Industrial global brand leadership: A capabilities view

We examine the global branding programs of five New Zealand industrial firms and identify the salient components and capabilities underpinning these programs. The cases built their respective brand identities around adaptability to customer needs and the provision of a total solution. This identity was built around five capabilities: relational support, coordinating network players, leveraging brand architecture, adding value, and quantifying the intangible. Underpinning these identity promises were five organizational level supportive capabilities: entrepreneurial, reflexive, innovative, brand supportive dominant logic, and executional capabilities. This approach resulted in global brand leadership, but also reflected the fundamental differences between the B2C and B2B realms.     

The globalization strategies of business-to-business born global firms in the wireless technology industry

This paper discusses the globalization process of business-to-business born globals in a rapidly growing industry, the wireless technology industry. Deviations in these patterns in regards to the mainstream pattern of internationalization and earlier born global literature are discussed. Furthermore, the roles of the founders and managers, the networks, the financial resources of the companies, and the innovations behind the companies under consideration are analyzed. A conceptual framework and propositions explaining the product, operation and market strategies of born globals are developed. The results suggest that born globals in the wireless sector do in fact deviate from the traditional internationalization process in many areas. Their expansion even to distant markets is rapid and they apply advanced product strategies at an early stage. However, their business operations are found to proceed at a more conventional pace and the notable difference from traditional firms is the rapid establishment of sales and marketing subsidiaries. Results emphasize the key role of the resources and capabilities of born globals in influencing the advancement of product categories, operation strategies, and global market presence. Born global firms were found to lack the resources and capabilities accumulated by traditionally internationalizing firms, and they therefore need to acquire them either through the earlier experience of the founding team, which should be complementary in nature, or from external domestic and international network actors.     

Stay in or get out the Janus? The maintenance of multiplex relationships between buyers and sellers

Buyers and sellers interact in different ways. They conduct economic transactions but often also engage in social exchanges; they compete to appropriate the value generated throughout the pipeline but often also collaborate in mutual value creation. Increasingly, they show patterns of repeated interaction rather than engaging in single transactions.Most past research investigated interaction modalities within buyer-seller relationships through an ‘or-or’ lens, and considered one modality as prevailing within the relationship at a given moment.In this study, we will develop an ‘and-and’ logic, opening the mainstream view of relationship maintenance to social theories on the structure of economic action and the strategy view of coopetition. We will further examine the implications of dualities and complementarities within buyer-seller relationships in respect of their maintenance over time.     

A multiple perspectives view of the market case for green energy

This paper presents an exploratory evaluation of the market case for green energy. These energy sources are widely considered to have less of an ecological impact than conventional energy sources. The case for green energy is viewed from the multiple perspectives TOP (technical, organizational, personal) framework. The green energy technologies will need to meet certain technical, organizational and personal criteria and resolve key issues in order to address the barriers to market adoption. The multiple perspectives approach facilitates the evaluation of green-energy alternatives as potential new products which would enable organizations and individuals to meet both economic and green criteria that impact customer value creation. Given the present trends of increasing energy use and requirements to minimize environmental impact, green energy adoption may become a key element of strategies to ensure long-term economic growth.     

Leapfrogging in mobile telephony: A measure for comparing country performance

There is widespread agreement as to what constitutes leapfrogging in technology and also that mobile phones are a good example of this phenomenon. What is lacking in the literature, however, is any attempt to operationalize the notion of leapfrogging in a way that allows us to rank different countries. The purpose of this paper accordingly is to provide such a measure using both the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones and a weighting of this ratio for a particular country by its share in the total number of mobile phones in the sample. The proposed measure yields a number of insights that cannot be gained by using only the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones. Yet, for a number of the best performing countries this ratio is very much in evidence.     

Are experts better than potential users in predicting the uptake of an innovation? Extending the use of the Juster Scale

Are experts or potential users better at predicting the success of a new product? To explore this question we used an eleven-point probability scale, the Juster Scale, to ask various groups of people about their probability of taking up a new product and also their assessment of its chance of its success in the marketplace. Although this type of scale generally performs better than intention scales it tends to over-predict when used in a repertoire market and we examine its performance for a boundary condition of such a market. We also explored the use of the scale as a projective research tool which is a novel application. In this study the product was a new type of charity lottery. The study was undertaken in the month prior to the lottery closing and we subsequently knew the actual outcome. The Juster Scale generally performed poorly as a predictor in this context. The predictions from the experts were no more accurate than those of the general public but none had direct knowledge of an equivalent lottery. This exploratory study concluded that the actual behaviour of a sample of relevant consumers, where the product is available, is better for forecasting than asking for estimates of their potential behaviour, that is, behaviour predicts behaviour better than probabilities of behaviour.     

Business planning based on technological capabilities: Patent analysis for technology-driven roadmapping

This research responds to the needs of technology-driven business by focusing on how firms can find new business opportunities based on their technological capabilities. It proposes a technology-driven roadmapping processes that starts from capability analysis for technology planning and ends with business opportunity analysis for market planning. We suggest the use of patent data as a proxy measure of technological capability for this purpose and develop four analysis modules — Monitoring, Collaboration, Diversification, and Benchmarking — to support decision-making during the process. Various analysis techniques such as text-mining, network analysis, citation analysis and index analysis are applied to discover meaningful implications from the patent data, which are summarized in four maps — Actor-similarity map, Actor-relations map, Technology-industry map, and Technology-affinity map. For the purpose of illustration, RFID-related patents are collected and the 18 firms with the most patents used, focusing especially on the third biggest. We believe using roadmapping and patent analysis together can play complementary roles for each other. Putting roadmapping techniques together with patent analysis can increase the objectivity and reliability of technology roadmap, while using patent analysis restricted to technological information together with roadmapping techniques can ensure that a more valuable breadth of strategic information is extracted from patents.     

From the relative to the absolute digital divide in developing countries

This paper argues that the literature on the digital divide is based heavily on relative rather than absolute magnitudes, although the latter has more welfare significance. It is clear that the former concept has been falling sharply in recent years yet such calculations have not been made for the absolute divide. One contribution of this paper is to redress this gap in the literature for both mobile phones and the Internet using a sample of more than sixty countries. The results tend to be broadly consistent with findings from the literature on the adoption and diffusion of IT in developing countries generally and Africa in particular.     

ESTEEM: Managing societal acceptance in new energy projects : A toolbox method for project managers

There is now a large literature dealing with the policy question of public participation in technical choice and technology assessment (TA). Files such as the mad cow crisis, genetically modified food, and the emerging nanotechnologies have been edified into a public problem, and have given place to a number of experiments and reviews about participatory arrangements. Much less attention has been devoted so far to the application of the TA framework to more local and limited projects-not yet and maybe never reaching the public problem status-and the management of their societal dimensions. Among them, new energy technology represents a very interesting field for investigation: many of the new energy enjoy a global positive public image whereas the local implementation of their implantation often raises societal questions and oppositions. This paper describes an original experiment conducted in the field of new energy technologies during which a participatory technology assessment inspired approach was applied to a number of individual and local projects. A framework methodology called ESTEEM was developed to facilitate such participatory process to take place, and it was tested and evaluated in 5 projects located in 5 different countries over Europe. A detailed discussion of the ESTEEM method and its application to one case study, a Carbon Sequestration project in The Netherlands, is provided. We show that a major question in the application in such participatory framework is to establish a reflective practice of project management based on situated and constructive interactions between project promoters and project stakeholders.