The All-Important First and Last Impression: A Guide to Auditing the Trip to and from Your Airport

The first and last impressions of a destination are critical to the guest experience. This article details a protocol to systematically analyze what guests experience as they enter and leave a destination via the airports. The article pulls from the author's experience researching for, and participating in, such an audit of the Philadelphia International Airport on behalf of the State of Delaware and includes a convenient list of points to be assessed in an audit.     

Demand,innovation, and the dynamics of market structure: The role of experimental users and diverse preferences

The history of a number of industries is marked by a succession of eras, associated with different dominant technologies. Within any era, industry concentration tends to grow. Particular eras are broken by the introduction of a new technology which, while initially inferior to the established one in the prominent uses, has the potential to become competitive. In many case new entrants survive and grow, and the large established firms do not make the transition. In other cases, the established firms are able to switch over effectively, and compete in the new era. This paper explores a model which generates this pattern and has focused on the characteristics of the demand. We argue that the ability of the new firms exploring the new technology to survive long enough to get that technology effectively launched depends on the existence of fringe markets which the old technology does not serve well, or experimental users, or both. Established firms initially have little incentive to adopt the new technology, which initially is inferior to the technology they have mastered. New firms generally cannot survive in head-to-head conflict with established firms on the market well served by the latter. The new firms need to find a market that keeps them alive long enough so that they can develop the new technology to a point where it is competitive on the main market. Niche markets, or experimental users, can provide that space.

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Franco MalerbaEmail:

     

Consumer structure in the emerging market for electric vehicles: Identifying market segments using cluster analysis

This paper presents results from a segmentation analysis of the emerging market for Electric Vehicles (EVs). Data has been sourced through the application of a self-completion household questionnaire distributed over two cities in the United Kingdom (UK). A two stage cluster analysis methodology has been followed to identify market segments in a dataset of UK drivers. Five unique segments have been identified in the analysis and are characterised by their preferences for EVs, socio-economic characteristics, current car details, and psychographic profiles. These segments hold a range of different EV preference levels, from those who appear unwilling to adopt an EV to those which are clearly attracted to EVs. Moreover, the features of these segments suggest that segments might be attracted to or repelled from EVs for different reasons. These results demonstrate that a significant degree of consumer stratification is present in the emerging market for EVs, with the possible implication being that policy interventions at the segment as opposed to market, level may prove more effective due to their ability to cater for the nuances of important segments.     

The determinants of corporate sustainability performance

This paper investigates the factors that drive high levels of corporate sustainability performance (CSP), as proxied by membership of the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. Using a stakeholder framework, we examine the incentives for US firms to invest in sustainability principles and develop a number of hypotheses that relate CSP to firm‐specific characteristics. Our results indicate that leading CSP firms are significantly larger, have higher levels of growth and a higher return on equity than conventional firms. Contrary to our predictions, leading CSP firms do not have greater free cash flows or lower leverage than other firms.     

Trends and random walks in macroeconmic time series: Some evidence and implications

This paper investigates whether macroeconomic time series are better characterized as stationary fluctuations around a deterministic trend or as non-stationary processes that have no tendency to return to a deterministic path. Using long historical time series for the U.S. we are unable to reject the hypothesis that these series are non-stationary stochastic processes with no tendency to return to a trend line. Based on these findings and an unobserved components model for output that decomposes fluctuations into a secular or growth component and a cyclical component we infer that shocks to the former, which we associate with real disturbances, contribute substantially to the variation in observed output. We conclude that macroeconomic models that focus on monetary disturbances as a source of purely transitory fluctuations may never be successful in explaining a large fraction of output variation and that stochastic variation due to real factors is an essential element of any model of macroeconomic fluctuations.     

Resources,Knowledge and Influence: The Organizational Effects of Interorganizational Collaboration*

ABSTRACT Inter‐organizational collaboration has been linked to a range of important outcomes for collaborating organizations. The strategy literature emphasizes the way in which collaboration between organizations results in the sharing of critical resources and facilitates knowledge transfer. The learning literature argues that collaboration not only transfers existing knowledge among organizations, but also facilitates the creation of new knowledge and produce synergistic solutions. Finally, research on networks and interorganizational politics suggests that collaboration can help organizations achieve a more central and influential position in relation to other organizations. While these effects have been identified and discussed at some length, little attention has been paid to the relationship between them and the nature of the collaborations that produce them. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that examines the relationship between the effects of interorganizational collaboration and the nature of the collaborations that produce them. Based on our study of the collaborative activities of a small, nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Palestine over a four‐year period, we argue that two dimensions of collaboration – embeddedness and involvement – determine the potential of a collaboration to produce one or more of these effects.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue:
Roger Bean and Russell W. Radford
The Business of Innovation: Managing the Corporate Imagination for Maximum Results
Elaine Dundon
The Seeds of Innovation: Cultivating the Synergy That Fosters New Ideas
Jacqueline Byrd and Paul Lockwood Brown
The Innovation Equation: Building Creativity and Risk Taking in Your Organization
Books received for possible review in a future issue:
Ashish Arora, Andrea Fosfuri, and Alfonso Gambardella
Markets for Technology: The Economics of Innovation and Corporate Strategy
Paul Belliveau, Abbie Griffin, and Stephen Somermeyer, editors
The PDMA Toolbook for New Product Development
Vincent Bozzone
Speed to Market: Lean Manufacturing for Job Shops
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
   The Social Life of Information
Amiya K.Chakravarty
Market Driven Enterprise: Product Development, Supply Chains, and Manufacturing
Henry Chesbrough
Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
Kenneth Carlton Cooper
The Relational Enterprise: Moving beyond CRM to Maximize All Your Business Relationships
Edmund B. Fitzgerald
   Globalizing Customer Solutions
Eliezer Geisler
   Creating Value with Science and Technology
Tim Jones
Innovating at the Edge: How Organizations Evolve and Embed Innovation Capability
Robert C. Megantz
Technology Management: Developing and Implementing Effective Licensing Programs
David Moschella
Customer-Driven IT: How Users Are Shaping Technology Growth
Jeffrey H. Rohlfs
Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries
Gerald Zaltman
How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
The reviews of three recent books on innovation in this issue are by Kumar Nochur, Ph.D., president of Vidya, Inc.