The importance of internal alignment in smart city initiatives: An ecosystem approach

Within the growing literature on smart cities, much research has focused on issues related to the formation stage of these initiatives. After initial subsidies expire, however, a number of smart city initiatives face problems with respect to value creation and value capture. To analyse these processes, the paper links value creation (i.e. activities focusing on innovation challenges) to value capture (i.e. activities referring to actual individual firm-level profit generation) in smart city initiatives. Based on an in-depth survey of the literature, the purpose of the paper is to better understand how processes of internal alignment foster value creation and value capture during the growth of smart city initiatives. By focusing on the determinants of internal alignment facilitating value creation and value capture, the paper examines these determinants in the context of four smart city initiatives in the Netherlands in 2016. The paper shows that internal alignment of actors aimed at integrating joint and business objectives is critical for the growth of smart city initiatives. From the theoretical view point, the paper points at challenges concerning internal alignment of different actors in the smart city initiative after the formation stage. From the managerial point of view, it becomes increasingly important to manage expectations of different partners and their learning efforts to account for internal alignment during the growth of the smart city initiative.     

Impacts of handset bundling on mobile data usage: The case of Finland

Promotion of the adoption of new services has emerged as a possible driver for the regulation of handset bundling and subsidies. Handset bundling, however, has complex implications not only on mobile data service adoption, the focus of this research, but also more broadly on the mobile market dynamics. Due to the complexity, regulators have difficulties in anticipating the possible resulting impacts. Using a case study, expert interviews, and usage measurements as research method, an empirical framework was constructed to make the service usage impacts more explicit. The framework enables the identification of the regulator's steering options and their qualitative impacts. Results are based on observations before and after the change of law on handset bundling in the Finnish market. According to the findings, handset bundling regulation is a possible but risky tool for steering the market.     

Value of knowledge—Technology strategies in different knowledge regimes

This paper introduces a knowledge-based view of the firm, which enables us to analyze how the firm should build up its technology strategies in order to capture profits from knowledge assets through knowledge creation, replication, integration and transfer. The basic idea is to shed light on the mechanisms that make it possible, first, to create value from knowledge assets, second, to protect the value created by using different protection mechanisms (such as legal means or tacitness) and, third, to share the value created between the innovator, imitators and partners (open innovation model). In our model we derive technology strategies based on different knowledge bases and their characteristics. By means of our simulation experiments we open up some black boxes behind technology strategies that are often launched only as empirical generalizations, such as Freeman’s famous technology strategy typology. Our tool can also be used as a framework when the dynamic effects of technology strategies are traced and empirically scrutinized.     

Strategic planning: valuing and managing portfolios of real options

This article presents a value-based strategic planning framework suitable for valuing and managing portfolios of corporate real options. The proposed framework combines insights from strategic management theory with novel quantitative valuation tools from finance. Strategic planning is viewed as a process of actively developing and managing portfolios of corporate real options in the context of competitive interactions. As such, the expanded valuation framework recognizes that future growth opportunity value deriving from the firm's resources and capabilities must explicitly account for uncertainty, adaptability, and competitive responsiveness. The resulting expanded valuation framework is able to capture the value of the adaptive resources and capabilities that enable a firm to adapt and re-deploy assets, develop and exploit synergies, and gain competitive advantage via time-to-market and first- or second-mover advantages. We show how two basic metrics in this value-based framework, current profitability of assets in place and future growth option value, can be obtained from financial market data and how they can be used in active portfolio planning.     

CONTINUOUS CROSS SUBSIDIES AND QUANTITY RESTRICTIONS*

This article provides a model of loss leader pricing and quantity restrictions for a competitive multiproduct industry when individual consumers have continuous (and independent) demands for the set of available goods. Utilizing a generalization of the model proposed by Bliss [1988] , we demonstrate the importance of consumer heterogeneity for the existence of cross subsidies when there is complete information and individual consumers have smooth, downward sloping demands. Continuous cross subsidies arising from consumer heterogeneity are also shown to exist in Hotelling models. Our use of continuous rather than ‘unit’ demands allows us to analyze issues related to welfare, which in turn exposes a strong incentive for the firm to place binding quantity restrictions on consumers. We also show how the presence of quantity restrictions can be used to distinguish between continuous cross subsidies arising from heterogeneous consumers versus those arising from classic demand complementarity with homogeneous agents.     

