Factors affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of hotel service personnel

The accumulation and sharing of knowledge is an important managerial approach to attracting customers and increasing customer satisfaction. However, knowledge sharing is not an automatic behavior. The primary purpose of this study is to understand the organizational and personal factors motivating employees to share knowledge. Personnel in international tourist hotels in Taipei who provide front-line services for travelers were surveyed. This study shows that internal marketing and organizational culture influence knowledge-sharing attitudes and perceived behavioral control. In addition, perceived behavioral control influences the relations among internal marketing, organizational culture, and knowledge-sharing attitudes. This research suggests that to develop knowledge-sharing attitudes among personnel that benefit customer service, it is important for managers to model supportive attitudes, give actual support in forms such as bonuses and resources, and develop a culture that encourages personnel to attempt innovation.     

Producing ceramic art works through tourism research

It might appear initially that the diverse fields of ceramics and tourism do not have much in common. However, printed pictorial ceramic objects have been widely available since the 1860s as touristic souvenirs. The relationships between art and tourism, however, have been explicitly examined by only a few tourism researchers. This paper critically examines how tourism research can actively and innovatively inform artistic practices. It thus explores the relationships between the production of ceramic art work, souvenirs, photography and tourism. In so doing it challenges the conventional opposition between art and souvenirs through the integration of popular tourism imagery and the distortion of souvenir shapes.     

Value‐Chains in the Andes: Upgrading for Ecuador's Blackberry Producers

We apply a value chain approach to examine how blackberry producers in Ecuador can improve production and marketing practices to obtain more favorable prices. Results show that general upgrading actions are associated with improved producer prices, and specific activities, such as seeking information from reputable sources can lead to substantial welfare improvements. The paper goes beyond most value chain studies which treat participation in a ‘modern’ value chain as a discrete state. Ecuador's blackberry industry is evolving incrementally with no clearly discernible ‘modern’ market chains. Instead, producers incrementally make improvements in multiple dimensions. Relatively low‐cost practices, many of which do not imply substantial risk or investment, are associated with price improvements. Obstacles to participation in incremental value chain upgrading activities are not insurmountable. In particular, scale of production is not a limiting factor: small‐scale producers are not precluded from adopting improved practices and they do not suffer in terms of price received.     

Localised Estimates of Dynamics of Multi‐dimensional Disadvantage: An Application of the Small Area Estimation Technique Using Australian Survey and Census Data

Deep and persistent disadvantage is an important, but statistically rare, phenomenon in the population, and sample sizes are usually not large enough to provide reliable estimates for disaggregated analysis. Survey samples are typically designed to produce estimates of population characteristics of planned areas. The sample sizes are calculated so that the survey estimator for each of the planned areas is of a desired level of precision. However, in many instances, estimators are required for areas of the population for which the survey providing the data was unplanned. Then, for areas with small sample sizes, direct estimation of population characteristics based only on the data available from the particular area tends to be unreliable. This has led to the development of a class of indirect estimators that make use of information from related areas through modelling. A model is used to link similar areas to enhance the estimation of unplanned areas; in other words, they borrow strength from the other areas. Doing so improves the precision of estimated characteristics in the small area, especially in areas with smaller sample sizes. Social science researchers have increasingly employed small area estimation to provide localised estimates of population characteristics from surveys. We explore how to extend this approach within the context of deep and persistent disadvantage in Australia. We find that because of the unique circumstances of the Australian population distribution, direct estimates of disadvantage have substantial variation, but by applying small area estimation, there are significant improvements in precision of estimates.     

The relationship between a firm's patent quality and its market value — The case of US pharmaceutical industry

This study examined the relationships between corporate market value and four patent quality indicators - relative patent position (RPP), revealed technology advantage (RTA), Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of patents (HHI of patents), and patent citations - in the US pharmaceutical industry. The results showed that RPP and patent citations were positively associated with corporate market value, but HHI of patents was negatively associated with it, while RTA was not significantly related to it. Thus, if pharmaceutical companies want to enhance their market value, they should increase their leading positions in their most important technological fields, cultivate more diversity of technological capabilities, and raise innovative value of their patents. In addition, this study found that market value of pharmaceutical companies with high patent counts was higher than that of pharmaceutical companies with low patent counts, and suggested that pharmaceutical companies with low patent counts should increase RPP in their most technological fields, decrease HHI of patents, or raise patent citations to further enhance their market value. Furthermore, this study developed a classification for the pharmaceutical companies to divide them into four types, and provided some suggestions to them.     

Industry- and company-level factors influencing the development of the forest energy business — insights from a Delphi Study

The global business environment of today requires industries to be increasingly agile in order to create added value. There is a particularly urgent need to innovate and redefine business models in the mature pulp and paper industry, which is continually announcing mill closures and reporting persistent profitability problems. This paper focuses on the emerging forest energy business, which appears to offer many novel opportunities for both the forest and the energy industry. We conducted a qualitative dissensus-based online Delphi study and carried out themed expert interviews in order to identify the main industry- and company-level factors that are most likely to influence the bioenergy sector, its value-creation potential and forest and energy companies' future roles in it. The Delphi technique proved to be a valuable research tool with which we were able to obtain comprehensive information on a subject that lacks historical and financial data, and yet requires input from many quarters. The results suggest that the complementary resources held by forest and energy companies make collaboration in the bioenergy business favorable. Moreover, the procurement and logistics of forest raw material appear to be key success factors in terms of yielding the most synergetic gains. Uncertainty about policy interventions nevertheless causes concern given their relatively rapid effect on the prospects of the bioenergy business.     

Battery technology for electric and hybrid vehicles: Expert views about prospects for advancement

In this paper we present the results of an expert elicitation on the prospects for advances in battery technology for electric and hybrid vehicles. We find disagreement among the experts on a wide range of topics, including the need for government funding, the probability of getting batteries with Lithium Metal anodes to work, and the probability of building safe Lithium-ion batteries. Averaging across experts we find that U.S. government expenditures of $150 M/year lead to a 66% chance of achieving a battery that costs less than $200/kWh, and a 20% chance for a cost of $90/kWh or less. Reducing the cost of batteries from a baseline of $384 to $200 could lead to a savings in the cost of reducing greenhouse gases of about $100 billion in 2050.