Citation
Shainesh, G. (2014), "Editorial", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIBR-04-2014-0023
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Indian Business Research, Volume 6, Issue 1
The inaugural issue of the sixth volume is an opportunity to celebrate the success of the JIBRs growing readership, increased submissions, greater visibility and impact. Our success underscores the support of all our stakeholders including readers, authors, reviewers, members of our editorial boards and the publishers. It is also an opportunity to reflect while we plan for the future. JIBR is committed to its mandate for advancing our empirical understanding of Indian business while making significant contributions to theoretical advancement through a strong interdisciplinary, international, and eclectic orientation. In the coming weeks, we will be reaching out to all stakeholders to review our mandate and develop a vision which is aligned to the opportunities for research rooted in India and emerging markets but relevant across the globe. We seek your support as we embark on the next phase of JIBRs exciting journey.
The current issue has two key themes – frugal innovation and customers. The first two papers focus on frugal innovation, the third paper on consumers purchase intention and the final paper on the impact of competitive psychological climate in a service context on customer orientation. I welcome you to enjoy this eclectic collection.
Abhoy K. Ojhas research paper "MNCs in India: focus on frugal innovation" highlights how large multi-national corporations have adapted their new product development processes for creating high technology but low cost products to meet customer requirements in India and other low income economies. Based on interviews with key decision makers of Bosch India and 3M India, Abhoy finds that MNCs increase research and development investments and activities in India when they identify market opportunities which cannot be tapped by their existing product portfolios designed and developed for the Western markets. These companies started with legacy technologies but with the reduction in technology level lag between the traditional markets and India, they have started adopting frugal innovation to produce high technology but low cost products with low ownership cost over product life time. Finally, these research capabilities have found applications in the Western markets by creating new-to-the-world products thus transitioning from local innovators to global contributors through "innovation blowback" and "reverse innovations".
In the second paper titled "Frugal innovation: aligning theory, practice, and public policy", Pavan Soni and Rishikesha T. Krishnan, view frugal innovation through the theoretical lenses of resource based view, new institutional economics, economics of location, and institutional theory to offer testable propositions on determinants of frugal innovations. They identified distinct types of frugal innovators at the grassroots-level, domestic-enterprise level, and MNC-subsidiary level with varied levels of motivation, institutional influences and innovation styles. Resource scarce environments, weak institutional intermediaries and a higher tolerance for uncertainty are key determinants of frugal innovations as they encourage a frugal mindet. Frugal innovations involve some combination of a frugal mindset, a frugal process, and a frugal outcome. Poor property rights regime and a critical size of lead market support frugal processes while the network-position of innovators, and presence of critical lead-markets encourage frugal outcomes. They also propose that frugal processes and outcomes would be greater in a lead-market where customers demand good-enough, low-cost products and services. Finally, access to multiple networks with non-redundant information and resources enable a grassroots-level innovator to produce frugal processes and frugal outcomes. Finally they recommend policy level initiatives to systematically influence, encourage and support frugal innovations.
Gordhan K. Saini and Arvind Sahay assess the differential impact of credit and low price guarantees on consumers purchase intention to compare the modern retail and kirana store formats in their research paper "Comparing retail formats in an emerging market: influence of credit and low price guarantee on purchase intention". They adopted an experimental design to test their hypotheses related to credit, low price guarantees across retail store formats. One of the key findings is that availability of credit is more important than a low price guarantee in determining purchase intentions.
Competitive psychological climate in call centers is the focus of the fourth paper titled "Effects of competitive psychological climate, work-family conflict, role conflict on customer orientation: the case of call center employees in India" by Sunil Sahadev, Sudarshan Seshanna and Keyoor Purani. They propose an indirect effect of competitive psychological climate on customer orientation through its impact on role conflict and work-life conflict. The empirical analysis through structural modeling indicates that a high level of perceived competitive psychological climate increases both the role conflict and work-life conflict of employees which finally impact their customer orientation.
G. Shainesh
Editor-in-Chief