Brand equity of defectors and never boughts in a business financial market

Buyer acquisition is important for any supplier looking to maintain or expand its customer base. This study uses a brand equity perspective to compare the future customer potential of those who used the brand in the past but stopped (defectors), with the potential of those who have never bought the brand. On the surface, both groups possess the same propensity to consider the brand for future purchase. However, the underlying reasons for these propensities differ. Defectors hold both positive and negative information about the former brand. In contrast, those who have never bought the brand possess largely neutral opinions. The results imply that managers should consider treating these two groups separately because they require different acquisition strategies.     

Bootstrap prediction intervals for autoregressions: some alternatives

A new method is proposed to obtain interval forecasts for autoregressive models taking into account the variability due to the estimation of the order and the parameters. The procedure improves that introduced by Masarotto (1990), allows a substantial reduction of the variance of the predictive distribution percentile estimators and should thus be considered as a useful alternative to the classic Box and Jenkins interval forecast. The method uses the bootstrap technique and is distribution-free. An empirical application is considered.     

Adopting key lessons from agile manufacturing to agile software product development—A comparative study

Many industrial new product development (NPD) software projects apply nowadays agile methodologies. These methodologies, such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming (XP), and Feature-Driven Development (FDD) date back to 1990s, and the Agile Manifesto was declared in 2001. However, already before that the concept of agile manufacturing (AM) was discovered to describe a corporate ability for quick adaptation to changing requirements. There is surprising amount in common between these two fields. This raises a question of whether NPD software development companies could take even more overall advantage of those different agile approaches. This interdisciplinary paper explores the commonalities between the key concepts of AM and some of the most popular agile software methods, and consequently suggests potential new areas for software process improvement (SPI) in large-scale NPD organizations. An industrial case example illustrates how agility in embedded software product development can be enhanced by following typical NPD principles. We conclude that there is potential for further improvements in software product development industry in general by seeing agility as a wider, organization-oriented business concept following the AM/NPD learning. Current agile software process models cover only a subset of this space.     

The labour market consequences of self-employment spells: European evidence

We examine how those re-entering paid-employment after a brief self-employment spell fare upon return using data from the European Community Household Panel. Unconditionally, those re-entering paid-employment appear to have considerably lower wages than those staying in the wage sector. This difference appears to be larger in Europe than in the US. Conditional analysis suggests, however, that the difference is more apparent than real: It seems that Europeans select negatively into (and possibly out-of) self-employment, i.e., the likelihood of entering (and exiting) entrepreneurship correlates negatively with unobserved ability and/or in-paid-employment productivity. Our analysis of non-wage outcomes indicates that the selection is mostly involuntary, and that for highly educated men, the brief self-employment spells are unemployment in disguise.     

Antecedents and consequences of opportunism in buyer–supplier relations: Research synthesis and new frontiers

Buyers and suppliers must concern themselves with opportunism, a phenomenon empirically established in exchange relationships. What causes firms to behave opportunistically? What are the consequences of firms' opportunistic behavior? To date, these antecedents and consequences have not been comprehensively synthesized. Herein, the opportunism phenomenon is revisited to expose research gaps and chart new directions that will enhance our understanding of buyer–supplier relationships. First, we provide a brief review of two critical theories of exchange that provide a theoretical foundation for opportunism. We next provide an overview of opportunism. Then each of the antecedents and consequences is discussed with emphasis on the contribution of each finding. Finally, and most importantly, several promising paths for further research are proposed.     

Pharmaceutical marketing through the customer portfolio: Institutional influence and adaptation

This paper discusses the dilemma of managing marketing in institutionalized business contexts. On the basis of a study of pharmaceutical marketing practices it is argued that business aspirations are dependent on understanding institutional influence and adaptation mechanisms on the customer-portfolio level. As relationships are perceived as such mechanisms, understanding network dynamics, institutional co-evolution and actor cognitions are key managerial issues. Furthermore, it is suggested that institutional discontinuities leverage institutional entrepreneurship to a critical extent.     

How many singularities are near and how will they disrupt human history?

