Search results

Regulatory initiatives and related technological shifts have been imposing restrictions on data-driven marketing (DDM) practices. This paper aims to find the main restrictions for DDM and the key management theories applied to investigate the consequences of these restrictions.

The authors conducted a unified bibliometric analysis with 104 publications retrieved from both Scopus and Web of Science, followed by a qualitative, in-depth systematic literature review to identify the management theories in literature and inform a research agenda.

The fragmentation of the research outcomes was overcome by the identification of 3 main clusters and 11 management theories that structured 18 questions for future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper sets for the first time a frontier between almost three decades where DDM evolved with no significative restrictions, grounded on innovations and market autoregulation, and an era where data privacy, anti-trust and competition and data sovereignty regulations converge to impose structural changes, requiring scholars and practitioners to rethink the roles of data at the strategic level of the firm.

This study seeks to investigate issues transpiring in green hotels from a human resource perspective which is unlike most green-hotel studies centering on consumer behavioral subjects. It hypothesizes that the employees’ green ability consisting of environmental awareness, environmental knowledge, and environmental skill creates a positive impact on hotels’ green ability and ultimately on the overall performance of hotels. Using alumni from a tourism and hospitality program, this study collects 233 responses from a structured questionnaire survey. The findings indicate that hotel employees approximately contribute toward a fifth of the hotels’ ability to implement greener practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.

An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.

An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.

This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.

The effect of processing parameters on the microstructure of steel produced by laser-based powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a recognized opportunity for property design through microstructure control. Because the LPBF generates a textured microstructure associated with high anisotropy, it is of interest to determine the fabrication plane that would generate the desired property distribution within a component.

The microstructure of 316 L produced by LPBF was characterized experimentally (optical, scanning electron microscopy, glow discharge emission spectrometry and X-ray diffraction), and a finite element method was used to study the microstructure features of grain diameter, grain orientation and thermal parameters of cooling rate, thermal gradient and molten pool dimensions.

The computational tool of Ansys Additive was found efficient in reproducing the experimental effect of varying laser power, scanning speed and hatch spacing on the microstructure. In particular, the conditions for obtaining maximum densification and minimum fusion defects were consistent with the experiment, and the features of higher microhardness near the component’s surface and distribution of surface roughness were also reproduced.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is believed to be the first systematic attempt to use Ansys Additive to investigate the anisotropy of the 316 L SS produced by LPBF.

The objective of the study is to design and validate an instrument that allows organizations to assess their status regarding the adoption of the critical success factors (CSFs) that enable lean six sigma (LSS) implementation in order to achieve the expected benefits.

An extensive literature review was conducted to define the LSS CSFs that have to be considered for the development of the questionnaire that would later be applied across all manufacturing companies on the Northern Mexican border. Once the database was built, a statistical verification of the assumptions required for factor analysis took place. Finally, the due construct validation was carried out to verify whether the proposed instrument measured reliably what it is intended to.

A questionnaire measuring nine CSFs, as well as the benefits associated with the implementation of LSS, was designed and validated through 61 items.

The main limitations of this study are that the research is cross-sectional and that the study was carried out taking as a reference only exporting manufacturing companies located in the border area between Mexico and the United States.

The validated instrument is expected to serve as a useful tool for companies interested in the implementation of LSS.

This study introduces a validated tool for the analysis of LSS CSFs while providing evidence of construct validity and the solid structure of the factors.

This paper aims to analyse the influence of environmental proactivity on cost and differentiation competitive advantages, and to explore the double relationship between environmental proactivity and business performance.

The population consists of all three- to five-star hotels in Spain. A sample of 350 hotels was classified according to environmental proactivity and performance levels, employing a two-step cluster analysis. Significant differences between groups were examined.

The results show two types of environmental behaviour (reactive and proactive), with proactive hotels developing significantly better on both cost and differentiation competitive advantage and achieving significantly higher performance levels. Hotels which achieve above average business performance levels are significantly more environmentally proactive.

