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This chapter flips innovation on its head. Instead of validating our ideas in the market, why not facilitate a market already motivated to change to do so. Theoretical and empirical evidence is presented to support this theory, along with tools and techniques enabling Innovation Leaders to deliver radical change. Three case studies are shared showing how successful innovation leaders have researched and developed opportunities for radical innovation.

In demand-driven markets, customer value, sometimes called perceived use value or consumer surplus, is defined by the customer rather than the firm. The value a firm can appropriate, its profits, is driven by the customer’s willingness to pay for the value they receive, adjusted by costs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that helps understand value creation and appropriation in demand-driven markets and shows how to influence them through strategic decision-making.

This paper uses an axiomatic approach combined with an extended analytical formulation of the jobs-to-be-done framework to contextualise demand-driven markets. It mathematically derives implications for managerial decision-making concerning selecting customer segments, optimising customer value creation and maximising firm value appropriation in a competitive environment.

Rooting strategic decision-making in the jobs-to-be-done framework allows distinguishing between what customers want to achieve (goal), what product attributes need to be satisfied (opportunity space/constraints) and what value creation criteria related to features are important (utility function). This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done, the problem of identifying which customer segments to serve, what product to offer and what price to charge, can be formulated as an optimisation problem that simultaneously (rather than sequentially) solves for the three decision variables, customer segments, product features and price, by maximising the value that a firm can appropriate, subject to maximising customer value creation and constrained by the competitive environment.

Applying the derived results to simultaneously deciding which customer segments to target, what product features to offer and what price to charge, given a set of competing products, allows managers to increase their chances of winning the competitive game.

This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done and simultaneously focusing on customers, product features, price and competitors enhances firm profitability. Strategic decision-making is formulated as an optimisation problem based on an axiomatic approach contextualising demand-driven markets.

This paper aims to deepen the current knowledge of seasonality by investigating visitors’ intentional and behavioural patterns during peak and off-peak seasons. It compares the variation in several key behavioural factors, namely, duration of stay, party size, revisit intention, spending and breakdown of spending in different sectors in hospitality and tourism including entertainment, restaurant, accommodation and transportation. Moreover, this research expands the understanding by examining the effectiveness of two innovative strategies of offering a digital app and organising a unique event to tackle seasonal imbalances through stimulating visitors’ intention to change their timing of visit from peak to off-peak periods.

The author initially used a Delphi approach to gather experts’ opinion on the two scenario settings: event organisation and a trip planner app. The scenarios aimed to potentially encourage visitors to change their visit time to off-peak seasons. Then, using a quantitative survey, the travel habits and spending behaviours of 310 participants were captured. Furthermore, the survey assessed their intention to travel during off-peak seasons in response to the implementation of the two innovative strategies.

The results revealed that although the number of visitors who travel in off-peak seasons may be lower, their daily spending is higher than peak season visitors. In addition to total spending per day, the duration of stay, part size, quality of accommodation and re-visit intention of visitors indicated significant variation between peak and off-peak seasons. According to the statistical analysis’ results, organising events (including festivals) proves more effective in encouraging visitors to travel during off-peak seasons compared to digital innovation (i.e. a trip planner app). This finding is in line with the tenets of the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory of innovation.

This study contributes by conceptualising the mechanism of seasonality and its impacts on subsectors of tourism and hospitality. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the few empirical research that compares the behavioural patterns of visitors including their average spending per day between peak and off-peak seasons. Previous studies focused on specific regions or sectors, whereas this research investigates visitors’ behaviour on a broader scale to provide more comprehensive view. Furthermore, this study is novel due to practising an outside-in approach through investigating the effectiveness of the two innovative strategies aimed at addressing seasonality in the hospitality and tourism industry from visitors’ point of view.

This paper aims to identify and prioritize the needs of coworking members. The authors focus on maintaining the existing members rather than attracting new ones.

The authors use two phases and multiple methods. The first phase focuses on a qualitative approach using observations and interviews to uncover and formulate the members’ needs. The second phase focuses on prioritizing the needs using a quantitative approach.

