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The purpose of this paper is to study two aspects of new product development (NPD) success – the impact of learning and the impact of structure – are studied.

A multiple case study method within a single setting consisting of in-depth interviews of two teams that developed successful, award-winning products and two teams that developed unsuccessful products.

Case 1: flexibility and expertise permitted learning and radical redefinition of the product mid-project and commercial success. Case 2: flexibility enabled adding expertise which was instrumental in success, iterating permitted optimizing pricing. Case 3: flexibility led to focusing on technical issues to the exclusion of commercial viability. Case 4: flexibility led to skipping market definition and partnering with a particular customer whose situation was idiosyncratic. Cross-case analysis: flexibility in teams with both technical and commercial expertise yielded success. Flexibility permitted teams consisting of narrow experts to invest development resources in products with insufficient market.

This paper argues that the right balance between structure and flexibility is dependent on the level of expertise of the members of the NPD project teams. However, getting this balance right is not a sufficient condition for NPD success. The cases were theoretically blocked to develop theoretical insight, but additional cases are needed for a strong test of theory.

The more experienced team members are, the more the project benefits from flexibility. Conversely, an inexperienced team will benefit from a more structured process. Projects require iteration. The dichotomy between structure and flexibility is false: the most expert teams benefit from some structure. The most inexperienced teams must employ flexibility to learn.

The analysis combines the virtues of the stage-gate school and the flexibility school previously thought mutually exclusive.

Typically, business‐to‐business (B2B) promotions are price cuts that drain profits and erode brand equity for the sake of short‐term volume gains. This paper shows how to elevate B2B promotions to a central place in implementing strategy – creating extra value for customers, building brand equity, improving profits, and permanently increasing sales.

The article examines nine successful non‐price promotions and shows the patterns and principles that made them work.

The article posits a new conceptual model that organizes the findings from the nine cases: “the customer learning curve.” Strategy‐driven promotions move customers down this mental process from having a need – but perhaps not even knowing it – all the way through to being advocates for the firm and its products.

The model provides a framework for analyzing existing, and designing future, decision‐oriented market research.

Strategy‐driven promotions focus on overcoming barriers to purchase. The best are specific (don't ask the promotion to do the whole job); creative (go beyond the conventional, “drop the price” thinking); customer‐centered (borrow interest from something the customer really cares about); measurable (if you can't measure it, you can't learn from it); and brand enhancing (don't fall into the trap of eroding brand equity).)

The customer learning curve is an original conceptual model and practical problem‐solving tool. The nine cases provide original examples.

This study aims to investigate the marketing actions that companies performed during the Great Recession, and the resulting effect on firms' performance. The purpose is to discover what marketing actions companies performed, what was the impact to the firm, and why the actions taken either helped them to excel, simply survive, or cease to exist.

The study uses a discovery‐oriented approach, consisting of a pilot study, a survey, field interviews and a focus group interview.

The findings suggest that successful companies invest in current customer relationships by strengthening their key account teams and by working with their clients who are suffering financial difficulties. Successful firms also began implementing new marketing techniques such as social media and crowd‐sourcing.

This study contributes to previous research in marketing that focuses on marketing activities during recessions.

Technological innovations that resulted in the emergence and widespread adoption of digital communication in recent years have led to a surge of academic and practitioner interest in its implications for the co-creation of value and customer engagement. However, in comparison to the attention given to the study of customer engagement in consumer markets, few studies have examined its key role in business markets. This paper aims to examine the impact of digital communication on value co-creation and customer engagement in inter-organizational relationships in business networks.

Co-creation of value and customer engagement in business networks occurs among interconnected organizations that are partners in intermediate transactions. The paper develops a matrix of inter-organizational engagement among partners in business networks and propositions linking digital communication to value co-creation and inter-organizational engagement.

The relationships among network organizations may be characterized by the extent of relational exchange and inter-organizational bonds among them. Four types of inter-organizational engagement emerge: transactional partners, loyal partners, trusted partners and engaged partners. The partners co-create value to better satisfy customers.

The paper is an initial attempt to develop a conceptual understanding of customer engagement in business markets and formulate propositions that can be further investigated. Networks of partner organizations co-create value, altering their input and output markets, value addition and products, permitting greater flexibility and customization in satisfying the needs of customers.

The ability afforded by digital communication for real-time interactive communication enables individuals from multiple departments and hierarchical positions within multiple organizations dispersed across geographic locations and industries to maintain contact, quickly and easily communicate task information, build trust and commitment in long-term relationships with network partners and provide superior customer value.

