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The purpose of this paper was to investigate antecedents and results of strategic choices of multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries in Croatia economy. Hence, the authors examined knowledge management and its association with performance. Additionally, they explored which of the strategies will be most likely chosen by subsidiaries in transitional economies that are characterized by market volatility and uncertainty.

Data were collected from a survey of 131 MNC subsidiaries operating in Croatia. To test the theoretical correlation between knowledge management capabilities and strategic orientation, the authors used the ANCOVA method and controlled for industry, years in international business and firm size.

The results pointed out the recognized necessities for a specific alignment between environment, strategy and knowledge management capabilities. The findings also suggest that there is a positive relationship between knowledge management and performance.

As with most of the research, this paper has limitations. First, all data were collected using self-report surveys raising the possibility of response set biases. Additionally, all data were collected at one point in one country specifically in Croatia.

Clearly, there is substantial interaction between the MNC subsidiary’s environment and the MNC subsidiary’s strategic orientation. Most notably, the environment studied here was at the competitive and consumer market level. Firms need to develop a strategic plan for knowledge management based upon the local environmental influences.

Other firms from Central and Eastern European and developed countries may compare their own environment, strategy and knowledge management practices in MNCs with findings from Croatia to be aware of similarities and market differences.

The strategic employment of knowledge acquisition, conversion and application are examined across firms using the Prospector, Analyzer, Defender and Reactor strategic orientations.

The presence of Latin in heavy metal music ranges from full texts, intros, song and album titles to band names, pseudonyms, and literary quotations. This chapter sheds light on heavy metal's fascination with the history and ‘arcane’ sound of Latin, and investigates its patterns of use in lyrics with the help of Natural Language Processing tools and digitally-available linguistic resources. First, the authors collected a corpus of lyrics containing differing amounts of Latin and enhanced it with descriptive metadata. Next, the authors calculated the richness of the vocabulary and the distribution of content words. The authors processed the corpus with a morphological analyser and performed both a manual and a computational search for intertextuality, including allusions, paraphrase and verbatim quotations of literary sources. The authors show that, despite it being a dead language, Latin is very frequently used in metal. Its historical status appears to fascinate bands and lends itself well to those religious, epic and mysterious themes so characteristic of the heavy metal world. The widespread use of Latin in metal lyrics, however, sees many bands simply reusing Latin texts – mostly from the Bible – or even misspelling literary quotations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction of pricing strategies with other aspects of launch, in particular, timing, logistics/inventory strategy, and coordination with support organizations, and the effect on profit and competitive performance.

The paper presents an empirical study of 215 recent new product launches, focusing on pricing and other strategic and tactical launch decisions and the resulting profitability and competitive performance. Clusters of new product launches are identified and the profitability and competitiveness of each cluster are discussed.

The paper finds that some clusters are related to greater success than others. The most profitable and competitively successful cluster contained launches supported by solid market research and marked by good timing decisions. By contrast, the least profitable/successful cluster were higher price launches unsupported by adequate research.

The study is limited by the fact that the sampling frame is made up of members of a professional association of product development and management, and may therefore be more representative of “best practice” in new product development (NPD) than of NPD in general. The authors believe the use of the key informant method is justified in this study, however this method has been criticized in the past.

The pricing decision for a new product is sometimes oversimplified as a “high‐low” or “skimming versus penetration” choice. The study finds that the actual effect of pricing on ultimate success is much more complex, and that one must consider not only price level, but also the timing of the launch, the logistics and inventory strategy, the extent of market research, testing, and planning, and so forth.

Most new product research for the past two decades has focussed on new product development and product innovation. Only a few product launches have been discussed in specific fields. The purpose of this paper is to fill the literature gap regarding enhanced product launch performance by using the customer relationship.

