Decision analytics mobilized with digital coaching

The context to be addressed is the digitalization of industry and industrial processes. Digitalization brings enhanced customer relationships and value‐chain integration, which are effective instruments to meet increasing competition and slimmer margins for productivity and profitability. Digitalization also brings more pronounced requirements for effective planning, problem solving and decision making in an increasingly complex and fast‐changing environment. Decision analytics will meet the challenges from the growing global competition that major industrial corporations face and will help solve the problems of big data/fast data that digitalization is generating as a by‐product. A mantra is appearing in business magazines – that powerful, intelligent systems will be effective tools for the digitalization of industrial processes – but much less attention appears to be paid to the fact that users need advanced knowledge and skills to benefit from the intelligent systems. First, an effective transfer of knowledge from developers, experts and researchers to users (including management) will be needed; second, the daily use and operations of the systems need to be supported, as automated, intelligent industrial systems are complex to operate. We look at this transfer as knowledge mobilization and will work out how the mobilization can be supported with coaching; this coaching needs to be digital, as human coaches are both scarce and too expensive to employ in large numbers.     

Resident Attitudes Towards Mountain Second-Home Tourism Development in Norway: The Effects of Environmental Attitudes

Rural tourism, especially through second-home development is increasing rapidly in much of Europe, the USA and Canada offering new economic opportunities for local communities, but also challenges related to environmental impacts and differing perceptions within communities about appropriate development paths. This study examines associations between the environmental attitudes of residents and attitudes towards second-home development in two regions in Southern Norway, with community attachment and economic dependency as additional predictors. Ecocentrism was found to have a strong negative effect on attitudes towards tourism development, while, in contrast to previous findings, community attachment did not have significant effects. Economic dependency is significantly related to attitudes towards development; both ecocentrism and economic dependency are mediated by other variables, such as expected impacts and benefits. The findings are important in planning to reduce potential conflicts.     

Attitudes towards immigration—Perceived consequences and economic self-interest

Using the European Social Survey 2002/3, we develop a new test of whether economic self-interest influences people's attitudes towards immigration, exploiting that people have widely different perceptions of the consequences of immigration.     

Multibranded Platform Development: A Corporate Strategy with Multimanagerial Challenges

Product platforms have become a principal fundament and a prerequisite for profitable product development in almost every industry today. Since platforms have a desirable potential to reduce development and production costs, there is an extensive bulk of knowledge describing underlying platform principles and challenges. But the vast majority of the identified challenges are based on single firms and brand contexts, which imply that previous findings might not be applicable when platform development involves several brands, here called multibranded platforms. In the present article it is therefore suggested that there is lack of knowledge describing managerial challenges of multibranded platform development. To be able to capture such a strategy that holds certain complexity and unknown dimension, an explorative and longitudinal field study is supposed to achieve the finest insights into a yet incompletely documented phenomenon. Because of the field‐study approach, findings from the study are theoretically validated in relation to existing knowledge from other contributions. To start developing a multibranded product platform development framework, the present study identifies three distinctively different strategic forces that must be handled in such multibranded platform development: (1) the creation of a common architecture; (2) accomplishing product differentiation within an expanded and multibranded product scope; and (3) corporate responsibility in the transition from single‐branded to multibranded platform development. Three dimensions of managerial challenges are identified. The first is technology management challenges, which deal with commonalization in terms of the development of common multibranded architectures. The major challenge to achieve architectural commonalization is that no individuals from any brand have the proper multibranded architectural knowledge. Instead, multibranded architectures must evolve from the beginning and be founded on a new and expanded brand scope. Architectural commonalization also includes elements of unlearning since previous experiences have little relevance. The second challenge is brand management challenges and deals with brand differentiation in terms of portfolio management. Differentiation is an effect of increased diversification that particularly challenges brands of opposite generic competitive strategies. The third challenge dimension is called corporate management challenges and deals with the combination of the two others. From a corporate management perspective, it seems important to provide new organizational structures that support and combine interests of technology and brand management. Finally, multibranded platform development is a corporate strategy that affects business units and functional units thoroughly.     

