Design Inertia: Designing for Life‐Cycle Flexibility in Internet‐Based Services*

Managing innovation in rapidly moving environments, such as Internet‐based services, is a major challenge in theory and in practice. Most of the existing literature focuses on the development process as the main area in which innovation takes place. However, in environments where the pace of change of technology and market needs is extremely high, managing service innovations means not only being able to design a good service but also, more importantly, continuously redesigning and adapting the service in order to deal with frequent exogenous changes and opportunities. A high number of innovations therefore must be introduced throughout the entire life cycle of a service. This capability of introducing incremental and radical innovations during the service life cycle (i.e., to adapt a service to contextual changes and opportunities after it has been first released onto the market) at low costs and in the shortest possible time is what is defined here as service life‐cycle flexibility. This process of service adaptation and upgrading implies significant challenges that can be traced back to when a service is first conceived and designed. In fact, many decisions made during the first design process (i.e., the choice of a given database environment) involve a low reversibility rate and may reduce the possibility of taking advantage of future unpredictable opportunities, creating what is called inertia toward innovation. In other words, service life‐cycle flexibility largely depends on how a service has been first designed. This article analyzes two in‐depth case studies of Italian online newspapers and identifies five possible inertia factors that may influence service life‐cycle flexibility, namely (1) technological inertia; (2) internal organizational inertia; (3) external organizational inertia; (4) customer inertia toward changes in the service package; and (5) customer inertia toward changes in the service interaction design. These inertia factors are traced back to the service development process in order to suggest design practices that may increase the service life‐cycle flexibility.     

Opting Out of Pay Devolution? The Prospects for Local Pay Bargaining in UK Public Services

Abstract : Throughout the 1980s, government ministers strongly advocated the decentralization of pay determination in the public services. Despite this exhortation, by the end of the decade rates of pay and salary structures were rarely determined at workplace level. This paper explores the resilience of national pay determination and considers whether it will survive the radical restructuring of public services initiated in the last few years. The analysis focuses mainly on the health and education services, arguing that distinctive organizational, occupational and political characteristics of the services still constrain the devolution of pay bargaining. In the face of tight budgets and the recent introduction of pay restraint, service managers have sought to make paybill savings through unilateral changes in work organization rather than through devolved collective bargaining.     

Managing Knowledge for Innovation: The Case of Business‐to‐Business Services*

The present study builds a typology of organizational knowledge in business services and empirically examines the effects of knowledge on innovation performance. It is suggested that firms differ with respect to their knowledge creation approaches and that these approaches have implications for firms' innovation activities. A conceptual framework of knowledge assets with degrees of tacitness and collectiveness as the principal axes is used to ground the empirical analysis. The organizational knowledge framework is empirically operationalized using survey data from 167 business service firms and supplementary case study evidence from 16 other firms. It is found that business service improvements and new service introductions are significantly associated with collectively held knowledge, such as codified service solutions or team‐based competences and procedures. In contrast, relying solely on tacit knowledge held by individuals may hamper innovation. The results also suggest that tacit collective knowledge is more closely associated with new service introductions, whereas explicit collective knowledge is associated with service improvements. Tacit collective knowledge is thus conducive. A managerial implication is that new service introductions necessitate team competences and routines, whereas incremental service improvements are more likely if procedures are in place to codify services into explicit solutions or technologies. Thus, the knowledge management approach should depend on the strategic orientation of the service firm toward continuous improvement of existing services or development of completely new services.     

Flooding and Liquidity on the Bayou: The Capitalization of Flood Risk into House Value and Ease‐of‐Sale

The existing literature focuses on how perceived flood risk affects house value. Search theory, however, implies that flood risks will be capitalized into both house price and liquidity. This article draws on search theory to develop an empirical approach for estimating flood risk capitalization into both price and selling time. The results show the mix of price and liquidity capitalization varies by level of flood risk as well as across housing market phases. Regardless of the specific capitalization pattern, the results illustrate that focusing solely on price without allowing for concomitant liquidity capitalization can yield estimates that understate the full impact of flood risk on house transactions.     

基于公共关系下的企业制服研究——以旅游服务业为例

现今社会是品牌竞争和情感消费的时代,公共关系是企业实力和企业形象的整体表现。企业制服的设计应当从公共关系方面入手,并在整体的设计构想中实现,势必有力地提升企业的公共关系环境和综合竞争力。     

When Preventing Absenteeism Fuels Long-Sickness Leave: The Case of a Leading Operator for Local Transport Services

We examine the strategy to reduce sickness absences of transit drivers in one of the leading Multinational Operators for Local Transport Services in France. Absenteeism dramatically rose as a result of this strategy. Using observations and interviews at the corporate and field levels, and company data, we disentangle the mechanisms that led to this failure. In a context of strong constraints especially from local communities, the strategy based on underlining the costs of absences pushed local units to change their management practices. They focused on chasing short absences, promoted presenteeism and intensified pressure on workers rather than boosting prevention. Eventually, long-duration sickness leaves massively expanded.     

