Entrepreneurial opportunities in peripheral versus core regions in Chile

Governmental policies tend to support and boost entrepreneurship in peripheral regions in many countries. This research revives the debate about specific regional policies designed to foster local new business creation, and the entrepreneurial framework conditions needed at the regional level for emerging regions such as Latin America. We applied one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s methodologies, the National Experts Survey, to a sample of 695 key informants in Chile at eight regions of which six are classified as peripheral. Using non-parametric statistics we compared the differences between peripheral and core regions. The main results indicate that peripherally located entrepreneurship experts perceive their regions as in a worse position than centrally located experts in terms of finance access and physical infrastructure. On the other hand, the results indicate that peripheral entrepreneurship experts detect more market dynamism in their regions and surprisingly perceive general policy and government programs as supporting entrepreneurship although the Chilean government had not promoted many regional policies.     

A Reconceptualization of Manufacturers' Service Strategies

Purpose: As part of service infusion, manufacturers use services to differentiate their products and provide growth. Although several attempts have been made to classify manufacturers' service strategies and offerings, most have been based on small purposive samples. The purpose of this article is to create a generic typology of manufacturers' service strategies.

Methodology/approach: The unit of analysis was the manufacturer or strategic business unit. The data collection was based on a survey of 145 B2B manufacturers in the United Kingdom.

Findings: Three categories of service offerings were identified: product-attached services, operations services on own products, and vendor independent operations services. These categories are used to specify three generic service strategies: Services Doubters, for whom services are not a strong differentiator with no focus on any category of service offerings; Services Pragmatists, for whom product-attached services are a key differentiator; Services Enthusiasts, for whom services are both a product differentiator and an enabler of growth, with all three categories of service offerings important.

Research implications: Whereas prior studies tend to use the concepts of service strategies and categories of service offerings interchangeably, we find empirical support for the importance of making a clear distinction between the two concepts.

Practical implications: Manufacturers can be classified according to their services strategies. For Services Doubters service infusion is unlikely to be an appropriate approach to creating differentiation. For Services Pragmatists services play a crucial role in creating product differentiation. Services Enthusiasts use services to both differentiate their own products and also develop services-led growth.

Originality/value/contribution: The paper exposes an ambiguity in the extant literature, with a manufacturer's categories of service offerings used as proxies for service strategies. A new typology of service strategies is presented based on categories of service offerings, which provides insight into how manufacturers infuse services.     

How Institutional Change Reconfigures Successful Value Chains: The Case of Western Pharma Corporations in China

Management researchers have traditionally emphasized two main factors in the definition of corporate strategies: internal capabilities and industry competition. However, in less stable, transition economies it is particularly the changing institutional environment that influences strategy definition and performance of multinational corporations (MNCs) as shown by numerous international business (IB) scholars. Yet, how institutions matter remains a largely unresolved question. This article examines how institutions have affected the value chain configuration of Western pharmaceutical firms in China. Our research framework identifies four major strategic shifts along the value chain of Western firms in the pharmaceutical industry: upgrading along the value chain, outsourcing to contract service providers, expansion of geographical scope and diversification of product portfolio. The findings allow concrete managerial implications to be derived for decision makers of Western pharmaceutical firms operating in China. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Reference Process Flows for Telecommunication Companies

The telecommunication market is experiencing substantial changes. New business models, innovative services, and technologies require reengineering, transformation, and process standardization. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks support the transformation by specifying methods, procedures, and reference models. With the Enhanced Telecom Operation Map (eTOM), the TM Forum offers an international de facto reference process framework, based on specific features and requirements of the telecommunication industry. However, this reference framework only offers a hierarchical collection of processes on different levels of abstraction; a control view in terms of a sequential ordering of tasks and hence a real process flow as well as an end-to-end view on the customer are missing. In this paper, we extend the eTOM reference model by reference process flows, in which we abstract and generalize the knowledge about processes in telecommunication companies. With reference process flows, we aim to assist companies in achieving a structured and transparent re-structuring and re-design of their processes. We demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of our reference process flows in two case studies, and evaluate them by means of criteria for reference model evaluation. Our reference process flows have been accepted as a standard by the TM Forum and published as part of eTOM version 9. We further elaborate on those components of our approach which can be applied outside the telecommunication industry.     

The Critical Relationship between Climate Change Awareness and Action: An Origin-Based Perspective

While it is now widely accepted by scientists and governments that human activity contributes to climate change, there is a lack of understanding whether this realisation is now gaining greater attraction with the general public than it had 5 or 10 years ago. Additional gaps in knowledge relate to the link between awareness and action, which could be hypothesised to have become stronger in light of evidence being produced of some projected climate changes occurring already. This article examines climate change awareness and the link with travel-related decision-making by adopting an under-utilised origin perspective in Wellington, New Zealand. The findings, generated by a household mail survey, indicate that the majority of the respondents are aware of tourism's contribution to climate change and think that it is likely that their lives in New Zealand will be negatively affected by climate change. However, when examining the respondents' recent holiday decision-making, it is evident that for the overwhelming majority, climate change awareness does not appear to influence travel-related decisions. This article concludes by discussing demand-focused measures aimed at reducing the GHG emissions generated by tourism.     

Disinflationary booms?

This paper shows that announced credible disinflations under inflation targeting lead to a boom in a standard New Keynesian model (i.e. a disinflationary boom). This finding is robust with respect to various parameterizations and disinflationary experiments. Thus, it differs from previous findings about disinflationary booms under monetary targeting.     

Can income support for part-time workers serve as a stepping-stone to regular jobs? An application to young long-term unemployed women

This article investigates whether income support for low-paid part-time workers in Belgium increases the transition from unemployment to non-subsidised, ‘regular’ employment. Our analysis uses a sample of long-term unemployed young women. Observing their labour market histories from 1998 to 2001, we implement the ‘timing of events’ method to identify the treatment effect. Our results suggest that participation in the policy has a significantly positive effect on the transition to regular employment. Participation reduced the survivor rate in unemployment by 27% points 1 year after the start of the programme. The time spent in the programme did not affect the transition to regular employment.     

Subjective performance appraisal and inequality aversion

Making use of a subjective performance appraisal system, it is a well-established fact that many supervisors tend to assess the employees too good (leniency bias) and that the appraisals hardly vary across employees of a certain supervisor (centrality bias). We explain these two biases in a simple theoretical model and discuss determinants of the size of the biases.     

Efficiency analysis of German electricity distribution utilities – non-parametric and parametric tests

This study applies non-parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in Germany. Traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking are addressed, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence specific to the situation in Germany. Labour, capital, and peak load capacity are used as inputs, and units sold and the number of customers as output. The data cover 307 (out of 553) German electricity distribution utilities. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied with constant returns to scale (CRS) as the main productivity analysis technique, whereas stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with distance function is the verification method. The results suggest that returns to scale play but a minor role; only very small utilities have a significant cost advantage. Low customer density is found to affect the efficiency score significantly, in particular in the lower third of all observations. Surprisingly, East German utilities feature a higher average efficiency than their West German counterparts. The correlation tests imply a high coherence of the results.