Control Aversion and The Search for External Financing in Swedish SMEs

The discussion on growth (see Storey, 1997) and control aversion (Cressy, 1995; Chittenden et al., 1996; Cressy and Olofsson, 1996) in small and medium sized firms has been attracting an increasing amount of attention. Our purpose in this article is to identify under what circumstances small and medium sized firms are prepared to accept outside control in the business firm in order to grow. In the article it is argued that technology development, financial strength, size and perceived need to grow, change firms attitudes towards external financiers. The change in attitude towards more openness eventually leads to an actual behaviour where the principals choose to apply for external finance in the form of bank loans. A linear structural equation modelling program, LISREL, is used to analyse a sample of 281 Swedish firms. The firms all have less than 200 employees, and the sample includes both manufacturing and service firms. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Domestic tourism expenditures: The non-linear effects of length of stay and travel party size

The independent variables length of stay and travel party size are recurrent determinants of expenditures in micro level tourism studies. In most of this research it has been tacitly assumed that these variables have linear effects on tourism spending. This study, situated in a Norwegian setting, questions this approach by explicitly scrutinizing the possible non-linearities in the relationships between tourism expenditures on the one hand and length of stay and travel party size on the other. The empirical results suggest a positive but diminishing relationship between length of stay and tourism expenditures and a convex (i.e. U) relationship between travel party size and tourism expenditures. The study also considers how a number of other key independent variables affect tourism expenditures. Finally, some managerial and scholarly implications are discussed.     

UNCOVERING THE COMMON RISK‐FREE RATE IN THE EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION

We introduce longitudinal factor analysis (LFA) to extract the common risk‐free (CRF) rate from a sample of sovereign bonds of countries in a monetary union. Since LFA exploits the typically very large longitudinal dimension of bond data, it performs better than traditional factor analysis methods that rely on the much smaller cross‐sectional dimension. European sovereign bond yields for the period 2006–2011 are decomposed into a CRF rate, a default risk premium and a liquidity risk premium. Our empirical findings suggest that investors chase both credit quality and liquidity, and that they price double default risk on credit default swaps. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Extent of Overestimation of Small Firm Job Creation – An Empirical Examination of the Regression Bias

Davis, Haltiwanger and Schuh (1993; 1996a; 1996b) suggested that the belief that small firms are major contributors of new jobs is largely based on methodological flaws. In particular, their reasoning about the "regression fallacy", i.e., that temporary fluctuations in size systematically biases estimates in favor of small firm job creation, has caught on interest among researchers and concern among policy makers. In this article we attempt to estimate empirically the extent of overestimation of small firm job creation due to the "regression fallacy". It is concluded that the effect is very small and that correcting for it does not lead to qualitative change of the results. There may be good reasons to question to what extent small firms can lead economic development, and whether it is good or bad if they do create most new jobs, but concern for the "regression fallacy" does not seem to be an important issue in this context.     

A local search algorithm for the optimization of the stochastic economic lot scheduling problem

This paper describes a model for the stochastic economic lot scheduling problem (SELSP) and a Local Search heuristic to find close to optimal solutions to this model. The SELSP considers multiple products, which have to be scheduled on a single facility with limited capacity and significant setup times and costs. The demand is modeled as a stationary compound renewal process. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes the long-run average costs for setups and inventories while satisfying a given fill rate. We use a cyclic scheduling approach in which the individual cycle time of each product is a multiple of some basic period (fundamental cycle).For the deterministic version of the SELSP, efficient heuristics have been developed which guarantee the feasibility of the solution by adding an additional constraint to the problem. In our case this is not sufficient, because for the calculation of the average inventory levels and fill rates we need to develop a schedule with detailed timing of the lots. We present an efficient heuristic for this scheduling problem, which can also be used to check the feasibility of the solution. Thereby, the most time-consuming step (the calculation of average inventory levels and fill rates) is only performed for a limited set of candidates.The algorithm was tested on deterministic benchmark problems from literature and on a large set of stochastic instances. We report on the performance of the heuristic in both cases and try to identify the main factors influencing the objective.