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In this paper, the design of multiple channels to achieve the goal of a high‐performance medium access control (MAC) protocol is to be proposed to solve the problem of wasting bandwidth resources due to waiting for the backoff time.

In the MAC design of this paper, a control channel and a data channel are used to improve bandwidth utilization. When the control channel waits for the backoff time, the data channel may transfer data. As a result, bandwidth utilization can be improved. In order to have better bandwidth utilization in multiple channels, the authors also propose a bandwidth allocation strategy for control channels and data channels. According to the strategy, the control and data signals can be smoothly transmitted without blocking or waiting, thereby not wasting bandwidth resources. Finally, the authors propose multiple control sub‐channels and data sub‐channels to further reduce the backoff time penalty and make more communication pairs work in a transmission range to increase the throughput.

The paper solves the following problems bandwidth waste that results from waiting for the backoff time in the single channel model and bandwidth allocation strategy for the control and data sub‐channels in the multiple channel model to achieve throughput enhancement in mobile ad‐hoc networks.

The proposed method needs the support of multiple channels.

From the result, the bandwidth allocation ratio of the proposed method performs better than other various allocation ratios. In addition, the proposed method with the bandwidth allocation strategy and multiple data and control sub‐channels results in a better throughput than IEEE 802.11 DCF by 22.3 per cent.

The proposed method using multiple control and data sub‐channels can improve the throughput and reduce bandwidth waste over IEEE 802.11 DCF.

This study proposes a conceptual model to assess the perceived service quality properly using fuzzy set theory, since customers' perceptions of service quality are generally expressed subjectively in vague linguistic terms

To demonstrate the proposed model, the exploratory prospect of empirical study with questionnaire is given in measuring the service quality. The customer first records his or her perception of service quality in linguistic terms. The reviewer then quantifies the perception with fuzzy numbers. By mutually comparing all the criteria, importance weights of criteria in assessing the service quality can be prioritized. The fuzzy perceived quality score is then calculated by combining the fuzzy numbers of criteria with the corresponding weights. The fuzzy scores are then transformed to linguistic terms to reflect the customer's satisfaction level of overall service quality as interpreted by the reviewer.

The investigation shows that distinguishing satisfaction scores with crispy numbers may be difficult, but that customer satisfaction is much easier to identify. The sample information reveals the percentage of population customers who are satisfied with the service provided, since customer satisfaction and attitude toward perceived service quality are linguistic in nature.

Fuzzy linguistic assessment of service quality is much closer to human thinking than methods based on crispy numbers. Similarly, the proposed method can also be extended to other studies or contests in which the evaluation or appraisal is subjective or verbal in nature.

By the end of this session, students should be able to: explain what a business model is; summarize the case firm’s business strategy using the elements of business model canvas proposed by Alexander Osterwalder and practice how to apply the business model canvas to analyze the business model of a firm; understand how a firm can seize an opportunity for innovation; and discuss how the case firm navigated through problems that came up as it grew.

Creative Design was a start-up company in Taiwan. To fulfill a course requirement while she was still in school, the founder had formed a team and entered an entrepreneurship competition. They won the second runner up award in that competition and impressed some firms who enquired if they would be interested in doing corporate identity system (CIS) design. They discovered that without establishing a corporate structure their prospective clients would be unable to pay an invoice. As a consequence, the founder and one of the team members established Creative Design Ltd. This case discusses the challenge Creative Design faced at the end of 2012. Wonderland farmers’ association (WFA) wanted to market locally grown jasmine but did not know how to go about it. They reached out to the founder and her company for assistance. The case of WFA was uncharted territory. Creative Design already had extensive experience in CIS design, but it did not have any experience in handling agriculture products. In this case, they had to deal with the full supply chain from production to exhibition. The risk for this project was high but Creative Design accepted the case and became the first design firm offering a “total solution.” Currently, Creative Design works with all kinds of cases, from simple CIS designs to more complicated total solutions of various scales. The founder now has to contemplate if the design house should develop more total solution cases. Doing so would require recruiting more staff and the dilemma of balancing revenue and costs.