The present paper demonstrates that environmental management is related to competitive advantages and business performance. Environmental management systems are more developed in higher category, chain-affiliated and larger hotels. This could be due to having more resources to develop their environmental capability. The environmental proactivity scale employed in this study is presented as a reference measure for hotel managers to benchmark their current practices and implement environmental improvements.

First, measuring environmental proactivity using four managerial systems (operative, information, strategic and technical) is innovative and provides a more detailed approach to measuring environmental proactivity. Second, demonstrating a double association between environmental proactivity and performance provides fresh insights into the relationship between these variables.

Intrapreneurship (IP) and Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) are a paradigm in which the current global scenario of increased homeoffice and professional globalization can have the capacity to stimulate professionals’ autonomy and new business orientations able to re-invent new strategies, services, technologies and even leadership development. This study, of an exploratory nature, aims to analyze the synchronicities between IP and SHRM, raised by relational dynamics translated into leadership, organizational culture and individual practices having as a facilitating factor technology as an agent of change for continuous improvement (based on the Kaizen philosophy). It is supported by a qualitative analysis through a case study of a leading Portuguese group, Grupo Salvador Caetano, which has been in existence for 75 years.

The results demonstrate that dynamic relations are the synchronicities of IP and SHRM as long as stimulated and transmitted to collaborators, and that technology, facilitated these processes. The flexibility of SHRM, the sequence of delegation and implementation of relational dynamics must be the key for the synchronicities of SHRM and IP to be two phenomena that go side by side and contribute to more effective performance and evolution among collaborators, as they support each other in creating firms’ value for customers. Some contributions to theory and practice, raised through a logic of “in-house entrepreneurship,” are also presented at the end of the study.

Topology optimization of structures under self-weight loading is a challenging problem which has received increasing attention in the past years. The use of standard formulations based on compliance minimization under volume constraint suffers from numerous difficulties for self-weight dominant scenarios, such as non-monotonic behaviour of the compliance, possible unconstrained character of the optimum and parasitic effects for low densities in density-based approaches. This paper aims to propose an alternative approach for dealing with topology design optimization of structures into three spatial dimensions subject to self-weight loading.

In order to overcome the above first two issues, a regularized formulation of the classical compliance minimization problem under volume constraint is adopted, which enjoys two important features: (a) it allows for imposing any feasible volume constraint and (b) the standard (original) formulation is recovered once the regularizing parameter vanishes. The resulting topology optimization problem is solved with the help of the topological derivative method, which naturally overcomes the above last issue since no intermediate densities (grey-scale) approach is necessary.

A novel and simple approach for dealing with topology design optimization of structures into three spatial dimensions subject to self-weight loading is proposed. A set of benchmark examples is presented, showing not only the effectiveness of the proposed approach but also highlighting the role of the self-weight loading in the final design, which are: (1) a bridge structure is subject to pure self-weight loading; (2) a truss-like structure is submitted to an external horizontal force (free of self-weight loading) and also to the combination of self-weight and the external horizontal loading; and (3) a tower structure is under dominant self-weight loading.

An alternative regularized formulation of the compliance minimization problem that naturally overcomes the difficulties of dealing with self-weight dominant scenarios; a rigorous derivation of the associated topological derivative; computational aspects of a simple FreeFEM implementation; and three-dimensional numerical benchmarks of bridge, truss-like and tower structures.

This paper aims to measure and unveil the relationship between customer satisfaction and efficiency levels in the most relevant Brazilian airports.

The authors utilize a two-stage network DEA (data envelopment analysis) and AHP (analytic hierarchy process) model as the cornerstones of the study. The first stage of the network productive structure focuses on examining the infrastructure efficiency of the selected airports, while the second stage assesses their business efficiency.

Although the results indicate that infrastructure and business efficiency levels are heterogeneous and widely dispersed across airports, controlling the regression results with different contextual variables suggests that the impact of efficiency levels on customer satisfaction is mediated by a set of socio-economic and demographic (endogenous) and regulatory (exogenous) variables. Furthermore, encouraging investment in airports is necessary to achieve higher infrastructural efficiency and scale efficiency, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

There is a scarcity of studies examining the relationships among customer satisfaction, privatization and airport efficiency, particularly in developing countries like Brazil.