Search results

Various authors have brought forth the idea that the increase in context turbulence and the relentless change in today's economic and competitive environments have rendered it essential for an effective firm strategy to combine both value appropriation and value creation (Porter, 1996; Moran & Ghoshal, 1999; Venkataraman & Sarasvathy, 2001; Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2001b). Nonetheless, the methodological bases and the assumptions that characterize contributions concerning value appropriation and value creation are notably different and in many respects opposite to one another. These profound methodological differences hinder the possibility of a combined consideration of value appropriation and value creation issues within a coherent interpretative framework. By reinterpreting more conventional strategy studies in the light of the Austrian process view, this article builds a process framework which is able to consider and render mutually compatible both value appropriation and value creation within the unitary process of firm development. In addition, the use of the Austrian approach as an interpretative lens enables an evolution and extension of the resource-based theory that consents it, not only to grasp the mechanisms behind value appropriation, but also to suggest new ways of viewing post-industrial firm behavior that help to interpret its dynamic and proactive role in the value creation process.

This paper aims to investigate how value drivers of internet medical business model affect value creation through a configurational approach. The internet medical business model (IMBM) is such a business model that integrates online and offline medical services with the driving force of internet technologies covering prediagnosis, in-diagnosis and postdiagnosis. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the support of national policies have boosted the development of internet health care. However, there are still many challenges in practice, such as the unclear innovation path, as well as difficulties in landing and profiting. Academic research has not yet provided sufficient theoretical insights. Therefore, to better explain and guide practice, it is urgent to clarify the innovation path and mechanism of value creation for IMBM.

Based on the sample of 58 internet medical firms in China, this paper adopts fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation.

Building on the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, five value drivers of IMBM are identified, namely, functional value proposition, emotional value proposition, user involvement, resource capabilities and connection properties. And the five value drivers form three configurations, which are, respectively, labeled as resource-driven configuration, user-operated configuration and product-combined configuration. From the perspective of the integration of traditional and emerging theories, such as resource-based view, internet economics and value cocreation, each configuration leads to value creation and improves value results with different mechanisms behind it.

First, combined with the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, this paper identifies five value drivers of IMBM, thus improving the relevant research on internet health care. Second, based on the configurational effects, this paper discusses the mechanism behind the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation, thus expanding relevant research on the value creation of business models. Third, applying fsQCA and combining the advantages of qualitative research and quantitative research, this paper adds to the configurations of IMBM’s value drivers that achieve high-value results.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the dialogue, access, risk assessment and transparency model of value co-creation processes (dialogue, access, risk and transparency) on new service market performance (NSMP) with the mediating role of value-informed pricing in the context of business-to-business (B2B).

The data were collected through a cross-sectional survey of 230 managers of the telecommunications industry in Malaysia and analyzed through structural equation modeling using SmartPLS v.3.3.3 software.

This study found that dialogue and transparency are predictors of NSMP. The findings indicate that value-informed pricing plays a mediating role in the relationship between dialogue and transparency with NSMP.

Disclosing pricing related information, providing up to date information to the customers, making clear to the customers about new offerings would certainly influence value-informed pricing. Thus, managers can enhance customer engagement in the interaction processes to better understand customer expectations of new services and how the new services should be priced.

The link between value co-creation and value-informed pricing has been only conceptualized in literature. This study has opened a new stream of research, examining the relationship of interactional-based value co-creation process with value-informed pricing and NSMP in the context of B2B relationship from providers’ perspective.

To successfully create customer value, firms must use coherent market strategies and perform value-creating activities that enable them to develop solutions to customers’ needs. However, as firms exhibit differences in how they approach value creation, their market strategies will also differ. These differences among market strategies can be described through different combinations of proactivity and responsiveness, representing each firm’s value-creation logic. This study aims to increase understanding of how firms can improve the effectiveness of their market strategies by considering their associated value-creation logics.

The authors conceptualize market strategies as coherent sets of value-creating activities. While the types of activities within a market strategy are driven by a firm’s strategic orientations, how these activities are performed is influenced by its value-creation logic. With this as the foundation, the authors develop a conceptual typology of archetypal market strategies based on the different value-creation logics that influence them.