The case study is designed for the undergraduate and graduate students of the College of Management; the case can be adopted for the courses of management, innovation and entrepreneurship, etc.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 3 Entrepreneurship.

The explosion of data due to the sophistication of information and communication technology makes it simple for prospective tourists to learn about previous hotel guests' experiences. They prioritize the rating score when selecting a hotel. However, rating scores are less reliable for suggesting a personalized preference for each aspect, especially when they are in a limited number. This study aims to recommend ratings and personalized preference hotels using cross-domain and aspect-based features.

We propose an aspect-based cross-domain personalized recommendation (AsCDPR), a novel framework for rating prediction and personalized customer preference recommendations. We incorporate a cross-domain personalized approach and aspect-based features of items from the review text. We extracted aspect-based feature vectors from two domains using bidirectional long short-term memory and then mapped them by a multilayer perceptron (MLP). The cross-domain recommendation module trains MLP to analyze sentiment and predict item ratings and the polarities of the aspect based on user preferences.

Expanded by its synonyms, aspect-based features significantly improve the performance of sentiment analysis on accuracy and the F1-score matrix. With relatively low mean absolute error and root mean square error values, AsCDPR outperforms matrix factorization, collaborative matrix factorization, EMCDPR and Personalized transfer of user preferences for cross-domain recommendation. These values are 1.3657 and 1.6682, respectively.

This study assists users in recommending hotels based on their priority preferences. Users do not need to read other people's reviews to capture the key aspects of items. This model could enhance system reliability in the hospitality industry by providing personalized recommendations.

This study introduces a new approach that embeds aspect-based features of items in a cross-domain personalized recommendation. AsCDPR predicts ratings and provides recommendations based on priority aspects of each user's preferences.

This study explores the relationship among relationship-selling, celebrity attachment and customer engagement.

Hypotheses were tested, using structural equation modeling on survey responses of 321 participants.

This study determines the connection between relationship-selling factors and customer engagement using the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. Results demonstrate that interactional intensity, mutual disclosure and cooperative intention exert considerable positive effects on celebrity attachment, which, in turn, significantly impacts customer engagement.

The research findings add to the existing body of knowledge through more information on the degree to which relationship-selling factors affect celebrity attachment, and eventually, customer engagement. The study also aims to prompt researchers and organizations to consider effective communication strategies to increase online customer engagement.

Virtual teams are becoming a norm in current knowledge-based society and offer a wide range of organizational benefits. This paper aims to investigate the effects of leaders’ motivating language (ML) and feedback approach on virtual team members’ creativity performance.

A 2×2 with pre-test and post-test experimental design was employed to explore how to stimulate virtual team members’ creativity performance using a group decision support system.

The results show that leaders’ ML and feedback approach via e-mail instructions have different interaction effects on members’ creativity and idea generation performance. Team members receiving direction-giving instructions generate more ideas under the demanding feedback approach and team member receiving instructions with more empathetic language exhibit higher creativity performance under the encouraging feedback approach.

Shortcomings of virtual environment and leadership remain the major factors influencing such findings. Since the results are also restrained by the functionality of the utilized software tool, tools for virtual teams are recommended to include features that can support the effective use of team leaders’ motivational language.

Virtual team leaders should provide proper guidance to members using understanding and empathetic wording approach. For task-oriented work, leaders should consider giving more specific instructions and provide constant feedback for completed work. For creative work, leaders should give positive encouragement as feedback or even challenge team members to stimulate their creativity. Additionally, facilitation rules can be set up in advance so that the intelligent agent can timely send out follow-up instructions/feedback.

The gained insights beneficially help tool developers for virtual teams build/enhance their tools based on the need of team leaders. This paper also usefully offers important implications regarding how to motivate virtual team members’ creative thinking.

The paper aims to explore the adoption attitudes of internal and external motivations by multinational enterprises (MNEs) concerning transfer pricing manipulation and to discuss on pricing strategies of MNEs under different motives of transfer pricing manipulation.

The paper conducts literature reviews regarding motives of transfer pricing manipulation and then conducts questionnaire survey and expert interview to select and generalize the transfer pricing manipulation decision making. Analytic network process (ANP) is then applied to obtain factors' weights and model construction.

