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In this study, we develop understanding of factors that shape the propensity of market incumbents to collaborate in response to the threat posed by new market entrants. We are particularly interested in instances when a market's competitive structure becomes unsettled by new entrants who engage in nonconforming strategic tactics. In such situations, we propose two factors – strategic similarity among competitors and market-share instability – will systematically shape competitors' collaborative response to new entrants. To test our theory, we use data on strategic tactics and collaborative dynamics in the US airline industry from 1989 to 2010. We demonstrate that greater strategic similarity among a market's incumbents increases the likelihood of cooperation in response to the threat of a nonconforming new entrant, while greater market-share instability reduces cooperative response. Through this study, we extend existing understanding of the contextual circumstances under which established competitors recognize their mutual interests and band together.

Successful commercialization is crucial to innovative firms, but further investigation is needed on how diverse stakeholders can contribute to the commercialization of a radical innovation that requires particular market creation support. This paper aims to, therefore, analyze the key stakeholders and their contributive activities in commercialization and market creation, particularly in the case of radical innovations.

This study relies on qualitative research design including interviews with key stakeholders, such as regulators, scientists, experts, licensing partners, core company representatives and extensive secondary data. This single-case study concerns a functional food product, which is a radical innovation requiring the development of a novel product category positioned between the food and medicine categories in global market settings. Since its market launch in 1995, the involvement of multiple stakeholders was needed for its successful commercialization in over 30 countries.

Results uncover the contributions of diverse stakeholders to commercialization and market creation, particularly of radical innovation. Stakeholders performed market creation activities such as regulating the marketing and labeling of food products, conducting safety assessments, revealing and validating the positive health effects of the novelty and raising awareness of healthy living and cardiovascular health. The commercialization activities included distributing the products overseas, applying the ingredient to different food products and making the products available for users.

This single-case study provides an overview of the positive stakeholder activities with contributions to market creation and commercialization of functional food innovations. Although the user perspective was not included in the empirical part of this study because of our focus on B2B actors, users of the innovation can contribute to R&D activities to a great extent.

The developed framework of stakeholders’ contributive activities in radical innovation commercialization and market creation contributes to literature discussing market creation as well as commercialization within the marketing and innovation management research fields. This work also generates practical advice for managers who commercialize (radical) innovations.

This paper aims to investigate the locational determinants of the craft beer industry in Budapest, Hungary, between 2009 and 2022.

The authors use various count data models to determine the relationship between the number of microbreweries and locational factors.

The authors find that demand and supply-side factors, including income, unemployment, level of education, population density and the number of local businesses, affect the number of craft breweries. Whilst agglomeration effects proxied by breweries per capita in a district have a positive coefficient, the number of breweries in neighbouring districts is not significant. In addition, the authors do not observe any negative impact of COVID-19-related restrictions. The picture of a still-evolving, resilient craft beer sector emerges from our analysis.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first specific studies on the craft beer sector in the Central and Eastern European region and the first to evaluate the location choices of craft breweries in Hungary within a municipality using an up-to-date data set. The authors’ analysis covers 14 years, from the early stages of craft brewery proliferation in Budapest until 2022, testing several hypotheses with respect to the location choices of these businesses.

Our prior work has identified a trade-off that new entrants face in obtaining favorable market reception, whereby initial entrants suffer from a deficit of legitimacy whereas later entrants suffer from a deficit of authenticity. This research has also proposed that a single mechanism is responsible for this trade-off: the tendency for customers and other stakeholders to assess the entrant's claim to originality based on the visible work that it has done to legitimate the new product or organizational form. This chapter extends and deepens our understanding of such “legitimation work” by showing how it can illuminate cases that seem in the first instance to defy this trade-off. In particular, we focus on two “off-diagonal” cases: (a) when, as in the case of “patent trolls” and fraudulent innovators, early entrants are viewed as inauthentic despite having a credible claim to originality; (b) when late entrants, as in the case of Dell Computers, mechanical watches and baseball ballparks, are viewed as authentic despite obviously not being the originators. We clarify how each off-diagonal case represents an ‘exception that proves the rule’ whereby audiences attribute authenticity on the basis of legitimation work rather than on the order of entry per se. The last case also leads to an opportunity to clarify why “cultural appropriation” can sometimes project authenticity and sometimes inauthenticity, why audiences bother to make inferences about a producer's authenticity on the basis of visible legitimation work, and why legitimacy is a universal goal of early movers whereas authenticity varies in its importance.

