Information Technology Tools in New Product Development: The Impact of Complementary Resources*,†

Emergent research has examined the antecedents to using information technology (IT) in the new product development (NPD) process and the impact of IT on NPD performance. Based on the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm, this study hypothesizes that particular resources create IT capabilities that significantly enhance NPD outcomes. More specifically, this research extends previous work by investigating whether three complementary resources, namely an executive champion for IT, global engagement, and organizational innovativeness, influence IT capabilities (IT use frequency and IT replacement frequency), which in turn affect NPD outcomes (NPD task proficiency and NPD performance). To test the conceptual model, survey data were collected from 220 NPD and IT managers in a variety of large Japanese firms. The results show that an executive champion for IT and global engagement are predictors of both IT tool use and replacement frequency while organizational innovativeness contributes only to IT tool replacement frequency. The results also indicate that both IT tool use and replacement frequency have a positive effect on NPD task proficiency, which improves NPD performance. This research contributes to the literature by adding understanding of the role of IT in NPD at the firm level in four ways. First, it examines particular organizational complementary resources and their relationship to IT capabilities. Second, it examines the RBV and IT in the context of NPD, an important business process. Third, it measures IT usage in a more granular fashion (i.e., IT tool use frequency and IT replacement frequency) rather than simply IT usage as a dichotomy. Finally, through testing the proposed model with data collected from Japanese firms, this study provides empirical evidence from an Asian country to answer the call for more NPD research to be conducted in countries other than North American and Western European contexts. The findings of the study also provide implications for managers. Importantly, they indicate that an executive level champion for IT is a key influencer in facilitating IT usage and replacement, and likely can help generate awareness of and support for greater IT investments so the firm can create IT capabilities for effective NPD.     

Public Sector Organizations and Cocreation With Citizens: A Literature Review on Benefits,Drivers, and Barriers

ABSTRACT

Cocreation has captured the attention of public managers and policymakers and yet the literature focusing in the public sector is still relatively dispersed. In this literature review we present a contextualized analysis of the potential reasons that lead public sector organizations to cocreate with citizens and identify potential barriers that may hamper the adoption of cocreation in public settings. The analysis undertaken allowed us to conclude that the topic is increasingly capturing the interest of researchers, although the state of the literature is characterized by a reduced heterogeneity in research methods. We classified cocreation benefits in the public sector as innovation related, improved decision-making, and symbolic related, and we categorized the drivers for cocreation according to three broad categories: external, relation-specific and internal. Finally, we identified potential barriers of cocreation, including structural, organizational, and behavioral barriers.     

La curva de Beveridge y los determinantes del emparejamiento en el mercado de trabajo

Se exploran los determinantes a corto plazo del emparejamiento entre oferta y demanda de trabajo identificando los desplazamientos de la curva de Beveridge en doce países de la OCDE entre el primer trimestre de 2000 y el cuarto trimestre de 2013. Mediante tres metodologías complementarias (examen visual, técnicas de cointegración y estimaciones no lineales), observamos que el crecimiento de la población activa, la legislación de protección del empleo y las políticas activas de mercado de trabajo (incentivos a la creación de empresas, programas de trabajo compartido) favorecen el emparejamiento, mientras que los niveles de instrucción intermedios, el desempleo de larga duración y las políticas pasivas (prestaciones por desempleo, fiscalidad del trabajo) lo dificultan.     

Distinctive Features of Environmental Innovators: An Econometric Analysis

This paper analyzes the main determinants influencing environmental innovators (i.e. firms developing or adopting environmental innovations) in Spain with respect to non‐environmental innovators. Similarly to other contributions in the literature, our results show that Spanish environmental innovators respond to regulatory stimulus in the form of demand‐pull and technology‐push instruments. They have a high internal technological capability and combine internal and external information sources, mostly in cooperation with knowledge institutions. Environmental innovators are more concentrated in mature, traditionally highly polluting sectors, but new firms are not more environmentally innovative than incumbents. Most importantly, in contrast to other environmental innovation studies, mostly carried out in a German context, we have not found evidence of a market pull from either the domestic or international markets. Furthermore, cost savings are not found to be a distinctive driver for environmental innovators. These differential results are possibly related to the special features of Spain regarding its national innovation system and the degree of stringency of environmental regulation and environmental consciousness of its consumers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

ALTERNATIVE WEIGHTING APPROACHES TO COMPUTING INDEXES OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

This paper compares the weighting schemes in the traditional, principal component and dynamic factor approaches to summarizing information from a number of component variables. To facilitate the comparison, we propose a framework to discuss the approaches with respect to their implied loadings in a latent variable model. We also propose a way to transform the dynamic factor index into an analogous index which is a weighted average of the components. The framework shows the strengths and weakness of the alternative weighting schemes and the sense in which the dynamic factor approach has the advantage of capturing both the significance and the variability of the components.     

Asset pricing and energy consumption risk

This paper proposes energy consumption in the US as a new measure for the consumption capital asset pricing model. We find that (i) industrial energy growth produces reasonable values for the relative risk aversion coefficient and the implied risk-free rate; (ii) compared to alternative consumption measures, industrial energy performs well in explaining the cross-sectional variation in stock returns with the lowest implied risk aversion and pricing errors; (iii) the industrial energy consumption risk model performs equally well as the Fama–French three-factor model in the cross-sectional asset pricing tests; and (iv) total energy consumption risk is priced in the presence of the Fama–French factor risks.     

Azéma martingales for Bessel and CIR processes and the pricing of Parisian zero‐coupon bonds

In this paper, we study the excursions of Bessel and Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) processes with dimensions . We obtain densities for the last passage times and meanders of the processes. Using these results, we prove a variation of the Azéma martingale for the Bessel and CIR processes based on excursion theory. Furthermore, we study their Parisian excursions, and generalize previous results on the Parisian stopping time of Brownian motion to that of the Bessel and CIR processes. We obtain explicit formulas and asymptotic results for the densities of the Parisian stopping times, and develop exact simulation algorithms to sample the Parisian stopping times of Bessel and CIR processes. We introduce a new type of bond, the zero‐coupon Parisian bond. The buyer of such a bond is betting against zero interest rates, while the seller is effectively hedging against a period where interest rates fluctuate around 0. Using our results, we propose two methods for pricing these bonds and provide numerical examples.     

Exploring the customer's intention to switch firms: The role of customer‐related antecedents

This study examined the customer‐related antecedents of the customer's intention to switch firms. Customer citizenship behavior was a key element in this study. Scholars have extensively studied the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior. However, the way that customer citizenship behavior relates to other attitudinal variables and the intention to switch has scarcely been analyzed. The proposed hypotheses were verified using partial least squares variance‐based structural equation modeling applied to 947 users of beauty care service firms in five countries. The results suggest that customer citizenship behavior is an antecedent of satisfaction, trust, and attitudinal loyalty. Two of these variables influence customers’ intentions to abandon relationships with the service provider. The implications of these findings enhance managers’ and scholars’ understanding of the determinants of customers’ intentions to switch firms.