The Effects of Market Network Heterogeneity on Innovation Diffusion: An Agent‐Based Modeling Approach

Innovations usually have an initial impact on very few people. The period of learning or early evaluation precedes the diffusion of the technology into the wider addressed population. More than a transfer, this is best characterized as communication of benefits, costs, and compatibility with earlier technologies and a relative assessment of the new state of the art. Innovation development by an organization or individual creates not just a device (i.e., process or tacit knowledge) but concomitantly a capacity on the part of other organizations or persons to use, adopt, replicate, enhance, or modify the technology, skills, or knowledge for their own purposes. How innovations actually diffuse is to understand the communication of progress, and this framing helps one to design innovations and also design the marketing and testing programs to ready innovations for market and launch them efficiently. Diffusion theory's main focus is on the flow of information within a social system, such as via mass media and word‐of‐mouth communications. This theory presents often in the form of mathematical models of innovation and imitation. Distinct from classical diffusion models, however, consumers are not all identical in how they connect to others within a market or how they respond to information. We examine the effects of various network structures and relational heterogeneity on innovation diffusion within market networks. Specifically, network topology (the structure of how individuals in the market are connected) and the strength of communication links between innovator and follower market segments (a form of relational heterogeneity) are studied. Several research questions concerning network heterogeneity are addressed with an agent‐based modeling approach. The present study's findings are based on simulation results that show important effects of network structure on the diffusion process. The ability to speed diffusion varies significantly according to within‐ and cross‐segment communications within a heterogeneous network structure. The implications of the present approach for new product diffusion are discussed, and future research directions are suggested that may add useful insights into the complex social networks inherent to diffusion. A simple summary is that discovery of significant prime communicator nodes in a network allows innovation development practices to be better calibrated to realistically multiple market segments.     

The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis

In this article, I synthesize an emerging literature that explores the conditions under which public and private investments and intergovernmental transfers are capitalized into local house prices and the broader economic implications of such capitalization. The main insights are: (1) house price capitalization is more pronounced in locations with strict regulatory and geographical supply constraints; (2) capitalization can induce the provision of durable local public goods and club goods; and (3) capitalization effects—which are habitually ignored by policy‐makers—have important adverse consequences for a wide range of policies such as intergovernmental aid and the mortgage interest deduction.     

The Effects of the EU Equal‐Treatment Directive for Fixed‐Term Workers: Evidence From the UK

In 2002, the UK implemented the EU Directive mandating equal treatment of fixed‐term and permanent workers. This article uses 11 years of data from the Labour Force Survey to assess whether the new legislation has led to a decrease in the average wage gap between fixed‐term and permanent workers. For women, there is no evidence of that. For men, the wage gap appears to have closed after 2002. However, this gap was falling even before 2002, and some evidence of changes in the selection of workers after the implementation of the Directive casts doubts on the extent to which the closing of the gap can be ascribed to the new legislation.     

Exploring the Contributions of Involving Ordinary Users in Ideation of Technology‐Based Services*

Lead users have long been acknowledged as important contributors to the market success of innovative products and services. The ability of lead users to be such effective innovators has been ascribed to a combination of adequate technological expertise and superior knowledge of the user domain so‐called use experience. Drawing on the apparent success of lead users in innovation, many companies are now attempting to involve other types of users, namely, ordinary users, for ideation at the fuzzy front end (FFE) of new product and service development. However, ordinary users do not usually possess the technological knowledge of lead users, and the existing literature provides little guidance on how to manage such user involvement or its expected contributions. The purpose of the present study is, therefore, to contribute to scholarly knowledge regarding the benefits and management of user involvement during the ideation phase of innovation in technology‐based services. More specifically, the study investigates the contribution made in this respect by “ordinary” users, as opposed to professional developers. The research questions that are addressed are as follows: (1) What contributions do ordinary users make when involved in the FFE for ideation of new technology‐based services; and (2) how is the contribution of the users affected by their knowledge of the underlying technology? The study addresses these questions through a literature review and conceptual analysis of the involvement of users in innovation in mobile telephony, followed by an empirical study using a quasi‐experimental design in which the independent variable is the users' technological knowledge of the underlying mobile telephone system and the dependent variable is the quality of the created idea‐proposals from an innovation perspective. Various scenarios involving guided users, pioneering users, and professionals are investigated. The study finds that the users' knowledge of the underlying technology has an effect on their propensity to contribute with incremental or radical new ideas. The ideas from guided users tend to be more incremental whereas the pioneering users' ideas are more radical. Contrary to the users in the guided user scenarios, the users in the pioneering user scenarios have a propensity to produce ideas that challenge the prevailing dominant logic of the company; these ideas can be used to assist the company to think in new trajectories. The paper proposes that ordinary users should not be expected to contribute ideas that can be directly put into the new product development process; rather, ordinary user involvement should be regarded as a process whereby a company learns about users' needs and is inspired to innovate. The paper concludes that user involvement can actually be a stimulus for review of a company's business strategy.     

