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The article introduces practitioners to the concept and process of co-creating customization with buyers.

This article offers a process and a model that mass market companies can use to take a scalable approach to involving customers in offering development, delivery and use.

Companies that co-create customization in a truly collaborative process enjoy significantly more sustainable competitive advantages.

For the company, co-creating leads to better offerings – including new capabilities that can be used with different customers in differing combinations – and also a more complete and clear picture of what its customers want.

The article introduces the co-creation customization model and nine strategies practitioners can use to provide individualized customer value.

To co-create value through dynamic collaborations, enterprises and their suppliers need to orchestrate the integration of complementary resources when providing business services. As such enterprises' strategic decision to apply a plural sourcing strategy to establish dynamic collaborations with their suppliers implies that both in-house and outsourced business services should be bundled into a business services portfolio. However, the antecedents that affect a business services portfolio have rarely conceptually been identified.

Drawing on resource orchestration theory, the authors theoretically developed and empirically validated a business services portfolio conceptual model. The model aims at explaining the critical antecedents to a business services portfolio based on a unique data set, comprising 121 international enterprises with variation in the degree of outsourcing, size, geographies and maturity. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to examine the relationships among the antecedents and a business services portfolio.

The findings show that the antecedent, i.e. plural sourcing strategy, modularised business processes and customer orientation have a direct and significant effect on the enterprises' business services portfolio orchestration. The results of the mediation test indicate that modularised business processes fully mediate the relationships between three independent variables with the orchestration of business services portfolio.

This study is the first to analyse the impact of plural sourcing strategy, modularised business processes and customer orientation on the business services portfolio orchestration from a plural sourcing context. Additionally, it examines the mediating role of modularised business processes in the relationship between the antecedents and business services portfolio orchestration.

Where traditional mass‐media advertising may perish in the enormous amount of communication messages, the product itself can act as a decisive communication tool and provide consumers with product‐related information in the buying decision situation. For example, the sound the product makes in use and the tactile sensation give an impression of the product’s quality. To complement the little research on the role that durable consumer products can play in marketing communications, we investigated the effects of direct product experience on information processing and product evaluation in a sample of 127 adult consumers. The results showed that direct experience enhanced consumers’ opportunity and ability to process product‐related information, but not their motivation to process the information. Subsequently, the induced levels of motivation, opportunity, and ability influenced both consumers’ attitude toward the product and their attitude confidence. One important implication for product development and marketing communications is that the communicative abilities of products can effectively be employed to enhance positively consumers’ evaluation of the product.

The deeply embedded perception that human beings are violent by nature is a worldview that becomes instrumental for justifying armed conflict. Prominent authors in multiple scholarly disciplines have challenged the myth of the violent human being. This article approaches the complexity of challenging political violence by identifying common ground among different disciplines and putting scholarly research in dialogue with recent developments in war and peace across the globe. This article describes the cultural, political and institutional dimensions that sustain violence, and suggests a specific approach for addressing these three strands.

Using a prosopographical methodology this study examines common leadership influences that might have existed among Genghis Khan, George Washington, and Nelson Mandela. Shoup (2005) suggests that the following seven influences have contributed to nurturing the leadership of 12 renowned individuals: involved parents, happy childhood, formal, informal education, prodigious patrons, critics and adversaries, apprenticeship/sequences of success, and favorable fate. This analysis suggests that the seven influences in his model had an affect the lives of the three individuals in this study, making them competent or exemplary leaders. The study additionally proposes three application stages that educators can utilize to instill leadership values and abilities in young minds.