The authors examine how network externalities and various factors shape strategic interactions between manufacturers and technology suppliers in networked manufacturing contexts. Using an evolutionary game model, it explores manufacturers' radical vs. incremental innovation choices alongside suppliers' technology authorization vs. licensing strategies. The results show that both parties' strategies often fluctuate without stabilizing under different initial conditions. While higher returns from radical innovation motivate manufacturers toward breakthrough efforts, suppliers consistently favor licensing regardless of profit-sharing adjustments and are highly sensitive to radical innovation costs. In contrast, changes in licensing fees predominantly influence manufacturers' behaviors. Collaboration costs only lead to minor shifts in evolutionary trajectories.
In a changing world, dominated by fierce competition, it is imperative that companies have the necessary agility to adapt to the market constraints where they operate, investing in frameworks that promote the achievement of planned results. There are many tools that can help managers in setting goals; however, one became very well-known because it helped large companies like Google to achieve success: OKR – objectives and key results. When compared to others, OKR is still little publicized and used, leaving open some questions that the authors intend to answer in this work. A case study was carried out in a Brazilian company using a qualitative methodology and interviews and document analysis that only defines goals.
The paper examined the role of corporate restructuring in improving organizational performance by reviewing various literature in the domain of strategic management, where key authors, relevant theories, and studies were identified and reviewed, and a premium was placed on books and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals published between 2017 and 2023. Consequently, 30 authors were examined to isolate the corporate restructuring strategies beneficial to improving organizational performance. Analysis showed that these strategies can take various forms, and many empirical studies were underpinned by the dynamic capabilities theory, the resource-based theory, or the strategy-structure contingency theory, and the relationships were significant. Thus, corporate restructuring was adjudged to have the potential to enhance organizational performance. Scholars in the field of strategic management should therefore pay attention to the long-term consequences of restructuring.
This study aims to investigate the impact of off-page communication factors on success of crowdfunding campaigns. While previous research mainly focused on on-page communication factors, relevant research on the impact of off-page communication factors related to additional website visibility and external social media remains scarce. To address this gap, the authors examine the impact of search engine optimization (SEO) actions taken on an additional website and explore influence of the use of external social media on rewards-based crowdfunding success, as it is argued to be the dominant online model. They perform a cross-sectional study of a randomized sample of 1,791 campaigns on KissKissBankBank, the major crowdfunding platform in Europe. The results reveal that (1) SEO actions taken on the additional website enhance success of the crowdfunding campaign, and (2) there are important connections between the use of external social media and success of crowdfunding campaigns. Taken together, these results contribute to adequate decision making among project initiators, backers, and platforms owners.
To gain competitive advantage, organizations need to have something that the competitors do not have and cannot achieve in the short-term. In the past, organizations invested large amounts of financial resources to the finest equipment to increase competitiveness. Today, the paradigm has changed, and so the quest is more knowledge- and innovation-driven, where the answer relies on the people's capacity to create and modify processes and generate business value. The investments in information systems and technology (IS/IT) have not always generated the business value or the financial revenue that should be expected. Benefits management focuses on how business areas will improve from business changes and provides a framework for identifying, planning, monitoring, evaluating, and actively managing these benefits. In this paper, the authors show how benefits management reinforces firms to identify more clearly the path to obtain the strategic objectives and the related benefits promoting the organizational competitive advantage.
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process that contributes toward revealing the position of an organisation in comparison to its competitors, market conditions, and future trends, and presents demographic and economic information. The objective of the research was to identify the elements that determine the effectiveness of BI for organisations. The research proposes a BI effectiveness model to enhance decision-making support by ensuring that decision-makers receive the right information at the right time in the most appropriate format. A quantitative research approach was followed, and purposive sampling was used for selecting research participants within an organisation in the telecommunications sector. The effectiveness of a BI department has a direct impact on the strength of an organization's decision-making capability. The components of the BI effectiveness model suggest focus areas for more effective information flow throughout the organisation, improved information accessibility, improved decision-making, and ultimately, improved productivity.
The paper examined the role of corporate restructuring in improving organizational performance by reviewing various literature in the domain of strategic management, where key authors, relevant theories, and studies were identified and reviewed, and a premium was placed on books and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals published between 2017 and 2023. Consequently, 30 authors were examined to isolate the corporate restructuring strategies beneficial to improving organizational performance. Analysis showed that these strategies can take various forms, and many empirical studies were underpinned by the dynamic capabilities theory, the resource-based theory, or the strategy-structure contingency theory, and the relationships were significant. Thus, corporate restructuring was adjudged to have the potential to enhance organizational performance. Scholars in the field of strategic management should therefore pay attention to the long-term consequences of restructuring.
