Search

Rivers have always been a unique space in urban landscapes. Regrettably, the river-town relationship was disturbed in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century as industrial plants and districts were established at banks, which changed the urban structure. This resulted in degradation of riverscapes among other things. Today, attempts are made to revitalise the areas and use them for ecological, recreational, and other purposes. The paper presents an integrated approach to river valley revitalisation - demonstrated on the Skawinka river, flowing through Skawina, an industrial town in Poland. An integrated approach could indicate local development possibilities of river valley and thereby strengthen the competitiveness of the area. The study employed the Landscape and Hydromorphological Assessment of River Valleys Method, focusing on hydromorphological, landscape, and integrated factors. Proposing an integrated approach to the Skawinka river valley revitalisation presents a procedure that indicates possibilities for local development and thereby strengthening the competitiveness of this region. The guidelines for the revitalisation project for this river indicate that if the river was made generally accessible, it may become an important location for social and economic life. At the same time it might have a recreational and educational function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the paper is to diagnose organisational culture of selected universities and analyse its impact on the innovation processes within them. The subject matter of the study was organisational culture and innovation at universities. The subjects were four selected universities in Poland, Austria, Germany, and Ukraine. The paper provided a definition of organisational culture and its typology. It further discussed the organisational culture of universities and the relationships between organisational culture and innovativeness. The literature review provided foundations for building a model for the formation of a type of organisational culture at universities that is innovation-friendly, which is the added value of the paper. It offers actions worth taking to shape innovation-friendly culture at universities. It is particularly important during difficult time of changing labour market, when universities greatly impact the attitudes of young people. The knowledge of how to shape innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities is necessary for academia to profile future employees in times of continuous changes. To investigate the relationship between organisational culture and the innovativeness of universities, we designed an original survey questionnaire [S1 File]. Organisational culture was diagnosed with the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument by K.S. Cameron and R.E. Quinn. The analyses were conducted in Dell Statistica v. 13.1 (StatSoft Polska). We normalised data from the Likert rating scale using Kaufman's and Rousseeuw's formula. We used Spearman's correlation coefficient and Kendall's W to calculate correlations. The research shows that the investigated Polish and Austrian universities are dominated by hierarchy and market cultures. On the other hand, the German and Ukrainian universities host all cultures, but clan and adhocracy dominate there. Moreover, the analyses demonstrated that although the adhocracy culture was the least visible in the investigated organisations, it contributes to university innovativeness the most. The conclusions were used to build a model for promoting innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities. The model contains answers to the research questions. In addition, it offers guidelines for shaping organisational culture to bolster innovation at universities. The research identified relationships between organisational culture and university innovativeness and components that create innovation opportunities at universities as its contribution to management theory. When applied in practice, the guidelines can help form the university's organisational culture bottom-up., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.