COST,VALUE AND FOREIGN MARKET ENTRY MODE: THE TRANSACTION AND THE FIRM

This paper compares and contrasts the mode of foreign market entry decision from the transaction cost/internalization and organizational capability perspectives. Each of these perspectives operates at a different level of analysis, respectively the transaction and the firm, and consequently differs in the primary arena of attention, namely transaction characteristics and the capabilities of firms. In making the comparison, a key distinction is made between the cost and the value aspects in the management of know-how, based on which issues pertaining to the transfer of knowledge within and across firm boundaries and the exploitation and enhancement of competitive advantage are closely examined. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the implications of a shift in frame from cost to value in the analysis of decisions related to firm boundaries. Entry into foreign markets is used primarily as a vehicle for the accomplishment of this purpose. The paper shows how the value-based framework of the organizational capability perspective radically and fundamentally shifts the approach towards the governance of firm boundaries and argues that, even though TC/internalization theory raises some valid concerns, the organizational capability framework may be more in tune with today’s business context. Some of the assumptions of the TC/internalization perspective, both direct—–opportunism, exploitation of existing advantage—and indirect—preservation of the value of know-how across locational contexts, asymmetry between bounded rationality for transaction and production purposes—are critically examined and questioned. Implications of a shift from a cost to a value-based framework are discussed and the need for a shift in research focus is emphasized. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Whose call is it? Targeting universal service programs to low-income households’ telecommunications preferences

Do universal service programs give customers what they want? This paper uses new survey data to study low-income households’ telecommunications choices in the United States and to consider the degree to which such households’ preferences are addressed by existing universal service programs. The research shows that households that choose only one form of telecommunications increasingly are choosing a mobile phone, while those that choose to have both modes of communications are shifting their usage towards their mobile phones. These trends are less pronounced among higher-income households. One implication for universal service policy is that traditional subsidies for landline phones are increasingly ineffective in reaching low-income households such subsidies are designed to help; subsidies for acquiring and using mobile phone services might be more beneficial to low-income households than traditional subsidies for landline phones.     

Technology Exploitation Paths: Combining Technological and Complementary Resources in New Product Development and Licensing

Technological resources in the form of patents, trade secrets, and know‐how have become key assets for modern enterprises. This paper addresses a critical issue in technology and innovation management, namely, the commercial exploitation of technological resources resulting from research and development (R&D) investments. Extracting economic value from these resources by maximizing the benefits for shareholders is an extremely challenging task because technological resources are intangible, idiosyncratic, uncertain, predominantly tacit, and with poorly defined property rights. In their attempt to extract the maximum value from their technological resources, firms increasingly combine their internal exploitation through new product development (NPD) with external exploitation through licensing. However, most existing studies on NPD and technology licensing have treated the two exploitation paths independently and in isolation, which has resulted in two separate research streams using different theories and addressing different managerial challenges. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to filling this gap by developing and testing a comprehensive conceptual framework that simultaneously considers the antecedents affecting the successful implementation of NPD and licensing strategies as well as their consequences on firm profitability. The paper in particular investigates the effects of the interplay between technological resources and three types of complementary resources, marketing, manufacturing, and relational. We test the model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 733 Spanish manufacturing firms observed from 2003 to 2007. The data provide support for the existence of different paths to market firm technologies: an internal path, whereby the ownership of technological resources fully explains NPD performance, and an external path, whereby high intensity of marketing and relational resources reinforces the positive effect of technological resources on licensing performance. This sustains the relevance of the resource‐based value‐enhancing effects of complementary resources in licensing, as opposed to the motivation‐reducing effects advanced by transaction cost‐based literature. Moreover, the empirical analysis shows a substitution effect between NPD and licensing, whereby their simultaneous pursuit at intense levels is associated with lower profit margins. This provides evidence of the much theorized, but seldom tested, rent dissipation effect. These findings offer several contributions to research on licensing, NPD, open innovation, and the resource‐based view of the firm. On a managerial level, they suggest that achieving maximum value from proprietary technologies may not entail exploiting them both through external and internal paths. Managers are also informed that the resource combinations that enhance licensing performance include marketing and relational resources.     