In a changing world dominated by fierce competition, it is imperative that companies have the necessary agility to adapt to the market constraints where they operate, investing in frameworks that promote the achievement of planned results. There are many tools that can help managers in setting goals; however, one became very well-known because it helped large companies like Google to achieve success: OKR – objectives and key results. When compared to others, OKR is still little publicized and used, leaving open some questions that the authors intend to answer in this work. A case study was carried out in a Brazilian company using a qualitative methodology and interviews and document analysis that only defines goals
The Internet is available for almost all homes in Japan. During the diffusion stage of Internet access services, it was important to construct a model to evaluate the sensitivity for Internet access service attributes and estimate user service choice behavior to consider service sale strategies. However, as the demand for Internet access services reached saturation, the differences in service attributes among service providers became smaller, making it difficult to decide service sale strategies using conventional choice behavior models. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to establish a method for extracting effective information for service sale strategies by focusing on user intentions and clarifying the differences in future intentions for current carriers or services with observable and unobservable factors concerned with user intention. The authors propose a framework for user intent-based segmentation to understand the current market structure and develop appropriate service sales strategies for each segment.
This paper seeks to identify a potential mechanism over which HPWS influences performance. Using relational coordination theory, this paper assesses communication and relational ties of relational coordination as a potential link over which HPWS can affect unit-level performance in banks which are characterized as highly uncertain, interdependent, as well as time-bound. Primary data were collected from bank officers about the strength of HPWS and relational coordination among employees. Results indicate that HPWS was significantly associated with bank performance outcomes, including branch levels of deposits, loans, and net profit. Results also indicate that RC significantly mediated the linkages between HPWS and unit-level performance outcomes. These results suggest new insights for top management and HR leaders in the banking industry regarding the design of HPWS.
Although the concept and the sources of competitive advantage have been extensively researched, literature still offers limited answers to the questions why, in some cases, there is overperformance despite the absence of competitive advantage and underperformance despite the presence of competitive advantage. By employing four case studies in dry bulk and container shipping, as its research method, this paper provides real-world evidence on the specific reasons underpinning the relationship patterns of competitive advantage without superior financial performance and superior financial performance without competitive advantage. The findings indicate that rapidly growing markets within an industry enable companies without competitive advantage to enjoy above industry average financial performance. Moreover, principal-principal conflicts and excessive capital expenditure in idiosyncratic firm resources result to underperformance even for companies with competitive advantage. These findings have important managerial and academic implications that are discussed herein.
Predicting the price of crude palm (CPO) oil is vital for resources management, especially in agricultural farms. However, the price of CPO is very volatile in uncertain economic conditions and the agricultural environment. In addition to this volatility, the CPO price presents non-linearity features, making its prediction challenging. The authors present a deep learning approach for the CPO price prediction. The researchers compare a SARIMA model with three deep learning techniques: Multilayer Perceptron, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Simple Recurrent Neural Network to uncover the most accurate prediction model for the CPO prices. The results suggest that the LSTM-based modeling approach presented in this research outperformed their counterparts in predicting the CPO price in terms of prediction accuracy. The findings suggest that the proposed LSTM based forecasting approach is a useful and reliable deep learning technique that may provide valuable information to businesses, industries, and government agencies.
The popularity of mobile commerce has offered many new challenges for investigating public sentiments. With an uncountable number of stores and products available on the marketplace, customers heavily relied on the comments or reviews posted by others to support their buying decisions. For the online retailer's side, these text reviews are valuable resources to understand the latest customer expectations and devise a better product plan for launching suitable products to customers. Sentiment analysis is then developed for the evaluation of a significant amount of text data by searching the sentiment words. Nevertheless, different writers may have different perceptions on the sentiment words, and hence, this inconsistency would be amplified. In this connection, a novel approach to obtain public sentiment by combining the topic modeling, fuzzy set, and multi-criteria decision-making approaches is proposed. The uncertainty of different perceptions on the sentiment words is remedied by fuzzy-set.
A feasibility study can be characterized as an assessment of potential effect of a proposed project. It is directed to help towards figuring out whether to establish a particular project. A feasibility study's main goal is to assess the economic viability of the proposed business. In this paper, the authors present a study that is done for an investor who wants to choose the most profitable alternative among four mutually exclusive alternatives. The alternatives include buying land and selling it after nine years, constructing an office building, constructing a shopping center, or constructing a multistory parking building. The office, shopping center, and parking buildings have a built-up area of 50,000 sf. The designated land area is located in Montreal downtown area, Canada. After performing the economic analysis, the shopping center turns out to be the most feasible. Finally, some supplementary analysis is applied to specify the most sensitive attribute. It is found that changing the minimum acceptance rate of return would have the most impact on the calculated results.