Precast wall lifting during prefabricated building construction faces multiple non-lean problems, such as inaccurate lifting-time estimation, unreasonable resource allocation and improper process design. This study aims to identify the pathways for improving lifting performance to advance lean construction of prefabricated buildings.

This study developed a methodological framework that integrates the discrete event simulation method, the elimination, combination, rearrangement and simplification (ECRS) technique and intelligent optimization tool. Two schemes of precast wall lifting, namely, the enterprise's business as usual (BAU) and enterprise-leading (EL) schemes, were set to benchmark lifting performance. Furthermore, a best-practice (BP) scheme was modeled from the perspective of lifting activity ECRS and resource allocation for performance optimization.

A real project was selected to test the effect of the methodological framework. The results showed that compared with the EL scheme, the BP scheme reduced the total lifting time (TLT) by 6.3% and mitigated the TLT uncertainty (the gap between the maximum and minimum time values) by 20.6%. Under the BP scheme, increasing the resource inputs produces an insignificant effect in reducing TLT, i.e. increasing the number of component operators in the caulking subprocess from one to two only shortened the TLT by 3.6%, and no further time reduction was achieved as more component operators were added.

To solve non-lean problems associated with prefabricated building construction, this study provides a methodological framework that can separate a typical precast wall lifting process into fine-level activities. Besides, it also identifies the pathways (including the learning effect mitigation, labor and machinery resource adjustment and activities’ improvement) to reducing TLT and its uncertainty.

This study aims to provide a contextualized look at the artisan sector in Zambia and asks: What factors contribute to scaling positive impact in artisan ventures in Zambia, and how can these factors be leveraged to promote positive economic, social and environmental outcomes for women and their communities.

This study uses an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach to gain a multi-layered understanding of artisan craft social enterprises in Zambia.

Purpose is found to be the primary driver of social and environmental impact in artisan social enterprises in Zambia, with female leadership a critical factor. Access to finance, markets and resources are also essential to help these organizations achieve their social missions.

While this study provides valuable insights into the artisan sector, its scope was limited to the Zambian context, making the generalizability of the findings to other geographies uncertain.

This research makes a valuable contribution to the literature on social enterprises by highlighting the critical role of female leadership and purpose in driving positive impact in artisan businesses in Zambia. Additionally, the study underscores the importance of understanding the mechanisms through which artisan social enterprises create positive change. The study highlights the importance of artisan craft employment for women in Zambia and illustrates the impact of Zambian artisan ventures, both formal social enterprises and informal businesses, on creating positive social and environmental impacts in the country.

This study aims to explore the effect of digitalization on the promotion of enterprise R&D cooperation, and it analyzes the microimpact mechanism and boundary conditions of enterprise digitalization on enterprise R&D cooperation.

Based on survey data sourced from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys of the business environment of Chinese enterprises in 2012, this study applies multiple regression methods to test theoretical hypotheses.

Enterprise digitalization positively affects the breadth and intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. Employees’ digital literacy plays an intermediary role between enterprise digitalization and enterprise R&D cooperation. The subordinate attributes of enterprises weaken the positive relationship between enterprise digitalization and the breadth and intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. The shareholding of state-owned enterprises reinforces the positive relationship between digitalization and the intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. However, such shareholding shows no significant regulatory effect on digitalization and the breadth of enterprise R&D cooperation.

Focusing on the digital transformation of the enterprise, this study discusses its impact mechanism on enterprise R&D cooperation, including the impact on the intensity and breadth of R&D cooperation. The study further examines the regulatory effect of organizational inertia on enterprise digital and R&D cooperation from two aspects: resource rigidity and routine rigidity. It emphasizes the significance of the digital literacy of employees in enterprise digitalization and discusses the micromechanism of enterprise digitalization and enterprise R&D cooperation.

