Anatomy of a social partnership: A stakeholder perspective

We offer an anatomic analysis of a social partnership among a complex network of stakeholder organizations. Contributions of this research are twofold. First, we use explanatory case data to develop a framework of stakeholder collaboration in a complex setting involving a mix of for-profit and non-profit organizations. Our study is motivated by a need for understanding about how organizations can work within social partnerships to achieve their goals (be they profit related or otherwise). Second, we offer insight about lateral relationship exchange from the view of the entire project—a perspective not typically employed in the domain of relationship marketing. The focal issue in the case, use of technology to improve highway safety, is a social initiative which further sets our study apart in the relationship marketing literature. Using fieldnotes from 33 in-depth interviews, we employ a mix of inductive and deductive reasoning to formulate a conceptual framework and research propositions for the social partnership. The conceptual framework offers in-depth understanding of social partnership development and relationship dynamics. This, in turn, may help stakeholders achieve organizational goals more effectively in this unique environment.     

Sense-making and management in business networks — some observations, considerations, and a research agenda

Business networks are complex webs of interdependent exchange relationships within which companies and individual managers operate. They consist of manifold actors, complex interactions, as well as organizational structures and resource transformation processes. Business managers cannot just capitulate vis-à-vis this complexity. Making sense of complex business networks helps managers to understand their own position, as well as their available options for change. Similarly, research in the area of sense-making and management in business networks may help us understand how managers cope with the contextual complexity in business networks, and how managers construct the forms in which this complexity appears. This paper identifies six major research themes that need to be taken up in the future with regard to sense-making and management in business networks, and discusses some methodological issues to advance our knowledge in this area.     

A multiple perspectives view of the market case for green energy

This paper presents an exploratory evaluation of the market case for green energy. These energy sources are widely considered to have less of an ecological impact than conventional energy sources. The case for green energy is viewed from the multiple perspectives TOP (technical, organizational, personal) framework. The green energy technologies will need to meet certain technical, organizational and personal criteria and resolve key issues in order to address the barriers to market adoption. The multiple perspectives approach facilitates the evaluation of green-energy alternatives as potential new products which would enable organizations and individuals to meet both economic and green criteria that impact customer value creation. Given the present trends of increasing energy use and requirements to minimize environmental impact, green energy adoption may become a key element of strategies to ensure long-term economic growth.     

Leapfrogging in mobile telephony: A measure for comparing country performance

There is widespread agreement as to what constitutes leapfrogging in technology and also that mobile phones are a good example of this phenomenon. What is lacking in the literature, however, is any attempt to operationalize the notion of leapfrogging in a way that allows us to rank different countries. The purpose of this paper accordingly is to provide such a measure using both the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones and a weighting of this ratio for a particular country by its share in the total number of mobile phones in the sample. The proposed measure yields a number of insights that cannot be gained by using only the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones. Yet, for a number of the best performing countries this ratio is very much in evidence.     

The role of networking in the competitiveness of firms

Two main forces characterise production systems today: on the one hand, the increasingly global nature of markets and economies has resulted in increasing competition and a new, more global division of labour. On the other, the greater complexity of technology makes innovation a key aspect in the competitiveness of manufacturing firms. The establishment of cooperative networks seems to be important in both processes. This paper aims to explore these aspects by analysing the competitiveness of firms in four different sectors of the manufacturing industry: food, chemicals, electronics and vehicles. Data have been obtained from a survey conducted specifically for this purpose at company level in Spain. Findings from the empirical analysis, based on the application of the Polytomous Logistic Universal Model (PLUM), confirm the positive effects that the ability to network has on company performance. In particular, among all the potential organisations that work as partners of the firms, the paper shows the importance of intra-firm cooperation, the user-producer relationships and the cooperation between competitors.     

Are experts better than potential users in predicting the uptake of an innovation? Extending the use of the Juster Scale

Are experts or potential users better at predicting the success of a new product? To explore this question we used an eleven-point probability scale, the Juster Scale, to ask various groups of people about their probability of taking up a new product and also their assessment of its chance of its success in the marketplace. Although this type of scale generally performs better than intention scales it tends to over-predict when used in a repertoire market and we examine its performance for a boundary condition of such a market. We also explored the use of the scale as a projective research tool which is a novel application. In this study the product was a new type of charity lottery. The study was undertaken in the month prior to the lottery closing and we subsequently knew the actual outcome. The Juster Scale generally performed poorly as a predictor in this context. The predictions from the experts were no more accurate than those of the general public but none had direct knowledge of an equivalent lottery. This exploratory study concluded that the actual behaviour of a sample of relevant consumers, where the product is available, is better for forecasting than asking for estimates of their potential behaviour, that is, behaviour predicts behaviour better than probabilities of behaviour.     

The exploratory analysis of trade-offs in strategic planning: Lessons from Regional Infrastructure Foresight

The sustainable transformation of infrastructure sectors represents a challenge of prime importance worldwide. Due to long life times of infrastructures, strategic decision making has to explicitly consider uncertainties in context conditions, value considerations and available technological alternatives. However currently, strategic infrastructure planning is often carried out in a very narrow perspective. The present paper argues that foresight informed strategic planning, allows addressing trade-offs related to context uncertainties, value conflicts and sustainability deficits in a structured way. The paper introduces a specific procedural proposal, the Regional Infrastructure Foresight method (RIF) and illustrates its potential virtues through an application to urban water management planning in a Swiss region (Kiesental).     

Business planning based on technological capabilities: Patent analysis for technology-driven roadmapping

This research responds to the needs of technology-driven business by focusing on how firms can find new business opportunities based on their technological capabilities. It proposes a technology-driven roadmapping processes that starts from capability analysis for technology planning and ends with business opportunity analysis for market planning. We suggest the use of patent data as a proxy measure of technological capability for this purpose and develop four analysis modules — Monitoring, Collaboration, Diversification, and Benchmarking — to support decision-making during the process. Various analysis techniques such as text-mining, network analysis, citation analysis and index analysis are applied to discover meaningful implications from the patent data, which are summarized in four maps — Actor-similarity map, Actor-relations map, Technology-industry map, and Technology-affinity map. For the purpose of illustration, RFID-related patents are collected and the 18 firms with the most patents used, focusing especially on the third biggest. We believe using roadmapping and patent analysis together can play complementary roles for each other. Putting roadmapping techniques together with patent analysis can increase the objectivity and reliability of technology roadmap, while using patent analysis restricted to technological information together with roadmapping techniques can ensure that a more valuable breadth of strategic information is extracted from patents.     

From the relative to the absolute digital divide in developing countries

This paper argues that the literature on the digital divide is based heavily on relative rather than absolute magnitudes, although the latter has more welfare significance. It is clear that the former concept has been falling sharply in recent years yet such calculations have not been made for the absolute divide. One contribution of this paper is to redress this gap in the literature for both mobile phones and the Internet using a sample of more than sixty countries. The results tend to be broadly consistent with findings from the literature on the adoption and diffusion of IT in developing countries generally and Africa in particular.