The paper finds that tax minimization is no longer the focus of transfer pricing manipulation strategies of Taiwanese MNEs, and their real concerns are winning maximum economic profits, enhancing the competitiveness of the enterprise, and effectively repatriating profits to parent companies in order to facilitate greater economic profits.

It is found from the model that most of the transfer pricing manipulation motives are based on low‐price strategies, which circumvent the exchange rate risks of low quotes. A possible reason is that current business operational patterns that have been limited to the electronic industry adopt the quantity‐based pricing strategy of “narrow profit margin and large volume.” However, the transfer pricing manipulation has great influence on the financial structures of the enterprises. The enterprises, as a result, must understand and reinforce the working of pricing transfer manipulation in the business development.

The paper collects questionnaires and investigation results from experts and scholars and uses ANP to construct a complete pricing strategic decision‐making model that may be taken by actual MNEs under different motives, in order to provide reference to MNEs when making transfer pricing manipulation strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to propose motivating language as a mediator to increase the positive effects of servant leadership on subordinates’ outcomes. The authors propose that motivating language acts as a mediator to transmit servant leadership traits and enhances the positive impact that servant leadership verbal behavior has on employees’ performance.

By developing a conceptual model, the authors propose a connection between servant leadership and motivating language.

In the proposed model, motivating language acts as a full and a partial mediator. The authors further categorize three distinct outcome sets that should be improved from this relationship. The first set includes improved worker performance, job satisfaction, absenteeism and worker innovation. The second set is composed of self-efficacy, organizational citizenship behavior and employee commitment. Finally, the third set includes trust, satisfaction with the leader and inspiration to become servant leaders.

Empirical research needs to be conducted to test this model.

The positive effects of servant leadership through the use of motivating language could be operationalized in multiple ways. First, potential servant leaders could take the well-established, reliable and valid motivating language scale to diagnostically identify their leader-member communication strengths and weaknesses. Then, tailored motivating language trainings could be implemented which target motivating language weaknesses and key strategic outcomes in the proposed model. Furthermore, motivating language training would be a valuable instrument for transmission of a servant leadership culture.

Servant leadership style responds to the demand for positive ethical behavior that is much needed during these times when emphasis is given to profitability and lack of concern for people is the norm rather than the exception. It is also synchronized with the current benefits of organizational citizenship behaviors that have recently emerged in the field of managerial research.

This paper aims at addressing a gap in the literature by developing a model of how leader strategic language, namely, motivating language, mediates between servant leadership and worker outcomes.

The purpose of this paper was to discover the best practices used by information technology (IT) project managers to determine what leadership skills, behaviors, communication tools and techniques are needed to lead and communicate effectively with virtual IT project teams.

In this qualitative case study, data was gathered by semistructured interviews from ten successful IT project managers from Northern California who had more than ten years of experience managing virtual teams (VTs) with growing and profitable IT companies in Silicon Valley, California.

IT project managers and leaders may consider building personal relationships with team members at the beginning of each project to foster a sense of camaraderie and common ground for the successful outcome and desired results. Maintaining cohesive team relationships to gain their trust and confidence may require additional coaching, mentoring, collaborating, recognizing their accomplishments, providing technical training, and understanding different cultures and local laws that relate to VTs to manage projects successfully to move projects forward in sustaining business, and assure customer satisfaction.

Findings from this study may assist IT project managers and leaders in building trust and rapport, increasing efficiency and developing effective lines of communication within their virtual IT teams.

This study set to explore the career needs and proposes the concept of the gap between career development programs and career needs, and its subsequent effect on job satisfaction, turnover intention, in an effort to contribute to the field of career management, through the effective integration of career needs and career development programs. Questionnaires were completed by 367 R&D personnel from Hsinchu Science‐based Industrial Park (HSIP) in the north of Taiwan. The results reveal that R&D personnel have very diverse career needs at various stages of their career, and that depending on which stage of their career they have reached. The result show that the larger the gap, the higher the levels of both turnover intentions and job dissatisfaction. Managerial implications of these findings are also discussed.