Investigating Adoption of Free Beta Applications in a Platform‐Based Business Ecosystem

Planning new product development (NPD) activities is becoming increasingly difficult, as contemporary businesses compete at the level of business ecosystems in addition to the firm‐level product‐market competition. These business ecosystems are built around platforms interlinking suppliers, complementors, distributors, developers, etc. together. The competitiveness of these ecosystems relies on members utilizing the shared platform for their own performance improvement, especially in terms of developing new valuable offerings for end users. Therefore, managing the development of the platform‐based applications and gaining timely end‐user input for NPD are of vital importance both to the ecosystem as a whole and to the developers. Subsequently, to succeed in NPD planning developers utilizing beta testing need a thorough understanding of the adoption dynamics of beta products. Developers need to plan for example resource allocation; development costs; and timing of commercial, end‐product launches. Therefore, the anticipation of the adoption dynamics of beta products emerges as an important antecedent in planning NPD activities when beta testing is used for gaining end‐user input to the NPD process. Consequently, we investigate how free beta software products that are built upon software platforms diffuse among their end users in a cocreation community. We specifically study whether the adoption of these beta products follows Bass or Gompertz model dynamics used in the previous literature when modeling the adoption of stand‐alone products. Further, we also investigate the forecasting abilities of these two models. Our results show that the adoption dynamics of free beta products in a cocreation community follow Gompertz's model rather than the Bass model. Additionally, we find that the Gompertz model performs better than the Bass model in forecasting both short and long out‐of‐sample time periods. We further discuss the managerial and research implications of our study.     

On the Effects of Uncertainty on Investment Timing and Option Value

This article demonstrates that when the relationship between systematic risk and project value is taken into account, the sensitivity of investments with respect to volatility changes dramatically. By taking cash flows as a fundamental variable, the article shows that the value of an option to invest can be decreasing in volatility, contradicting the conventional wisdom. Second, the recent proposition, according to which the expected time to invest is U-shaped, does not generally hold; the expected time and the cash flow trigger are likely to be always increasing in volatility.     

Drivers and barriers of peer-to-peer accommodation stay – an exploratory study with American and Finnish travellers

The explosive growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation service presents a potential transformation in the competitive landscape of accommodation sector. This research explores the market characteristics and the factors that drive and hinder the use of P2P accommodation to better explain the phenomenon of collaborative consumption in the tourism and hospitality marketplace. Using responses from travellers residing in the United States and Finland, exploratory factor analyses revealed two factors that drive the use of P2P accommodation: social appeal (desire for community and sustainability) and economic appeal (cost savings). The barriers include issues of trust, efficacy and familiarity with the system, and cost. The empirical evidence from this study suggests several managerial implications for tourism and hospitality businesses and directions for future research.     

What happens to international new ventures beyond start-up: An exploratory study

Since its inception, research in international entrepreneurship has focused mainly on how and why international new ventures internationalize early on. To date, there has been hardly any research regarding the issue of continuing corporate growth in such ventures beyond their start-up phase or initial internationalization. Theoretically, we ground our study within the dynamic capabilities view of the firm and through an inductive theory building research explore how and whether international new ventures made-it beyond the start-up phase, aiming to generate early theoretical constructs to guide international entrepreneurship research in this substantive area. Grounded in data, we develop the following constructs related to made-it points: strategic experimentation, tensions in organizational gestalt, and legitimacy lies. To get to a made-it point, entrepreneurs experiment with their venture at several levels: organizational, business model, and operational. These experimentation efforts are fueled by tensions that exist in the organizational gestalt, such as ownership structure, business proposition to the market, and product development process. To legitimate themselves and their venture in the stakeholders’ eyes, entrepreneurs may tell legitimacy lies. We maintain that international new ventures do not reach a made-it point if they only manage to develop substantive capabilities to produce desired outputs at various levels within the venture but fail to create dynamic capabilities to change and reconfigure existing substantive capabilities.     

Joint learning in R&D collaborations and the facilitating relational practices

The present study considers joint learning as a relational dynamic capability and examines the role of relational practices as enablers of joint learning in R&D collaboration between suppliers and their customers. The study applies a qualitative comparative case method to analyze seven dyadic cases, selected based on a quantitative dataset and cluster analysis. Our results indicate that in dyadic relationships, firms would benefit from developing practices related to relational investments, relational structures, and relational capital that facilitate joint learning and yield collaborative advantages from R&D interactions. This paper contributes to the existing literature on joint learning in R&D collaborations by defining joint learning as a relational dynamic capability and by focusing on the practices that facilitate it in R&D collaboration.     

Rothschild-Stiglitz's definition of increasing risk and the relationship between volatility and risk premium

This paper analyzes the relationship between volatility and risk premium under the capital asset pricing model and Rothschild and Stiglitz's [Rothschild, M. and J.E. Stiglitz. (1970) Increasing risk I: a definition. Journal of Economic Theory, 2, 225-243.] definition of increasing risk. Especially examined are the conditions of the widely used assumption of constant correlation, which results in a linear relationship. Though both the above model and definition are widely known and accepted, their compatibility has remained unclear in the literature. According to this paper, they are in harmony with the linear relationship, if the correlation between a stock and the market portfolio is less than 0.7. Otherwise a conflict may arise.     

A dynamic model of supplier–customer product development collaboration strategies

This study examines transitions between different types of product development collaboration in supplier–customer settings, the events that trigger such transitions, and the emerging requirements for suppliers. The current study contributes to the literature regarding supplier and customer involvement by combining previously discovered types of collaboration into a dynamic model that describes these different types as alternative modes of collaboration that can be implemented in a relationship. Transitions between different types of collaboration are identified in a longitudinal case study. Three of the four transitions identified took place in the same dyad, which demonstrates that it is possible to change the type of collaboration without losing the advantages of a long-term relationship with a customer. The most radical change in collaboration—the change from supplier involvement to customer involvement—involved temporarily discontinuing the original relationship, which indicates that this transition incorporates the highest risk of relationship termination. By offering a dynamic model for product development collaboration, this study is the first to analyze changes between different types of customer–supplier product development collaboration from a supplier's perspective. The dynamic view is important for companies seeking to take advantage of their long-term relationships instead of starting new ones when new requirements for product development collaboration emerge.     

Testing Segment Stability: Insights from a Rural Tourism Study

The majority of earlier segmentation studies have focused on finding segmentation solutions rather than on applying the results to practice, and testing the viability of the results. In this study a unique opportunity is used to test how the segmentation solutions of an earlier rural tourism segmentation study conducted in 2009 represent rural tourist segments in 2011, and how well rural tourists can relate to the segments found in the earlier study by using multiple choice questions. Also, different segmentation methods are compared regarding their accuracy to identify the segments. These results show that the four segments identified in the earlier study continue to exist two years later as respondents are able to relate to the segments quite well. However, segment sizes are crucially different and there is some overlap between segments. Travel motivations measured using binary scale produce more accurate segments than motivations measured using a Likert-type scale.