The Effect of Municipal Services and Local Taxes on Housing Values

This paper presents an economic model which casts the "Tiebout Hypothesis" in a Von Thumen type model of spatial equilibrium and considers the effect of differential provision of municipal services on household utility levels and housing prices in a politically fragmented urban area. Also in the context of this model three alternative methods of financing municipal services are examined. The article suggests that different levels of municipal services may cause spatial disequilibrium in an urban area, and as households move within the urban area to maximize their utility, they bid up (or down) the price of housing to the extent that their consumer's surplus is capitalized in housing values. Thus, the resultant urban rent gradient may be "kinked" or discontinuous. This paper also presents empirical findings examining the relationship between housing values and several municipal services.     

A ‘Problem of Fairness’ in the Making: The Transformation of Public Services from the Perspective of Postal Workers

During the last two decades public administration and public services have undergone profound changes with far‐reaching impacts on employment relations and working conditions. The paper presents the perceptions and lived experiences of workers affected by liberalization and privatization of public services. In doing so it focuses on workers’ ideas of fairness and dignity at work using the concepts of distribution, recognition and the public ethos of the common good and linking them to fundamental principles of justice. It is argued that the perception of inequalities as fair, while it is shaped by custom, is also being socially constructed during far‐reaching changes. The analysis is based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in Austria, Germany and Switzerland with postal‐service workers, a sector well suited for the analysis because of the far‐reaching changes in terms of market regulation, ownership of organizations, labour regulation, employment and working conditions.     

Wage Effects of On‐the‐Job Training: A Meta‐Analysis

A meta‐analysis is used to study the average wage effects of on‐the‐job training. This study shows that the average reported wage effect of on‐the‐job training, corrected for publication bias, is 2.6 per cent per course. The analyses reveal a substantial heterogeneity between training courses, while wage effects reported in studies based on instrumental variables and panel estimators are substantially lower than estimates based on techniques that do not correct for selectivity issues. Appropriate methodology and the quality of the data turn out to be crucial to determine the wage returns.     

Measuring Trade Union Democracy: The Case of the UK Civil and Public Services Association

The Civil and Public Services Association (CPSA) has experienced a substantial number of organizational changes over the last 25 years, both as a voluntary response to membership concerns and to comply with legislative demands. Have these changes made the CPSA more or less ‘democratic’? An answer to this question must acknowledge that individuals interpret ‘trade union democracy’ in different ways. This paper evaluates the changes in the CPSA’s organizational structure and internal decision‐making procedures according to the emphasis of four models of trade union democracy: liberal pluralism, grass‐roots activism, individual accountability and consumer trade unionism.     

The Effects of Occupational Licensing: Evidence from Business‐Level Data

Occupational licensing currently affects more than 1,000 occupations in the United States. I use confidential US Census Bureau business micro‐data to shed light on the effect of occupational licensing in cosmetology on key market outcomes and study its effect on the providers of occupational training. Occupational licensing regulation does not seem to affect the equilibrium number of practitioners or prices of services to consumers, but is associated with significantly lower practitioner entry and exit rates. I further find states with more stringent licensing requirements to have more instructors and a larger median size of training facilities, suggesting possible barriers to entry for the training schools. Instructors, however, do not earn more in such states.     

Performing for Pay? The Effects of ‘Merit Pay’ on Motivation in a Public Service

Abstract : Despite the growing use made of performance-related pay schemes, their true impact remains sadly under-researched. This article, a case study of the scheme introduced into the Inland Revenue in 1988, and typical of recent UK public-sector schemes, is an attempt to reduce the area of mystery.
We assess the scheme by its likely impact on employee motivation, which we gauge through a variety of employee and management opinions and attitudes, as expressed in more than 2000 responses to a questionnaire. Our conclusion is that, although the scheme was thought by staff to have a number of virtues, it was very unlikely to have raised employee motivation appreciably; it may indeed have been demotivating on balance. We also consider the likely reasons for this result.
If the scheme did not improve employee motivation, it is hard to see how it could have enhanced employee performance. The study has potentially important implications for the government policy of seeking to improve the functioning of the public sector through performance-related pay.