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This chapter analyzes the dynamics of crises. A crisis typically begins with the emergence of a critical situation, followed by poor leadership and mismanagement that precipitates the crisis itself. The causes of crises may be classified as natural, political, economic, financial, industry-specific and firm-specific. This chapter examines the causes and consequences of poor leadership and management in crises of different kinds. Firm-specific crisis is a surprisingly neglected topic. The failure of a firm may reflect external factors, for example, the decline of an industry, or internal factors, for example, management failures, or a combination of the two. The chapter explains firm-specific crisis in terms of firm-specific disadvantages, which are the opposite of the firm-specific advantages identified in internalization theory.

This study aims to investigate the US cruise market by analyzing industry trends and consumer psychology. COVID-19 has coexisted with human beings for more than two years, and scientists claim that human beings will continuously live with the virus for a long time. Nowadays, cruise tourism and the COVID-19 pandemic studies are still popular in both academia and the industry, and cruise industry trends and market investigations are expected by consumers and investors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the US cruise market and provide a comprehensive market overview for 2022, especially regional comparisons of consumer perceptions. This study identified consumers' preferences, including cruise duration, cruise line, travel season, and travel experience. Regional impacts were assessed by comparing the Agreement scores, and the southern region's residents show higher intention and a more positive attitude toward cruise travel. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Traditionally, firms have been dependent on internal sources such as their own employees – and up to a certain extent, on some external sources, their customers – for innovation. However, in the current scenario of technological dynamism, firms are exploring multiple sources to generate ideas for innovation. Therefore, there is a need to understand the relative effect of various sources of innovations on a firm’s performance.

We offer a conceptual framework where we identify six distinct sources of innovations – firm, customers, external network, competition, macro-environment, and technology and how they create value for focal firms especially their brand equity. We introduce a taxonomy of various costs and benefits related to innovations. We then argue using our proposed taxonomy to understand the relative strengths of various sources of innovation affecting a firm’s brand equity.

We discuss and compare the relative effects of these sources of innovations on a firm’s brand equity by rank-ordering the sources. The customers and the technology as a source of innovation have the maximum impact on the firm’s brand equity followed by the marginal impact of macro-environment and external network of a firm. The firm itself has a moderate impact on its brand equity, while competition has the minimal impact. Further, we also discuss how the relationship is moderated by different innovation characteristics (nature and type of innovations).

The main practical implication is to create awareness among managers about various costs and benefits of the proposed six sources of innovations and their effects on brand equity. Managers would be able to prioritize their sources of innovation based on firms’ current needs, and whether to focus on lower costs or building higher brand equity in the scarce resource environment.

We offer a comprehensive list of six sources of innovation, build a conceptual framework wherein we discuss the relative strengths of these sources affecting brand equity.

Several studies have proposed that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack resources and experiential knowledge to internationalise to distant markets. The authors argue that SMEs can handle the lack of these tangible and intangible internal resources through external collaborations; they can achieve success in international markets by collaborating with business partners. The role of inter-firm marketing collaboration and its impact on internationalisation efforts has not been thoroughly studied, particularly in the context of SMEs. This study will thus advance our understanding of SMEs’ inter-firm marketing collaborations and how they influence performance in international markets. In this chapter, authors conceptually develop this line of arguments through an extensive literature review and develop some hypotheses and a framework that can be empirically tested. The authors believe this framework will serve as a starting point for further studies on this topic. Theoretically, we endeavour to contribute by showing that firms can enhance their level of international performance through inter-firm collaboration. The authors believe this type of study would have considerable theoretical as well as managerial implications in this important field of research.

What core strategic capabilities should multinational and domestic firms possess to create competitive organization in Russia? In this chapter, we try to answer this question with our pilot case study of six firms operating in the Russian high-tech, low-tech, and services markets – four global companies and two Russian firms. Our research shows that customer orientation is the crucial strategic capability, highlighted by all of the firms involved in the research. For multinational and high-tech players, this is followed by research and development, mentioned by two-thirds of the respondents. Moreover, the four multinational companies leverage their strategic capabilities of cross-cultural management and general sales capabilities as keys for their success in Russia. Russian firms emphasize importance of entrepreneurship, understanding local customer needs, and an engaged team as strategic capabilities that particularly differentiate them from the multinational players in the Russian market.