The authors propose four distinct market strategies – habitual, visionary, adaptive and ambidextrous – representing unique ways in which value-creation logics influence the formation of market strategies. Furthermore, the authors highlight the need for activities to reflect consistent value-creation logics to create coherent market strategies and the authors provide an exploration of the activities that enable firms to implement different types of market strategies.

The typology expands the concept of market strategy, introducing the idea of a value-creation logic of proactivity and responsiveness, and thus demonstrating the need for more in-depth consideration of the value-creating activities that constitute market strategies to better understand how firms can create superior customer value.

Business creation is an important measure of real economic activity as it shows the dynamics with which new firms are born, create jobs, move their capital, innovate and compete with old firms. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze the short-term impact of the lockdown policies implemented to stop the spread of the COVID-19 on the creation of new formal firms in Ecuador.

This paper uses a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design jointly with official administrative real-time data. This data is collected by the supervisory and regulatory institution of formal companies in Ecuador. The authors use real-time data from January 13, 2020, to May 15, 2020. This period allows to use the President’s order of effective lockdown on March 16, 2020, as the exogenous event. This gives 43 working days on each side of the cutoff date on the baseline model.

The authors find: an overall large drop in the creation of new formal firms (−73%) and a decrease in the total amount of initial capital coming from the new formal firms (−40%). Additionally, the results suggest that the negative impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the creation of new formal firms seems not to decrease in the short term. The main conclusion is that lockdown policies have a negative impact on firm creation, a result that is of high policy relevance and can be a tool to design business attraction policies.

The analysis is carried out in a short period because on May18, 2020, a new policy was applied in Ecuador that allowed firms to be created more quickly, with 1 USD of capital, and 1 shareholder, among other benefits, and this may affect the outcomes analyzed in this document, so extending the analysis of the impact of the lockdown to a longer period could result in biased results due to this policy. Additionally, studying daily sales would be of the utmost importance; however, these data are not found in the database of the supervising institution.

This study contributes to the empirical literature and the policy debate in various aspects. First, it is important to generate facilities for the creation of new formal firms, from the reduction of days it takes to create one (using technology as a support in this matter) to the decrease of the minimum capital to formalize a company. Second, improve the business conditions of the new formal firms that were born during the pandemic, but also that these conditions create stimulus for the creation of new companies. Third, the authors show that induced-lockdown policies have a negative impact on the creation of new formal firms and the total amount of initial capital from new formal firms; this effect could be a full-blown recession if governments do not apply mechanisms to revert this situation that could be a drag on the economy.

This paper opens the debate on the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on the creation of new formal firms; therefore, future research could study the impact in a broader time window to analyze medium and long-run effects, but also in different economic sectors and in the effects on firm bankruptcy, which added to an analysis of job loss, will show a total effect of damage in the economy.

New firm creation plays an important role in economic development and growth. Despite the recognized importance of general and entrepreneurial self-efficacy for entrepreneurship, new firm creation, and growth, research has devoted minimal attention to explicitly investigating the relationship between marketing self-efficacy and firm creation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between marketing self-efficacy and firm creation.

Data were collected in two European countries (Finland and Slovenia). Regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis.

The findings of this study demonstrate that marketing self-efficacy makes a difference in firm creation.

The model advanced in this study is partial and not comprehensive. Gaining insights into marketing self-efficacy-based firm creation in established economies of northern Europe and transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe can be valuable for broadening the new firm formation research and improving marketing self-efficacy-related practices in these countries.

Practitioners and policymakers need to be aware that marketing self-efficacy can be an important driver of new firm creation.

It is suggested that economic policymakers make funds available or channel investments into training and education in marketing abilities in elementary, middle, higher, and university education levels in order to increase marketing self-efficacy levels in the population.

This study contributes to a better understanding of firm creation induced by marketing self-efficacy by developing and testing a normative model.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if the knowledge spillover effect from foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow exists as well as its possible channels in China, and makes some policy suggestions.

Based on the literature review, the paper sets a panel data model to empirically examine if the knowledge spillover effect of FDI inflow exists in China, using data from 28 manufacturing industries during 2001‐2005.