From the contract manufacturer’s perspective, the authors propose that the customer relationship and senior management involvement affects lean launch execution. The customer relationship includes both cooperativeness and behavior monitoring. Studies have suggested that a lean launch exerts a direct influence on new product performance and marketing performance. We used a questionnaire to collect data to test the postulated research model and hypotheses from project, account, and purchasing managers in the high-tech manufacturing industry.

The results provided compelling evidence that the customer relationship exerts a positive effect on lean launch, which in turn exerts a positive effect on new product performance. Although lean launch execution affected marketing performance through new product performance, the direct effect on marketing performance was non-significant. Senior management involvement exerted an indirect influence on lean launch performance through cooperativeness.

This paper suggests and empirically tests a model to explain how contract manufacturers manage brand-customer relationship through cooperativeness and behavior monitoring, leading to higher levels of lean launch execution toward new product performance.

In the wake of the growing popularity of the open innovation approach, leveraging suppliers as external sources of innovation has attracted increasing interest from scholars and practitioners. Successful supplier involvement largely depends on an effective performance measurement process, but both supply chain management and innovation management literature have paid limited attention to this aspect. This paper aims to fill this gap by illustrating how companies measure the performance of the suppliers involved in their innovation projects and what role is played by the purchasing department.

This study interviews project stakeholders from nine different organizations acting as focal companies in the supply chains of various industries. This paper complements this on-field information with a vast amount of data collected from secondary project documents. Structured data coding and analysis allow us to discuss how companies redesign their performance measurement systems to ease the collaboration with suppliers in innovation and what factors underly these decisions.

The findings show that, in many cases, supplier performance measurement systems deviate from their typical characteristics to support collaboration in innovation projects. They integrate quantitative and qualitative measures, include contributions from different project stakeholders and are oriented toward high visibility and transparency with suppliers. A more substantial redesign of these systems is favored when purchasing is assigned to strategic project responsibilities and possesses higher absorptive capacity.

The results complement the knowledge for the supply chain management field, where supplier performance measurement systems have been discussed in the context of traditional buyer-supplier relationships, but not comprehensively in innovation projects and not considering the role of purchasing. Findings also contribute to the innovation management literature, which has mostly focused on what aspects need to be measured for innovation partners, rather than how to manage the performance measurement process in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the proper matches between institutional business ties (to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and to banks) and firm capabilities (technological capability and marketing capability) in impacting the radical innovation of manufacturing firms in China.

Using the samples of 208 manufacturing firms in China, this study runs three regression models to test all hypotheses.

Ties to SOEs and ties to banks are positively related to radical innovation of manufacturing firms in China. Further, the technological capability and marketing capability have different functions on moderating the relationship between institutional business ties and radical innovation.

The results imply that managers of manufacturing firms should strive to establish close connections to those organizations that are set-up by government in China. In addition, managers should cautious about the synergies between different institutional business ties and different internal capabilities, and properly matching them to develop radical innovation.

This study enriches and extends the managerial ties literature by going beyond previous narrow focus on either business ties or political ties to address a particular type of organization that is set-up by the governments but operate in the business world. The findings of proper ties-capabilities matches provide nuanced understandings to dynamically manage external resources and internal capabilities for the synergetic benefits (e.g. radical innovation). This study also offer a theoretical paradigm (i.e. resource management model) for manufacturing firms to lessen the striking tension between the urgent needs for radical innovation and the hostile ground for conducting radical innovation.

This paper explores openness within new product development (NPD) projects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of breadth, depth and partner newness on product innovativeness and product competitive advantage. The authors also seek to examine the contingent effects of the appropriability regime. The authors make suggestions to academics and practitioners based on the findings.

The authors use a structured survey instrument producing an empirical analysis of 205 NPD projects in the manufacturing sector in the UK. The authors use an ordinary least squares regression model to test hypothesised relationships between openness (breadth, depth and partner newness), product innovativeness, product competitive advantage and the appropriability regime.

The authors find that each of the three dimensions of openness, depth, breadth and partner newness, have a significant but differing impact on product innovativeness. Specifically, the study indicates that breadth has a positive effect but only in the presence of a strong appropriability regime, partner newness has a direct positive effect, and depth a direct negative effect. The authors also find that product innovativeness has a positive impact on product competitive advantage.