The paper starts from an observation of a discrepancy between the ambitions for sustainable change in the agro-industry and the actual changes being implemented. We offer one possible explanation by investigating the organizational structures conditioning change in this industry.

We apply a case study methodology, focusing on the Danish pig industry and its organizational conditions for change. Based on interviews and document analysis, and building on systems theory, we develop the concept of change structures, understood as decision premises that guide the change of further decision premises.

The analysis suggests that the pig industry’s change structures predominantly enable changes that cut costs and optimize the production, which may conflict with and possibly foreclose the changes needed to realize the industry’s sustainable ambitions. This conflict and its implications are not acknowledged by the industry.

The analysis indicates that the industry may be locked in its current form of organizational change. We suggest a way to overcome the lock-in by fostering organizational mechanisms that enable alternative interpretations to emerge internally. Without this, achieving the required sustainable change in the industry may hinge on stronger external regulation and support.

Conceptually, the notion of change structures supplements actor-oriented analytical approaches that focus on change agents and sense-making. Empirically, we contribute with an analysis of the conditions of possibility for sustainable change in an important yet understudied industry in organization studies; namely, the conventional agro-industry.

There is a growing interest in investigating craft beer tourism and consumption experiences as different destinations seek to position unique attributes and cultures in their culinary offerings. Yet, in this space, factors that have triggered the creation, management and marketing of craft beer tourism remain implicit. The purpose of this paper is therefore to present a systematic literature review of craft beer tourism, apply a conceptual model of craft beer gastronomy tourism and, in turn, provide strategic imperatives for the sector moving forward.

A comprehensive search for craft beer tourism in hospitality and tourism literature was undertaken using a combination of Google Scholar search terms as well as institutional library databases. Then, following the steps proposed by Xiao and Watson (2019), articles were sorted into themes before determining their appropriateness to be included in a systematic literature review.

Based on prior research, a Craft beer gastronomy tourism model is proposed. This model was found to provide a macro perspective of the craft beer tourism literature and was applied using the systematic literature review. It was found that not many of the papers fit the three-step process, and a fragmented relationship between craft breweries and tourism was observed. On reviewing the theories and frameworks used, it was found that there was not much consistency with the majority using frameworks and concepts. Furthermore, most studies were undertaken from the perspective of a single region or homogenous samples, with few offering cross-sectional comparisons. The most common methods of the papers were surveys and interviews, with a majority being cross-sectional.

The systematic literature review has led to the development of a novel conceptual model that highlights the current focal areas but also gaps that inform future studies and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on positioning strategies, categorise them as typologies and taxonomies and propose generic positioning strategies for organisations from a theoretical viewpoint.

Typologies and taxonomies are defined and characterised, and then all product or brand positioning strategies are examined. Articles published in reputable marketing and strategic marketing journals from 1969 to 2022 are analysed for this purpose. The analysis was done using qualitative text mining: classification, coding and text analysis.

The review enables the identification of three generic positioning strategies widely accepted in the literature, as well as the distinction between conceptually derived positioning strategies (typology) and empirically derived positioning strategies( taxonomy).

This study provides a comprehensive overview for researchers who wish to get broad-picture research on generic classifications in positioning strategy. Moreover, most notably for academics, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to classify positioning strategies into typologies and taxonomies based on their evolution.

Knowledge of positioning typologies and taxonomies can assist managers in developing and implementing a strategy that allows their company to maximise the potential of its product/brand and achieve better results. The literature review contributes to theory development and helps companies understand their positioning strategies.

Despite considerable interest in positioning research, little effort has been made to examine positioning strategies’ current or future development. Some authors use the term taxonomy to describe their conceptually derived classification of positioning strategies, and it was discovered that authors frequently interchangeably use the terms typologies or taxonomies. When attempting to understand and compare the various classifications, this liberal use of the term’s typology and taxonomy creates misunderstanding and confusion. This paper fills that void.