Explaining Employment Effects in Multipolar Value Chains: A Cross‐National Study on Soft Drinks and Dairy Manufacturing in Europe

The article develops an integrated framework that employs a dynamic perspective on interlinked levels of value chain governance in order to explain employment in value chains. It compares two multipolar chains in food and beverage manufacturing, in two different producer and consumer markets, Belgium and Germany. Analysis reveals that varied value capture dynamics in the food and beverage industries underpin distinct employment effects at specific inter‐firm nodes, as well as between labour and product markets. This reveals institutional and product variation explaining firms’ value capture trajectories. However, it also illustrates a concomitant transnational trend of deteriorating working conditions, stemming from overall chain governance.     

竞争战略的产权观点

产权理论认为，不完备的产权不仅影响利用资产创造价值的程度，也使得人们花费资源用于攫取和保护产权。本文把交易成本看做是与攫取、保护和转移产权相联系的成本。由于攫取和保护行为会耗散企业的价值，企业可以凭借影响攫取和保护的成本来创造价值。本文在产权理论的基础上构建了竞争战略的产权分析框架，并且比较了这一观点与其他竞争战略观点的区别与联系。     

The Contributions of Firm Innovativeness to Customer Value in Purchasing Behavior

The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of firm innovativeness and product innovativeness on the components of customer value mediated by instrumental and symbolic brand benefits. Over the last 10 years, the mobile phone industry in Korea has grown rapidly, with the introduction of several innovative phone features. The research context therefore is mobile phones with Internet access and their users in Korea. A major research finding is that the firm innovativeness affects product innovativeness, and hence, the instrumental brand benefits. A firm's innovativeness also has a significant effect on the symbolic brand benefits and the partnership value. Our key academic contribution is to expand the previous fragmentary studies of customer value, by classifying customer value into four components: expectation, partnership, transaction, and relationship customer values, rather than just focusing on benefits and sacrifices. Implications for managers include the verification that firm innovativeness is a source of ability for mobile phone firms to create value for customers. Instrumental and symbolic brand benefits through innovation should be the focus area for marketers and new product development (NPD) managers in mobile phone firms to communicate with consumers to increase expectation values in the prepurchase step.     

联想手机难逃魔咒

国产手机厂商纷纷倒下,正在不断地验证着一个魔咒:冒进者难逃厄运!和主业PC差异甚远的手机业务终于告别了联想集团。通过一系列运作,联想集团在今年1月底以1亿美元的价格将其手机业务出售给了4家私募基金Jade     

Innovation-induced food supply chain design

We present a conceptual framework depicting the issues and strategies of a firm with an innovation (in product or technology or system). To “implement” the innovation in terms of procurement of feedstock (intermediate inputs), production and processing, and marketing, the innovating firm undertakes strategic design of its supply chain. It must decide how much to produce, what segments of the supply chain to undertake in-house versus sourcing externally, and what institutions such as contracts and standards it will use to coordinate the suppliers assuring its external sourcing. The paper illustrates with cases from developed and developing economies, draws policy implications, and lays out a research agenda.     

How Much Do Strategic Groups Matter?

Understanding firm heterogeneity is the first step towards explaining the dispersion of profit rates between firms. This paper proposes a framework that distinguishes between three sources of competitiveness, related to three levels of firm heterogeneity, which give rise to industry competencies, strategy-specific competencies and firm-specific competencies. Using data from a Spanish survey we estimate the relative importance of these three sources of heterogeneity. We show that taking the group effect into account significantly differentiates our results from those obtained in previous research. We provide new evidence on the existence of a significant group effect and also an estimate of its relative importance vis á vis firm and industry effects.     

Making the news: Heterogeneous media coverage and corporate litigation

Research summary: This study explores how relative prominence shapes rivalry between firms. Corporate litigation, an increasingly costly domain of interfirm rivalry, is threatening not just because of the immediate legal stakes but because of the indirect losses that unwanted negative publicity inflicts on defendants. I argue that potential defendants' incentives to avoid such losses create a source of value that firms can capture by agreeing to forgo litigation. The more prominent a firm is relative to rivals, the greater its threat and the more value it stands to capture from potential targets by sparing them from litigation. Managerial summary: The power to attract media attention can be valuable to firms beyond its role in managing relations with investors or the public. It can also provide leverage against industry rivals. Being sued by a prominent firm carries the threat of potential damaging publicity, especially for lesser‐known rivals. Firms may be able to leverage this threat to elicit concessions in return for sparing rivals from litigation. Prominent firms stand to benefit not just from eliciting concessions from rivals but from the ability to do so while avoiding costly litigation. Data from the semiconductor industry show that firms that command much higher levels of media coverage than rivals are able to avoid litigation more often than firms with comparable or lower levels of media coverage. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Review of: “MODELING THE SUPPLY CHAIN” BY JEREMY R SHAPIRO Duxbury Press,Pacific Grove,California, 2001, xv + 586 pp. ISBN 0-534-37363-1. List: $71.95.

