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Regulators and the investment community are demanding that closings become faster and more accurate. Most organizations are not equipped to meet these requirements, however. Many attempt to achieve them by investing more heavily in technology, but technology alone is not a panacea. In most cases this approach wastes valuable resources and compounds already existing inefficiencies. Instead, organizations must focus first on making breakthrough improvements in their processes and culture.

There can be little doubt that Six Sigma is far more than just another novelty concept, and can be regarded as a major innovation in terms of the management of quality throughout a business. A rapidly increasing number of companies, from all industries and of all sizes, are now almost unanimously reporting extremely handsome, and sometime spectacular, returns on their program and training investments. However, despite this obvious success there is also the growing recognition that most companies are actually failing to get the most from the approach, because they are not focusing the philosophy on its prime target – the customer.

I ENTERED the literary world late in the immediate post‐war years when changes of literary taste and loyalty were already in the air. The first broadcast I gave was, I remember, an attack upon Virginia Woolf. Her books had nurtured me as an adolescent, and I was in reaction against her influence.

The purpose of this paper is to question the applicability of recent industry-derived terms such as “Big Data” (BD) and the “Internet of things” (IoT) in a supply chain managerial context. Is this labeling useful in managing the operations found in supply chains?

BD and IoT are critically discussed in the context of a complete supply chain organization. A case study of banana supply from Costa Rica to Norway is provided to empirically ground this research. Thompson’s contingency theory, Alderson’s functionalistic end-to-end “marketing channels” model, Penrose’s view of supply purpose associated with service provision, and particularities of banana supply reveal how end-to-end supply chains are complex systems, even though the product distributed is fairly simple.

Results indicate that the usefulness of BD in supply chain management discourse is limited. Instead its connectivity is facilitated by what is now becoming commonly labeled as IoT, people, devices and documents that are useful when taking an end-to-end supply chain perspective. Connectivity is critical to efficient contemporary supply chain management.

BD and IoT have emerged as a part of contemporary supply chain management discourse. This study directs attention to the importance of scrutinizing emergent and actual discourse in managing supply chains, that it is not irrelevant which words are applied, e.g., in research on information-enabled supply process development. Often the old words of professional terminology may be sufficient or even better to help manage supply.

The blockchain represents a seminal paradigm shift, likely to radically transform business in the future. While the paradigm associated with the World Wide Web and Big Data is focused on the “sharing of information,” the paradigm associated with blockchain is focused on the “sharing of assets.” Intellectual assets are among the most valuable of assets, and customer co-creation is a key approach for creating new value for firms. This paper aims to draw on blockchain-centric logic to develop an initial theoretical framework, with managerial recommendations, for the use of blockchain in customer co-creation.

Building upon established indigenous theory development and inductive realist approaches, the authors develop an original two-step methodology to create the initial theoretical framework. This methodology, involving foundational premises and propositions, is ideal for relatively new areas of research and is well suited to serve as a relatively faster catalyst for future research.

Despite the substantial potential impact of blockchain in innovation, no theoretical foundation for blockchain in customer co-creation exists. To fill this gap, the authors present an initial theoretical framework, using blockchain-centric logic in customer co-creation. The proposed theoretical framework highlights how key prerequisites in customer co-creation, including trust, security, transparency, identity and immutability, can be enhanced with blockchain-centric logic.

It is hoped that the initial theoretical framework, based on blockchain-centric logic, can contribute to future academic research on blockchain in customer co-creation and help practitioners better exploit the blockchain in co-creation. Directions for future research, the larger agenda for this paper, are presented in the conclusion.

Despite increasing attention in the marketing literature devoted to market orientation and relationship marketing issues, the sponsorship relationship has not been examined according to these perspectives. In this study, a number of propositions linking market orientation, collaborative communications, trust and commitment are developed and examined empirically in a sponsorship context. The findings suggest that market orientation and collaborative communication are both important determinants of sponsorship commitment, defined as a sponsor’s preparedness to leverage the association. Results concerning trust are somewhat more ambiguous. The implications of these findings are discussed in conclusion, along with directions for future research.