3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item An innovative approach to the regulation of equipment authorisation in developing countries: a grounded theory study of South Africa(2017) Ruplal, Praneel HaricharanThe current theoretical approach to equipment authorisation (EA) regulation has proven problematic to resource-poor countries. EA is the technical and administrative process that all electronic communications equipment are subject to before sale and use. EA involves checking the technical characteristics of equipment, by dedicated test facilities, to national or international standards which are enforced by the regulatory authority. Initial research in the South African EA environment has revealed several real-world trends that show that the current approach to EA regulation has limitations when faced with a changing electronic communications (EC) landscape. The general theories of public interest and the economic theory of regulation only broadly form the theoretical basis for EA regulation. The narrow focus of the thesis in developing an innovative approach to EA regulation, in the context of a developing country, required seeing beyond the existing theory surveyed in the literature. Using a Straussian approach to grounded theory, the epistemology of the EA environment is studied inductively via a post-modernistic interpretative framework. The research finds that the EA framework, applicable to efficiency driven and transitional countries with a relatively rich EA testing infrastructure, is predicated on a calculated concept of trust. The regulatory authority employs a tacit computational mechanism to determine the level of trust when dealing with EA applications. The rationale for such an approach is largely driven by sub-optimal decision heuristics available to the regulator, as a result of an inability to corroborate technical data associated with the EA process. The regulator thus applies a differential trust paradigm based on determining factors such as salience. A future knowledge-based approach to EA regulation is theorised, in which technology innovation assimilated from other EA environments, is applied to the EA process to improve ii institutional efficiency. The goal of applying technology and innovation to the EA process is ultimately centred around increasing the trust value proposition.Item Corporate entrepreneurship: the role of middle-level management on corporate entrepreneurship within the telecommunications industry in South Africa(2016) Engelbrecht, AndreGuth and Ginsberg (1990) stressed that Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) encompasses two major phenomena: new venture creation within existing organisations and the transformation of on-going organisations through strategic renewal. Zahra (1991, p. 262) observed that Corporate Entrepreneurship may be formal or informal activities aimed at creating new business in established companies through product and process innovations and market developments. The research study was quantitative and data was collected through an online questionnaire, which used closed-ended questionnaires. The questionnaires entail assessing the degree of CE within the telecommunications industry in South Africa. The analysis involved 172 samples of responses to the online questionnaire. The research indicated that that there is a correlation between the dependent variable (entrepreneurial orientation) and the independent variables (innovation, performance, risk taking, and pro-activeness). The findings of the research contribute to the South African telecommunications industry in terms of innovation, regulation, external collaboration and entrepreneurial orientation literature and studies.Item Providing value-added services to cellphone contract clients - a hybrid recommendation approach(2016) Ndlovu, MpumeleloThere is stiff competition for customers and market share in the South African telecommunications industry amongst the four predominant mobile service providers, namely Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom Mobile. The First National Bank (FNB) through one of its entities, FNB Connect, has also joined this intensely competitive environment. These companies face a constant challenge of having to come up with new and innovative ways of attracting new customers and retaining their current ones. Cell C has embarked on a good strategy of claiming solid market share and growing itself against the competition by using the Private Label Promotions (PLP) group, a leading BEE Level 3 company that provides a variety of business solutions, to market GetMore, its value-added service package. A recommender system could be used to suggest and promote the items available in this package to existing and potential clients (users). There are different approaches to recommendation, the most widely used ones being the collaborative and content-based recommendation. The collaborative filtering approach uses the ratings of other users to recommend the items the current (active) user might like. In the content-based approach, items are recommended in terms of their content similarity to items a user has previously liked, or elements that have matched a user’s attributes (features). Hybrid recommendation approaches are used To eliminate the drawbacks individually associated with the CF and CBF approaches and to leverage their advantages. One of the aims of this research was to design and implement a prototype hybrid recommender system that would be used to recommend Cell C’s GetMore package to current and potential subscribers. The system was to implement matrix factorisation (collaborative) and cosine similarity (content-based) techniques. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate its performance and quality. The metrics used included Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). We expected the proposed hybrid recommender system would leverage the advantages provided by its different components and demonstrate its effectiveness in providing Cell C’s customers with accurate and meaningful recommendations of its GetMore package services. Keywords: Content-based Recommendation, Collaborative Recommendation, Hybrid Recommendation, Cosine Similarity, Matrix Factorisation, Association Rule Mining, J48 Classifier, Decision Table, Naive Bayes, Simple K-means, Expectation Maximization, Farthest First, Predictive Apriori