, and formulate a scheduling optimisation problem, as well as heuristics to solve them, to either minimise the execution time of a given number of simulations or to maximise the number of simulations executed in a given time frame. © 2022 IEEE.

Design Futuring for Love, Friendship, and Kinships: Five Perspectives on Intimacy

Human relationships, intimacy and the role of technology within it constantly change, catapulted in 2020 by COVID-19. We take this social rupture as an opportunity to reimagine possible futures for love, friendship, and kinships. Through design futuring and related approaches, we offer five prompts we developed for imagining alternative futures exploring a diverse range of intimacies. Through generating responses to the prompts, we offer alternative intimate futures as well as reflections on how such 'prompts for futuring' can be generative for design research. Our work extends calls for diversifying design futuring, imploring design researchers to consider diverse and inclusive ways of designing for futures, especially for human relationships and intimacy. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Workshops in TEI: Development, Evaluation, Exploration, and Implementation: Development, Evaluation, Exploration, and Implementation

Workshops are frequently used in human-computer interaction research, in a diverse range of research projects. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made this research activity difficult to conduct since they often involve group work, physical interaction with tangibles and/or bodily activity. Motivated by this, the authors conducted a review of papers from the International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) to develop a better understanding of workshops as a research method in TEI. The meta-review led to the development of a preliminary classification for workshops in research. Four categories of workshops were identified: Design development, Evaluation, Exploration, and Implementation. This work is intended to spark discussion and further research around the value and the challenges of conducting research workshops. © 2022 Owner/Author.