This study aims to assess fleet practice and implications for fleet performance in Ethiopian pharmaceutical supply agency (EPSA). EPSA is encountering aging fleets, higher fleet expenses, lack of spare parts, and excessive service delays. EPSA was chosen as it was the major public pharmaceutical procurer and distributor in Ethiopia. Institution-based descriptive and explanatory cross-sectional study designs with mixed approaches were employed. Descriptive findings reveal that vehicle tracking is the most practiced activity. Correlation and regression analysis show that maintenance, fuel, and tracking activities have significant association and predictive power for fleet performance. Qualitative findings show that delay of vehicle maintenance was the major challenge. EPSA higher officials may emphasize having a well-organized workshop. The findings can be considered as input by policymakers in the transport sector. The limitation was the use of a homogenous purposive sampling method for the qualitative study. Thus, future study can be conducted using other reliable methods.
A faster pace of change in business strategies and the adoption of new mining models on the part of mining companies is their response to commodity price decrease, global demand change, operating costs increase, ore grade declining, the need to extend asset life cycle, community empowerment, and increased mining operating licenses. One of the mainstream solutions is the organization's automation and digital transformation aiming to achieve new levels of performance throughout the process network. However, the barrier that hinders any transformation process is the network culture supporting productive/administrative processes. This paper shows how relational change determines the amount of organizational waste production, so trying to introduce digital change excluding network culture results in a futile effort. The data shown comes from assessments in the Occupational Safety and Health Management (OSHM) of Chuquicamata Division, Codelco, Chile.
This study aims to assess fleet practice and implications for fleet performance in Ethiopian pharmaceutical supply agency (EPSA). EPSA is encountering aging fleets, higher fleet expenses, lack of spare parts, and excessive service delays. EPSA was chosen as it was the major public pharmaceutical procurer and distributor in Ethiopia. Institution-based descriptive and explanatory cross-sectional study designs with mixed approaches were employed. Descriptive findings reveal that vehicle tracking is the most practiced activity. Correlation and regression analysis show that maintenance, fuel, and tracking activities have significant association and predictive power for fleet performance. Qualitative findings show that delay of vehicle maintenance was the major challenge. EPSA higher officials may emphasize having a well-organized workshop. The findings can be considered as input by policymakers in the transport sector. The limitation was the use of a homogenous purposive sampling method for the qualitative study. Thus, future study can be conducted using other reliable methods.
Axioms are reviewed for group contest success functions for general production functions, focusing particularly on the additive production function and the multiplicative Cobb-Douglas production function. With one minor exception, these axioms already exist in the literature. This article clarifies which axioms apply and how they apply for group contest success functions. Essential for axioms satisfied by the additive production function, driven by substitutability across efforts, is the sufficiency of only one group member exerting effort. Essential for axioms satisfied by the multiplicative production function, driven by complementarity across efforts, is that all group members exert efforts. The additive production function satisfies an axiom where adding an amount to one effort and subtracting the same amount from a second equivalent substitutable effort does not change the winning probabilities. The Cobb-Douglas production function satisfies a strong homogeneity axiom where an equiproportionate change in matched group member efforts does not affect the winning probabilities.
A faster pace of change in business strategies and the adoption of new mining models on the part of mining companies is their response to commodity price decrease, global demand change, operating costs increase, ore grade declining, the need to extend asset life cycle, community empowerment, and increased mining operating licenses. One of the mainstream solutions is the organization's automation and digital transformation aiming to achieve new levels of performance throughout the process network. However, the barrier that hinders any transformation process is the network culture supporting productive/administrative processes. This paper shows how relational change determines the amount of organizational waste production, so trying to introduce digital change excluding network culture results in a futile effort. The data shown comes from assessments in the Occupational Safety and Health Management (OSHM) of Chuquicamata Division, Codelco, Chile.
Although the concept and the sources of competitive advantage have been extensively researched, literature still offers limited answers to the questions why, in some cases, there is overperformance despite the absence of competitive advantage and underperformance despite the presence of competitive advantage. By employing four case studies in dry bulk and container shipping, as its research method, this paper provides real-world evidence on the specific reasons underpinning the relationship patterns of competitive advantage without superior financial performance and superior financial performance without competitive advantage. The findings indicate that rapidly growing markets within an industry enable companies without competitive advantage to enjoy above industry average financial performance. Moreover, principal-principal conflicts and excessive capital expenditure in idiosyncratic firm resources result to underperformance even for companies with competitive advantage. These findings have important managerial and academic implications that are discussed herein.