The authors discovered 19 member needs from the coworking spaces. Based on an online survey, the authors classified those needs into three main Kano model’s categories.

The resulting member needs and their strategic priorities provide a useful basis for coworking providers to direct their improvement efforts towards achieving greater member satisfaction.

This paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a consumer-focused alternative for considering the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into services.

The paper reviews and critiques the most popular frameworks for addressing AI in service. It offers an alternative approach, one grounded in social psychology and leveraging influential concepts from management and human–computer interaction.

The frameworks that dominate discourse on this topic (e.g. Huang and Rust, 2018) are fixated on assessing technology-determined feasibility rather than consumer-granted permissibility (CGP). Proposed is an alternative framework consisting of three barriers to CGP (experiential, motivational and definitional) and three responses (communicate, motivate and recreate).

The implication of this research is that consistent with most modern marketing thought, researchers and practitioners should approach service design from the perspective of customer experience, and that the exercise of classifying service occupation tasks in terms of questionably conceived AI intelligences should be avoided.

Indicative of originality, this paper offers an approach to considering AI in services that is nearly the polar opposite of that widely advocated by e.g., Huang et al., (2019); Huang and Rust (2018, 2021a, 2021b, 2022b). Indicative of value is that their highly cited paradigm is optimized for predicting the rate at which AI will take over service tasks/occupations, a niche topic compared to the mainstream challenge of integrating AI into service offerings.

Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) across the United States at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic created entrepreneurial opportunities for sewists and makers. In the United States in March and April 2020, masks were not readily available to the general public from existing retailers and PPE for medical use was being rationed for healthcare workers. Sewists and crafters, professionals and amateurs alike, began making and selling and/or donating masks. For individuals with sewing skills and time, sewing and selling masks became a lifeline financially, personally, and socially. To understand the experiences of people who made and distributed handmade masks during the early months of the pandemic in the United States, an interdisciplinary team developed an online cross-sectional survey instrument using a qualitative-dominated approach with both open and closed questions. This chapter explores themes identified from a sample of 94 participants, predominantly female-identifying, who created an enterprise or added a product line to an existing business. The sample includes individuals who did not identify as a ‘creative entrepreneur’ prior to the pandemic but did identify as an entrepreneur after starting a mask-making venture. Informed by entrepreneurship literature, the authors observed that these nascent entrepreneurs articulated recognisable motivations for social entrepreneurship, showed signs of pre-existing entrepreneurial mindsets, and employed business models and marketing tactics of entrepreneurs, largely without any business training. Implications for the study include increased recognition of latent entrepreneurial readiness, interest of women in social entrepreneurship, and higher levels of business knowledge among women than previously recognised.

As young individuals transition from educational settings to embark on their career paths, their expectations for their future careers become of paramount importance. Ng et al. (2010) examined the expectations of young people in post-secondary education in 2007; those colloquially referred to as “Millennials” or “GenY”. The present study replicates Ng et al.'s (2010) study among a sample of post-secondary students in 2019 (referred to as Generation Z or GenZ) and compares the expectations of young adults in GenY and GenZ.

This study employs a time-lag comparison of GenY and GenZ young career entrants based on data collected in 2007 (n = 23,413) and 2019 (n = 16,146).

Today's youth seem to have realistic expectations for their first jobs and the analyses suggest that young people continue to seek positive, healthy work environments which make room for work–life balance. Further, young people today are prioritizing job security and are not necessarily mobile due to preference, restlessness or disloyalty, but rather leave employers that are not meeting their current needs or expectations.

Understanding the career expectations of young people allows educators, employers and policymakers to provide vocational guidance that aligns those expectations with the realities of the labor market and the contemporary career context.

While GenY was characterized as optimistic with great expectations, GenZ can be described as cautious and pragmatic. The results suggest a shift away from opportunity, towards security, stability, an employer that reflects one's values and a job that is satisfying in the present.