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The objective of this paper is to present the existing state of research relating to the steel industries.

This paper seeks to explore how Indian buying firms practise an open book (OB) policy in supplier relationships in three industries, i.e. the vehicle industry, the construction industry and the information technology industry. It also aims to study determinants of open book practices.

Application of the OB policy is operationalised as the nature of open book practices, the extent and stage of data disclosed, the form of data disclosed, the direction of data disclosed, the attitude towards cost data disclosed, and the purpose and conditions of data disclosed. Determinants of the open book policy comprise characteristics of the exchange, the product, the buyer, the supplier and the supply market. Qualitative data were collected in the form of 22 interviews with representatives of three buying organisations and several of their suppliers in order to build three case studies.

The results suggest that the OB policy is used by buyers for diverse purposes ranging from strategic to operational, for example value engineering at the product development stage, to ensure supplier margins, for self improvements and cost reductions, and country entry decisions. Similarly, the data shared ranged from narrow to wide in scope and scale. Suppliers' attitudes ranged from fairly neutral to very negative towards open books. Power asymmetries, the number of alternative suppliers, product performance characteristics and value, incentives offered, and buyer efforts were found to influence OB practices.

Experiences gained from employing an OB policy in vehicle manufacturing suggests that firms in other industries can better leverage the use of open books for joint problem solving, equitable profit sharing and supplier selection.

The paper highlights that an OB policy can have broader applicability than recognised by many past studies and indicates that it can serve purposes of strategic decision‐making. It can also be an integrated part of a buyer's risk reduction strategy. Further, the study provides specific recommendations for Indian companies with regard to the application of an open book policy.

This paper aims to review the author's association with the discipline of business‐to‐business (B2B) marketing for nearly 40 years. Of these, 34 were spent teaching in a postgraduate institute, i.e. the Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, India.

The paper is organized around nine lenses for reflection. These provide a comprehensive coverage of the author's experiences. The paper critically evaluates the author's performance as a B2B marketing instructor, researcher, trainer and consultant. It examines the evolution of B2B markets and marketing in India and traces the symbiotic relationship between academics and practice.

The reflection reveals that B2B marketing practices have benefited and improved a great deal in India due to interventions from academia. However, the most disturbing aspect of B2B marketing practices in India is all‐pervasive corruption. There seems to be no solution for it.

An important audience for this paper is young faculty members. It is hoped the paper will be able to motivate them for more research and publications. The challenge for B2B marketing is to fuel the declining interest in the discipline. The B2B marketing discipline in India needs more faculty members, and substantial home‐grown research articles and cases.

The paper illustrates that the Indian B2B scenario has changed a great deal: the impact of competition and globalisation has transformed B2B marketing practices beyond recognition.

This paper aims to explore the impact of competitive intelligence (CI) practices on the firm's performance in the emerging market context of India. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: do CI activities have an impact on the market performance of Indian firms? If so, what are the macro and micro environmental drivers of CI for Indian firms? How are CI activities organized within Indian firms? How is the usage and dissemination of CI taking place within Indian firms?

The study used a stratified sample developed from a variety of mailing lists focusing on Indian firms. The study employed a cross‐sectional, survey‐based methodology.

The study identifies two key aspects: Indian firms that exhibit higher levels of CI activities indeed achieve better financial performance results; and the current level of CI activities in Indian firms is at a moderate level, thereby suggesting an opportunity for using and implementing more sophisticated CI techniques.

The findings of this study should assist local and foreign managers in having a more informed understanding of CI activities in the Indian marketplace. Additionally, these findings provide directives to managers regarding the untapped opportunities and potential that CI can offer in a highly volatile and rapidly changing market scenario.

This is the first study that empirically investigates the relationship between the level of CI activities and firm performance in an emerging market context. It is also the first study of its kind that explores the current state of CI practices in the Indian market.

Factors such as globalization and market size have made India a major consideration for multinational firms and their salespeople. Despite the appeal of the market, the majority of theories and empirical studies of sales have been based on Western thought and within a Western context. This study seeks to address the issue of what interpersonal traits impel outcomes and behaviors of Indian salespeople.

A model was tested using survey data collected from salespeople and their respective sales managers within a print media company located in India. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest an interesting interplay between interpersonal traits and pro‐social sales behaviors. Empathy proneness was positively related to helping behaviors targeted at other salespeople, while guilt proneness was positively associated with behaviors targeted at customers.

The research suggests that a salesperson's capacity for empathy does not always translate into customer‐based behaviors. Hence sales training and other interventions targeted towards building empathy may actually impact on behaviors between salespeople versus the interface between the salesperson and the customer. Theoretical and managerial applications are also discussed.