The empirical results show that FDI played a positive role in China's knowledge creation and management in the sample period. At the same time, the demonstration effect and labor mobility effect served as the channels to yield beneficial results while the competition effect produced undesirable impact. However, the effect of these three channels on China's knowledge creation was very weak. Instead, the knowledge creation in China was still dependent on the input of R&D by domestic firms.

Owing to the data limitation, this paper only adopted data from large and medium enterprises to examine the spillover effect of FDI on the knowledge creation, and thus the conclusions may not be applicable to small enterprises.

Most of the present studies only examined the existence of knowledge spillover effect, without investigating econometrically its channels. Using the latest industry‐level panel data, this paper examines both the existence of knowledge spillover and its main spillover channels empirically.

This paper aims to identify and analyze factors that determine firms’ commitment to co-create new services with business customers.

A quantitative study based on a scenario method, involving an online survey of French service companies, reveals the determinants of commitment to service co-creation.

Customer benefits and organizational sacrifices, as well as firm-related factors (specialization, partners’ involvement and innovativeness) correlate with firms’ commitment to co-create new services. The proposed, empirically grounded model details factors that determine firms’ commitment to co-create new services with business customers, including innovative culture as a key determinant.

The identified factors that affect firms’ commitment to co-create services can guide managers’ efforts to improve customer relationships and thus their service innovation processes.

This study identifies and analyzes characteristics of committed firms, as well as the benefits and sacrifices they face in co-creating new services, in a novel way. Thus, it helps define the fit between a service offering and business customers’ participation in new service development contexts.

This paper aims to identify key dimensions of brand value co-creation activities and empirically examine the impacts of different dimensions of brand value co-creation upon brand performance among Chinese industrial services firms.

Key dimensions of brand value co-creation activities are identified and a research framework is presented based on qualitative interviews with three industrial services firms. Then, the conceptual model and 14 research hypotheses addressing the impacts of different dimensions of brand value co-creation activities upon brand performance are tested by conducting a questionnaire survey among 258 pairs of Chinese B2B services providers and their client companies.

The research results show that: on the whole, integration of brand value chain and service-dominant logic (SDL) can lead to stronger theoretical explanation about the industrial services brand value and brand performance. In other words, value co-creation activities among multiple stakeholders can help customers perceive brand value in a favorable way and finally improve brand performance; branding process involves eight kinds of value co-creation activities on four interfaces between firm-employees, firm-customers, employees-customers, and firm-other stakeholders, indicating that the cultivation of industrial services brand needs a broader stakeholder perspective; value co-creation activities on the firm-employees interface is original driver of brand development by impacting brand value and brand performance via value co-creation on other interfaces.

This paper is the first kind of research that empirically explores the formation mechanism of industrial brand value from the perspective of SDL and also provides insightful implications for managers by pointing out that B2B service providers need to consider the interactive value co-creation behaviors in the social network constructed by different stakeholders in order to improve brand management performance.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to analyse the implications generated by a service perspective.

A conceptual analysis of two approaches to understanding service perspectives, service logic (SL) and service-dominant logic (SDL), reveals direct and indirect marketing implications.

The SDL is based on a metaphorical view of co-creation and value co-creation, in which the firm, customers and other actors participate in the process that leads to value for customers. The approach is firm-driven; the service provider drives value creation. The managerial implications are not service perspective-based, and co-creation may be imprisoned by its metaphor. In contrast, SL takes an analytical approach, with co-creation concepts that can significantly reinvent marketing from a service perspective. Value gets created in customer processes, and value creation is customer driven. Ten managerial SL principles derived from these analyses offer theoretical and practical conclusions with the potential to reinvent marketing.

The SDL can direct researchers’ and managers’ views towards complex value-generation processes. The SL can analyse this process on a managerial level, to derive customer-centric, service perspective-based opportunities to reinvent marketing.

The analysis and principles help marketing break free from offering only value propositions and become an organisation-wide responsibility. Firms must organise service-influenced marketing and create a customer focus among all employees, beyond conventional marketing.

A service perspective on business has key managerial implications and enables researchers and managers to find new, customer-centric, service-influenced marketing approaches.