Analysis of franchisors' expansion strategies and competition

Franchising provides a channel for small businesses to grow successfully into nationwide or even worldwide chains. Franchising is considered to be common among chain stores, of which the convenience store is a typical example. This study aims to examine the expansion strategy of each individual convenience store franchisor and the competition to expand among the franchisors. Taiwan is considered to have the highest convenience store density in the world. This study performs empirical analyses of four major convenience store franchisors in Taiwan, namely, 7-Eleven, Family Mart, Hi-Life, and OK. The evidence shows that the franchisors tend to be slow to expand when facing a highly dense competitive environment. There exists a strong first-mover advantage in convenience store franchising. The first mover (7-Eleven) has played a dominating role throughout the years. As a result, the franchisors' outlet shares have remained relatively stable.     

Entrepreneur subsidiary of business groups from emerging markets: a multi-level perspective

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This study examines the effects of firm resources on entrepreneur subsidiaries of business groups. Resource-based theory is the foundation...     

Innovation and service-dominant logic

Radical changes have occurred in innovation management. Traditional goods-dominant logic has shifted to service-dominant logic, where value is created for use instead of exchange. Customers are tied to organizations to co-create value. The focus of this special issue is on high quality, original, unpublished research, case studies, and implementation experiences. The issues are covered, including the collaborative workplaces for innovation in service companies, the financial crisis in hospitality industry, the role of quality management in innovation, and the value logic in service.     

Factors affecting the success of women entrepreneurs

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relation that exists between the skills possessed by women entrepreneurs and their motivations, barriers and performance. Thus, on the theoretical framework we review literature some aspects that are related to the skills required of a business owner: level of education, previous occupational experience, and prior business expertise and management skills. The analysis undertaken shows that the lack of education and managerial skills of women business owners are two of the most important variables when it comes to understanding the motivations and the difficulties they have to face.     

Hospital material management in Taiwan: a survey

The new insurance policy that began in 1995 for all people in Taiwan and severe competition within the health care industry are some of the pressing issues forcing hospitals to improve their operational efficiency. A primary productivity improvement for hospitals is the reduction of the cost of material management because the materiel function on average controls 30-40 percent of the operating dollars in a Taiwan hospital. In this article, a fuzzy clustering method is used to classify the different types of materiel management systems within Taiwan hospitals. Inventory turnover rates and fill rates are compared among those different types of systems by using multivariate analysis of variance. The results show that the differences in both inventory turnover rates and fill rates are statistically significant among different material management systems.     

Developmental management: Theories,methods, and applications in entrepreneurship,innovation, and sensemaking

This paper summarizes the best papers of the Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) conference, which took place in July 2013 in Valencia, Spain. The Journal of Business Research has published a special issue entitled “Developmental management: Theories, methods, and applications in entrepreneurship, innovation, and sensemaking”. All of them went through many rounds of double-blind reviews and revisions. Theories, methods, and applications are the three pillars to solve the issues in entrepreneurship, innovation, and sensemaking. Entrepreneurship contributes to the quality and future hopes of a sector, economy or even a country. The role of the entrepreneurs is crucial in creating value. Innovation has become important as the global economy seeks to escape from a period of major recession. In organizations, sensemaking consists of cognitive strategies for interpreting reality. It is interesting to examine how these three issues interacting with each other. And these papers contribute to various perspectives of these interactions in different countries.     

An innovative regime switching model to forecast Taiwan tourism demand

The tourism industry has become a major part of economic development for many countries. These countries have greatly invested in tourism to attract more tourist arrivals. Hence, the need for more accurate forecasts of tourism demand is important. Various approaches have been applied to forecast tourism demand of different countries. However, tourism demands tend to be imprecise and their trends nonlinear. In addition, there may be drastic changes in the tourism demand time series. To properly handle these problems, this study proposes an innovative forecasting model to detect the regime switching properly and to apply fuzzy time-series model to forecast. The monthly tourist arrivals to Taiwan will be used as forecasting target. The analysis by the proposed model will be validated by the major events as well as previous studies.     

Using qualitative approach to forecasting regime switches

Drastic changes (named regime switches) often exist in economic and financial time series causing the forecasting of time series difficult. Hence, we need robust models to detect and forecast the regime switches. Most previous studies apply quantitative methods to forecast time series and regime switches. Contrast to these studies, this study attempts a novel approach to use a qualitative method to forecast regime switches. Fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), based on fuzzy set and logic theory, yields the relationships between antecedent combinations and outcome. Studies support fsQCA analysis is more proper to reflect the real situations. Hence, this study uses fsQCA to analyze the autoregressive relationships of the upward and downward regime switches in the in-sample data. Then, the relationships are used to forecast the regime switches in the out-of-sample data. Taiwan Capitalization Weighted Stock Index is taken as the data for analysis. The empirical results show that fsQCA provides strong predictive validities.     

Winning strategies for innovation and high-technology products management

Though numerous studies examine the issues on innovation, diffusion, and adoption of high-tech products, the industry practitioners still have many questions unanswered. Twenty papers in this special issue of the Journal of Business Research explore six major venues in this area. The contributors presented the studies in the track of innovation, diffusion, and adoption of high-tech products at the Global Marketing Conference held in Tokyo, Japan in September 9-12, 2010. All these papers have gone through double-blind reviews and revisions. The scholars share the successful experiences in innovation, analyze the diffusion of information and communication technology, investigate the adoption of high-tech products, discuss the technology management issues, and evaluate the marketing strategies for high-tech products.