The paper combines a data collection of salesperson‐sales manager dyadic responses and examines whether the theoretical undergirding of the Western‐based pro‐social literature is appropriate to apply in Eastern cultures such as India.

Few research studies have been done to investigate the issue of new service development (NSD) in an emerging market. To address this gap in the literature the aim of this paper is to document a study of the NSD process and the strategy of business‐to‐business financial service firms in India.

The author conducted surveys of 148 multinational service firms operating in India and 126 local and indigenous Indian service firms belonging to the financial services industry.

The findings suggest that significant differences exist between multinational service firms operating in India and local/indigenous Indian firms. That is, service firms belonging to these two varied groups use different strategies to compete in the industry and emphasize different sets of development stages in service innovation.

The analysis has been restricted to one emerging market, i.e. India. This suggests the need for further studies of NSD in other emerging markets of the world.

The findings of this research validate the initial contention that NSD practices vary from company to company, and thus there cannot be a “one size fits all” approach to service innovation. The insights from this study can help service managers to better understand and manage their NSD programs in an emerging market such as India.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this research represents the first attempt to investigate empirically the NSD practices of financial service firms in India.

This paper's aim is to identify structural and relational factors influencing the upstream channel management of organized retailers in India.

In‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 organized retailers and two manufacturers in India. Data were analyzed using the thematic network analysis technique from qualitative research. The authors use the framework of institutional theory to guide the discussion.

The findings suggest that government regulations influence the supply chain structure in India. Relational bonds offset the uncertainty borne of weak institutions. Informational transparency and long‐term orientation foster trust between channel partners. This trust, in turn, leads to collaborative partnerships.

The findings have implications for multinationals planning to enter the Indian retail industry. There is a need to understand complex regulatory and social institutions in India. The uniqueness of these institutions calls for adaptive strategies toward channel management.

The paper contributes to the literature on the supply chain structure in India. Despite growing interest in the Indian retailing industry, not many studies reflect on the specific B2B exchange structure in India. The paper fills this gap and also provides several marketing implications for multinational retailers planning to enter the Indian market.

Given India's rapid industrial growth and burgeoning numbers of sales and marketing employees, there is an urgent need to develop India‐centric B2B sales management knowledge. However, there is little hard information about similarities or differences between sales management strategies in India and the developed economies. To shed more light on this issue, in this commentary the aim is to report the results of a novel exploratory study of recent India B2B sales job ads motivated by the idea that sales recruiting is a critical sales management function that provides insights into hiring organizations' overall business strategy.

The authors content analyze a sample of India sales job ad postings to identify the job goals, skills and additional roles sought by Indian B2B sales recruiters. Subsequently, they use latent class clustering to segment companies along these requirements.

It is found that B2B sales organizations in India appear to be recruiting according to the same core strategies, principles and criteria as those in the developed world, especially with regard to customer management.

This research develops confidence that some extant B2B sales management theories, models, and knowledge accumulated in developed markets are applicable to the Indian context, with suitable modifications to accommodate idiosyncratic cultural and economic differences.

This is the first, albeit exploratory, effort to utilize the content of India‐specific B2B sales job advertisements as a source of data and insights into sales management strategies in India.

This paper presents a stepwise method for identification and analysis of innovative activities in production systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a structure in order to propose the risk paradigms and factors corresponding to the innovative activities and evaluation of the impact of these activities on innovation decisions and investment.

The model used here is an analytical approach that evaluates the impact of innovative activities on innovation decision and investment using product opportunity gap (POG) concept. This framework is applied for innovative activities of Asian industrial field, and the risk of innovative activities is calculated by weighted risk analysis method. In this method, the risk weights and intensities are estimated by the average of experts’ opinions in interviews.

This implementation discovered some useful information being used by investors, innovators and policymakers for taking the best strategies and decisions in various innovation domains such as innovation management, risk management and innovation policy. The results of this study show that the product innovation is the most popular category of innovation that has occurred in Asian manufacturing industries, and the product innovation, marketing innovation and organizational innovation have the most influence on technology, economic and social changes intensity, respectively.

This study analyzed the risk of innovative activities after their occurrence and because of different views of experts, there were diverse and sometimes contradictory analyses of innovative activities risk.

This paper links two separate and important sectors of innovation domain: innovation risk and innovation decision making and investment. POG plays the role of a bridge to connect the two mentioned sectors and shows how innovation causes the technological, economic and social changes. This paper also provides useful and practical information for innovation investors and decision makers to take the best decisions and to avoid the probable failures and losses.