Further research should focus on replicating the findings in other countries, search for further moderating factors, such as the stage of the NPD process, and analyse the longitudinal impact of openness within NPD projects.

Organisations are encouraging managers to be more open in their approach to NPD. The authors’ findings suggest that managers need to think about the three dimensions of openness, breadth, depth and partner newness. Their engagement with each of these dimensions depends on the desired outcomes of the innovation project and the strength of patents.

The research extends the extant supplier involvement in new product development literature to examine the effect of up to 11 types of external actor in NPD projects. The authors test a new multi-dimensional measurement scale for the openness construct. The authors show that each dimension has a different relationship with product innovativeness.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model examining the effect of organizational capabilities over new product (NP) performance. Building on a literature review, the model proposes that organizational capabilities (i.e. technological, marketing mix, and customer‐relational capabilities) exert a direct effect over two dimensions of new product competitive advantage (i.e. new product quality and speed), which in turn exert a direct effect over new product customers and financial performance.

Based on a literature review, a structured questionnaire was developed as a primary data collection method. Questionnaires were distributed to a sample of 473 manufacturing organizations in Jordan, out of which 355 were returned and deemed valid for the analysis. Structural equation modeling was applied to examine the model and its related hypotheses.

Out of the three organizational capabilities, only marketing mix capabilities had a direct positive effect over both new product quality and speed to the market, while technological capabilities had no significant direct effect over both dimensions of new product competitive advantage. Customer‐relational capabilities had a direct effect over new product quality only. On the other hand, while new product quality exerted a positive direct effect over both NP financial and customer performance, new product speed to the market had a direct positive effect over NP customer performance only. Finally, NP customer performance exerted a positive direct effect over NP financial performance.

The fact that the paper is a single country study focusing on the manufacturing industry limits its generalization to other industries/contexts. Furthermore, the paper focuses on two dimensions of new product performance, i.e. customer performance and financial performance. Other dimensions of new product performance might add more insights to the effects new product competitive advantage exerts.

Managers must focus their efforts on developing marketing activities in a competitive manner so that they can introduce both quick and satisfactory new products. Hence, a special focus on marketing function is required. Not only traditional activities of marketing, but also generation, utilization, and management of customer information and knowledge are necessary to introduce competitive new products. Marketing function should be given the lead in the new product development (NPD) process. However, to avoid any rivalry between marketing, production, and R&D, top management needs to foster the marketing concept as a philosophy and to spread it across the organization.

The paper adds to the research on sources of new product competitive advantage in developing countries. It also underlines the need to focus on different dimensions of NP competitive advantage, rather than approaching it from a holistic perspective. The paper further underlines that organizations should focus on long‐term results of NPD, such as NP customer performance, rather than solely focusing on short‐term financial results.

Text classification is a widely accepted and adopted technique in organizations to mine and analyze unstructured and semi-structured data. With advancement of technological computing, deep learning has become more popular among academicians and professionals to perform mining and analytical operations. In this work, the authors study the research carried out in field of text classification using deep learning techniques to identify gaps and opportunities for doing research.

The authors adopted bibliometric-based approach in conjunction with visualization techniques to uncover new insights and findings. The authors collected data of two decades from Scopus global database to perform this study. The authors discuss business applications of deep learning techniques for text classification.

The study provides overview of various publication sources in field of text classification and deep learning together. The study also presents list of prominent authors and their countries working in this field. The authors also presented list of most cited articles based on citations and country of research. Various visualization techniques such as word cloud, network diagram and thematic map were used to identify collaboration network.

The study performed in this paper helped to understand research gaps that is original contribution to body of literature. To best of the authors' knowledge, in-depth study in the field of text classification and deep learning has not been performed in detail. The study provides high value to scholars and professionals by providing them opportunities of research in this area.