This paper reviews a large number of approaches that have been used for considering technologically driven profound societal change. We agree with Vinge's suggestion for naming events that are “capable of rupturing the fabric of human history” (or leading to profound societal changes) as a “singularity”. This is a useful terminology especially since a mathematically rigorous singularity seems impossible for technological and related societal change. The overview of previous work is done within the context of a broader look at the role of technological change within human history. The review shows that a wide variety of methods have been used and almost all point to singularities in the present century particularly in the middle of the century. The diversity of the methods is reassuring about the potential robustness of these predictions. However, the subjectivity of labeling events as singularities (even well studied past events) is a concern about all of the methods and thus one must carefully pause when relying in any way on these predictions. The general lack of empirical research in this area is also a concern.Quantitative considerations (by proponents and opponents) about past singularities or future singularities often confound two types of metrics. The first type is essentially related to diffusion of technologies (or bundles of technologies) where the logistic curve is empirically well established as the proper time dependence. The second type of metric is for technological capability where hyper-exponentials are empirically well established for their time dependence. In this paper, we consider two past singularities (arguably with important enough social change to qualify) in which the basic metric is alternatively of one type or another. The globalization occurring under Portuguese leadership of maritime empire building and naval technological progress is characterized by a metric describing diffusion. The revolution in time keeping, on the other hand, is characterized by a technological capability metric. For these two cases (and thus robust to the choice of metric type), we find that:

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  People undergoing profound technologically-driven societal change do not sense a singularity.

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  The societal impacts depend in complicated ways on human needs, institutional variables and other more uncertain factors and thus are particularly hard to project;

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  The societal impact is apparently not determined by the rate of progress on either type of metric or by projections to mathematical points with either kind of metric. This finding supports the existing concept that social change due to technology is a more holistic phenomenon than can be characterized by any technical metric.

In the final section, we use these empirical findings as the basis for exploring the possibilities for and nature of future singularities. In this we speculate that the potential for a future strong singularity based upon computational capability does not appear particularly probable but that one may already be occurring and is not fully noticed by those (us) going through it. Other possible 21st century singularities (life extension and fossil fuel elimination are two examples considered) may also be already underway rather than waiting for the predicted mid-century changes.     

Too big to fail — Lessons for today and the future from British industrial policy, 1960–1990

British industrial policy for two sectors (automotive and aerospace manufacture) in the period the 1960–1990 is considered and compared with the challenges facing the United Kingdom following the financial crisis of 2008. The history of the period 1960–1990 is informed by interviews with well-placed policy-makers of the time. These observations complement the historical record to confirm that British industrial policy was then more often a pragmatic response to events than the consequence of political ideology. Four particular phases of policy are observed: consolidation, investment, nationalisation and privatisation. During the decade 2000–2009 several British companies in banking, transport and energy have been subject to similar state interventions. In 2010 these companies are at various stages on the four step journey considered by the paper. The paper provides four lessons from the past for twenty-first century policy makers tasked with taking forward the companies with state investment and ensuring a return to economic prosperity.     

The unholy marriage? Integrating qualitative and quantitative information in Delphi processes

This study analyses the strengths, weaknesses and pitfalls encountered when combining qualitative and quantitative information in a Delphi process and when reporting the results as scenarios or images of the future. The paper draws material from seven Disaggregative Policy Delphi processes conducted in Finland in 1999-2008, in which the authors were researchers or advisors. The cases are analysed in terms of the level of integration and the ways to overcome the difficulties. A learning ‘community of practice’ was created by these afterthoughts and by organising an international conference workshop on the issue. Qualitative and quantitative material was holistically integrated in one case. In the other cases, solutions led to domination of one material type over another but even then the other material did give relevant points to scenario formation. Finally, we give recommendations for tackling the pitfalls: 1) balancing between qualitative and quantitative, 2) balancing between formal structure and questions raised in the process, 3) framing questions to discover alternative future states, 4) paying attention to panellists' style, 5) dealing with lack of data for comprehensive cluster analysis, 6) considering scenario consistency, 7) understanding manager's responsibility and, 8) understanding the epistemological aspects of Delphi data. We conclude that integrating qualitative and quantitative material by using mixed methods to form coherent scenarios is at the same time desirable, possible and difficult - making the ‘unholy marriage’ a worthy adventure.