Business model innovation and decision making: uncovering mechanisms for coping with uncertainty

As a research subject, business model innovation spans the strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship fields. Yet, despite the importance of the concept, prior work has paid little attention to how decision-makers cope with uncertainty and gain understanding about interdependencies in new business model configurations. To address this gap, we combine top-down theorising and evidence-based exploration and seek to unpack some of the coping mechanisms that operate in the evolutionary view of business model innovation. Using in-depth interviewing to collect data, our study reveals five strategies – customer centricity, value co-creation, capability evolution, ecosystem growth, and adaptive pricing – that decision-makers apply to cope with uncertainty in business model innovation. We find that coping mechanisms support decision making during the development of new business models. Furthermore, we find that the five coping strategies delineate decision making for value proposition, value creation, and value capture configurations in more detail than existing literature has described. Our findings have important implications for decision making in business model innovation.     

Power Relations and Social Mix in Metropolitan Neighbourhoods in North America and Europe: Moving Beyond Gentrification?

Research on spatial segregation has suggested that social mix may be a temporary phase in class displacement, where relations between different groups are at best divided or ‘tectonic’, for instance in England. Political and policy discourses, by contrast, tend to uncritically valorize social mix as a means to breaking up concentrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle‐class voice. In the literature, little attention has been paid to power dynamics in socially mixed neighbourhoods and the implications this may have for understanding theory and policy. The five articles that make up this symposium address the ways in which social and ethnic groups interact in major cities in Europe and North America and, as the title suggests, this involves taking into account power relations, domination and negotiation between the different groups. There is a need to connect the experience of the deployment of power within neighbourhoods (and between them) with the discussions of power mechanisms at work in wider urban processes.     

Using Technology to Encourage Critical Thinking and Optimal Decision Making in Risk Management Education

This article draws a link between the risk management failures in the financial services industry and the educational philosophy and teaching constraints at business schools. An innovative application of prediction market technology within business education is proposed as a method that can be used to encourage students to think about risk in an open and flexible way. This article explains how prediction markets also provide students with the necessary experience to critically evaluate and stress‐test quantitative risk modeling techniques later in their academic and professional careers.     

Consumers’ Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility: Scale Development and Validation

Researchers and companies are paying increasing attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and the reaction to them by consumers. Despite such corporate efforts and an expanding literature exploring consumers’ response to CSR, it remains unclear how consumers perceive CSR and which “Gestalt” consumers have in mind when considering CSR. Academics and managers lack a tool for measuring consumers’ perceptions of CSR (CPCSR). This research explores CPCSR and develops a measurement model. Based on qualitative data from interviews with managers and consumers, the authors develop a conceptualization of CPCSR. Subsequently, model testing and validating occurs on three large quantitative data sets. The conceptualization and the measurement scale can assist companies to assess CPCSR relative to their performance. They also enable managers in identifying shortcomings in CSR engagement and/or communication. Finally, the paper discusses implications for marketing practice and future research.     

The sociology of innovation and new biotechnologies

Understanding the social processes that support innovations in new biotechnologies presents an interesting challenge. Evidence from the Australian bioindustry reveals how the development and integration of new biotechnologies is a dynamic social process. Our findings highlight how new technology acceptance and integration rested on the micro‐politics of sense‐making and relational networking.     

Measuring the Level and Inequality of Wealth: An Application to China

We construct and compare three distinct measures of household asset wealth that complement traditional income‐ or expenditure‐based measures of socioeconomic status. We apply these measures to longitudinal household survey data from China and demonstrate that household asset wealth has been increasing over time, a theme consistent with many previous studies on the process of development in China. Unlike other studies that have shown rising income inequality over time, however, we show that asset wealth inequality has actually been declining in recent years, indicating widespread participation in the benefits of economic reforms. Furthermore, the evolution in the cumulative distribution of household welfare is such that social welfare has been increasing with the passage of time, despite rising inequality in the early years of the survey.     

Exploring human capital: putting ‘human’ back into strategic human resource management

The field of strategic human resource management has seemingly rediscovered human capital with increasing research focused on human capital as a mediator in the relationship between HR practices and performance. In this paper we review human capital definitions and measurement approaches within this literature. We then identify some of the issues emerging with human capital research. Finally, we propose some future directions for research on human capital in organisations.     

Home sweet host: A cross‐country perspective on prudential and monetary policy spillovers through global banks

Prudential regulation of banks is multi‐layered: policy changes by home‐country authorities affect banks’ global operations across many jurisdictions; policy changes by host‐country authorities shape banks’ operations in the host jurisdiction regardless of the nationality of the parent bank. Do these policies create (unintended) cross‐border spillovers? Similarly, monetary policy actions by major central banks may also have effects on the behaviour of banks in other countries. This paper examines the effect that changes in home‐ and host‐country prudential measures have on cross‐border dollar credit provision, and how these interact with US monetary policy. We first run panel regressions with both layers of regulation, to examine which has a greater effect on cross‐border lending. We then use a novel approach to decompose growth in cross‐border bank lending into separate home, host and common components, and then match each with the corresponding home or host policies. Our results suggest that prudential policies can have spillover effects, which depend on the instrument used and on whether a bank's home or host country implemented them. Home policies tend to have larger spillovers on cross‐border US dollar lending than host policies. We also find that a tightening of US monetary policy can compound the spillovers of some prudential measures.     

Determinants of materiality disclosure quality in integrated reporting: Empirical evidence from an international setting

This study examines determinants of materiality disclosure quality (MDQ) in integrated reporting (IR) in an international setting. To this purpose, we constructed a novel, hand‐collected MDQ score in line with the <IR> guiding principles introduced by the International Integrated Reporting Council. On the basis of a cross‐national sample consisting of 359 firm‐year observations between 2013 and 2016, we find that MDQ is positively associated with learning effects, gender diversity, and the assurance of nonfinancial information in the integrated report. On the other hand, we find that IR readability, listing in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and earnings management do not affect MDQ. Our results are robust to different statistical models. We expand on earlier empirical findings on IR disclosure quality and provide valuable insights for research, practice, and standard setting.