In this paper, we measure economic profit in an inflationary environment. Inflation adjusted economic profit requires two principal alterations to Economic Value Added (EVA[rgrave]). First, because inflation increases the replacement cost of non-current assets above book value, one must make a downward adjustment to EVA[rgrave] to correctly measure economic profit. Second, we add a term to EVA[rgrave] to represent a manager's ability to increase product price as costs increase. This adjustment is positive because this ability adds value to a firm. When a firm's assets are largely current, the first adjustment is not necessary, and therefore, the second dominates. In this case, EVA[rgrave] underestimates economic profit. Economic profit remains positive when a firm's rate of return on invested capital, after tax and after depreciation, is less than the weighted average cost of capital by as much as the rate of inflation. Even when inflation is modest, unadjusted EVA[rgrave] has the potential to seriously misrepresent the operating performance of a firm.     

The emerging value network in the mobile phone industry: The case of Japan and its implications for the rest of the world

This paper considers how the mobile phone industry is changing from a value chain to a value network using the Japanese market as an example. Value networks involve a larger number of firms, a more complex set of relationships between them, and agreements on a greater number of interface standards than do value chains. Building from this concept of a value network, the paper shows how: (1) agreements on many of these interface standards are enabling connections to be made between the mobile phone and other industries; (2) the resulting products and services often reflect the technological capability of phones and the existing products and services in these “other” industries; (3) each new interface standard requires a new critical mass of users; and (4) a critical mass of users for a new interface standard partly builds from previously created critical masses of users. On a practical level, this paper's analysis adds to a growing list of evidence that the growth in Western mobile Internet markets is nowhere near its potential and that the change from a value chain to a value network requires a different form of standard setting, policy making, and management than are currently used in the mobile phone industry.     

How entrepreneurial orientation can leverage innovation project portfolio management

Innovation project portfolio management (IPPM) is a key task in R&D management because this decision‐making process determines which R&D projects should be undertaken and how R&D resources are allocated. Previous research has developed a good understanding of the role of IPPM in R&D strategy implementation and of successful IPPM practices. But the fundamental orientations that drive the strategy formation and implementation process have never been investigated in the context of IPPM, and it is unclear whether successful practices are equally valid for different strategic orientations. This study, therefore, investigates the moderating impact of a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation on the relationship between strategic portfolio management practices and portfolio success. An empirical analysis of 257 firms shows that both innovativeness and risk taking as entrepreneurial orientation’s dimensions positively moderate the relationship between managerial practices and performance. Specifically, we find that firms high in innovativeness profit more from stakeholder engagement compared to firms low in innovativeness. Firms high in risk‐taking profit more from a clearly formulated strategy. With increasing innovativeness and risk‐taking propensity, firms also profit more from business case monitoring and agility in portfolio steering. The results suggest that a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation can leverage the effect of IPPM practices. Vice versa, a lacking entrepreneurial orientation can render these practices ineffective. Strategic orientation and IPPM practices should, therefore, be aligned with each other to enable firms to better implement their strategy and generate competitive advantage.     

Conflict-coordination learning in marketing channel relationships: The distributor view

Although a fairly large body of literature exists on channel conflict management, little research has been done from an interorganizational conflict-learning perspective. This study explores how channel members can use conflict-coordination learning (CCL), as a conflict resolution mechanism, which leads to improved capabilities, which in turn can enhance co-created value in marketing channel relationships from a distributor point of view. Drawing on both a resource-based view of the firm, an absorptive capacity perspective, and an interorganizational learning approach, we propose that conflict values (positive conflict attitudes and avoidance of conflict behaviors) can be viewed as firm resources that directly influence CCL, which in turn can enhance co-created value (joint marketing strategy quality and joint profit performance). To explore these issues, we developed and tested our hypotheses with data from 101 distributors within the food industry in Taiwan. As predicted, we find that positive conflict attitudes are positively related to CCL, and that avoidance of conflict behaviors is negatively related to CCL. Furthermore, the results indicate that joint marketing strategy quality mediates the relationship between CCL and joint profit performance. Specifically, under high positive conflict attitudes, CCL strongly appears related to joint marketing strategy quality.