Salespersons as Internal Knowledge Brokers and New Products Selling: Discovering the Link to Genetic Makeup

Managers increasingly realize the importance of involving the sales force in new product development. However, despite recent progress, research on the specific role of the sales force in product innovation‐related activities remains scarce. In particular, the importance of a salespersons' internal knowledge brokering has been neglected. This study develops and empirically validates the concept of internal knowledge brokering behavior and its effect on selling new products and developing new business, and explores whether a salesperson's internal brokering qualities are determined by biological traits. The findings reveal that salespeople with the DRD2 A1 gene variant engage at significant lower levels of internal knowledge‐brokering behavior than salespeople without this gene variant, and as a result are less likely to engage effectively in new product selling. The DRD4 gene variant had no effect on internal knowledge brokering. Management and future research implications are discussed.     

Contextual Innovation Management Using a Stage‐Gate Platform: The Case of Philips Shaving and Beauty

To improve its innovation process, Philips Shaving and Beauty (S&B) designed a blueprint for its innovation process. Although it has proved to be quite effective, it has experienced a lack of efficiency, in terms of frequent cost and time overruns, in the fuzzy front end of this process. We suggest a contextual innovation management approach to set up a stage‐gate‐based innovation process platform and thus improve the efficiency in the fuzzy front end, which means that, for different contexts, stage‐gate process variants will be designed from which unnecessary activities are removed and important activities are emphasized. The design is based on the identification of relevant contextual factors to develop variations of the common innovation process within Philips S&B. We distinguished different variants of the innovation processes within Philips S&B that can increase the efficiency in the fuzzy front end. Based on interviews within and outside Philips S&B, we identified problems and potential solutions with regard to efficiency in eight recently finished innovation processes. The results indicate that the most important contextual factors are the distinction between incremental and radical innovations, and between market and technology‐based innovations. We used these factors to design three variants on the basic platform of the stage‐gate process.     

Helping behavior in a virtual crisis situation: effects of safety awareness and crisis communication

Incident evaluations show that bystanders tend to help: they do not wait for professionals to arrive, but act as required by the situation at hand. In the present study, we investigated how safety awareness (induced before an accident happened) and providing a course of action by emergency services affect helping behavior after witnessing a virtual accident with two victims. The main task of the participants was to arrive at a job interview in time. Safety awareness was manipulated by the specific organization they went to: either promoting safe traffic or healthy living. The results show that all participants were inclined to help. Participants who were primed towards safe traffic more often called the emergency number, but talked to the victim less often. Participants who had received specific courses of action moved the victim less often. In all, the results clearly indicate the value of effective risk communication (before an event occurs) and crisis communication (after an event has occurred), as both types of information improve the quality of actual helping behavior at the scene.     

Corporate leverage and the collateral channel

We investigate whether and how corporate leverage depends on the structure of corporate assets. Based on a large panel dataset of US firms from 1990 to 2010, we show that property, plant and equipment are important drivers of the collateral channel, while inventories and receivables are less important. The collateral channel is more pronounced for firms that have to rely on banks and trade creditors to raise debt finance, but it has become weaker for these firms after the start of the financial crisis. Our study provides new evidence on the cross-sectional and time-varying importance of the collateral channel for corporate leverage.     

OPTIMAL INTERNATIONAL DEBT AND ENDOGENOUS TIME PREFERENCE IN A DEMOGRAPHICALLY DIVIDED WORLD (*)

The international transmission of shocks in population growth and technology is examined in an interdependent two-country world economy; decisions concerning the intertemporal allocation are made by social planners with an infinite horizon and an endogenous rate of time preference. Steady state shocks in population growth are shown to be negatively transmitted to the rate of time preference. In the steady state, the optimal foreign debt is determinate and it brings about a convergence of time preference. The net creditor and debtor positions in the steady state depend on the discount rate functions, the states of technology and the rates of population growth.     

Toward a Model to Enhance Synergy of Out-of-Home Advertising Media Integration Strategies

ABSTRACT

For media planners to combine multiple media across platforms to maximize synergy is a critical challenge within integrated marketing communication. For this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with experienced media specialists in leading agencies to explore how they integrate different out-of-home advertising media platforms in IMC strategies. The feedback of these experts was then used to propose a model of strategies to enhance synergy within out-of-home advertising campaigns. This model is a first of its kind for planning out-of-home advertising media across platforms and bridges a gap in the existing literature on media synergy and out-of-home advertising media strategy.