The paper represents a unique attempt to understand the nature of customer engagement in business markets. It discusses how digital communication alters market transactions among partner organizations in a network by facilitating changes in their make/buy decisions. It develops a matrix of inter-organizational engagement in business networks and propositions that improve understanding of the customer engagement concept and provide the foundation for strategies to better satisfy customers.

This study aims to analyze the effects of economic inequalities on state capture in Latin America. Economic inequalities are the defining issues of our time. While the effect of economic inequality has been explored before on its impact on state capture in Latin America, it has often been done in a qualitative manner. Moreover, most quantitative research to date uses poor proxy variables to assess the impact of inequalities on corruption and or state capture, such as the Gini coefficient, which suffers from a lot of missing data.

A random effects regression model is used to enable the exploitation of between level variation to greater generalize the results across the Latin American region while minimizing bias to the coefficient estimates.

The results demonstrate that the top 1% wealth inequality is highly statistically significant and positive in explaining the variation in state capture. The greater the share of wealth the 1% hold, the more state capture we should expect.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents the first empirical study using a novel variable, the top 1% share wealth inequality derived from the World Inequality Database that directly measures the top 1%’s share of wealth overall. The study examines the empirical effect of the top 1%’s share of wealth inequality in contributing to state capture. Nineteen Latin American countries are analyzed across the temporal period 1996–2021.

This paper investigates the factors responsible for the emergence of different arrangements of state–society relations. Being concerned with the relations related to the industrial sector, this study focuses more on state–business–labor relations (SBLRs), especially on power dynamics between the main actors in these relations, namely, the state, tycoons, entrepreneurs and labor.

Based on power dynamics, four SBLR modes are identified and differentiated according to state power vis-à-vis non-state actors and tycoon power vis-à-vis the other non-state actors. The balanced mode is characterized by balanced power relations among the four considered actors. In the capture mode, tycoons are more powerful than other actors, including the state, although other nonsocial actors have organizational rights. The crony mode has powerful state, subservient tycoons who enjoy high levels of favoritism and low organizational power for the other social actors. Finally, the state-dominance mode has powerful state, low levels of favoritism to tycoons and low organizational power for all social actors. The paper then explores the factors responsible for the emergence of each of these modes by investigating the factors’ effects on state power and favoritism to tycoons. The investigated factors include historical political–economic, geographical, legal and cultural factors. The hypothesized effects of these factors are then tested using a random-effects probit regression model, investigating how the different factors affect the probability of the existence of the studied SBLR modes.

The results support much of the hypothesized relations and place more emphasis on some of the investigated factors. Earlier development is clearly responsible for the emergence of either the balanced or the state-capture SBLR mode. Geographical conditions favorable for development, such as latitude and metal richness, also lead to the emergence of either mode. The communist heritage, and more accurately the post-communist economic and incomplete political liberalism of the transition stage, contributed to the emergence of the state-capture SBLR mode. The British legal system, with the power it provides to non-state actors through the independence of judges and other measures, contributes to the emergence of the balanced SBLR mode. Cultural factors are largely responsible for the emergence of the crony SBLR mode, especially hierarchical and collectivist cultures, as well as ethnic fractionalization. On the other hand, the culture of Confucians has the strongest influence on the emergence of state dominance, while other cultures play a marginal role in its rise, and ethnic fractionalization marginally defuses the ability of the state to dominate without resorting to favoritism. Finally, access to rich natural resources, by enriching the state independently from social actors’ financial resources (e.g. taxation), marginally increases the probability of the emergence of the state-dominance mode.

There is room for path dependency to explain the emergence of different SBLR modes in many countries. Unfortunately, the introduced regression model and any quantitative empirical work would not be able to effectively investigate such a process. Instead, an approach depending on case studies and a deeper investigation of country-specific historical political development is needed to complement the research done here. Conducting such an additional quest would help in reaching a more comprehensive understanding of why different countries have different SBLR modes. This should ultimately help in answering an equally important question: How to reverse engineer the emergence of favorable SBLR modes?

Although this paper did not investigate the economic merits or mischiefs of each of the studied modes, it is plausible to think of the balanced SBLR as the best mode. This is supported not only by the fact that most of the countries of this mode are developed countries but also by the attractiveness of the power dynamics governing this mode—a more balanced power among different SBLR actors. While some factors are almost impossible to replicate, for example, geographical factors, reform could target the factors that could be changed or mitigated. This is true for legal reform, especially for fostering the independence of judges. Culture is often regarded as a sticky institution. However, this is not always true, even though the change happens in the long run. A sort of dynamism should always be considered when referring to culture through time and space. Institutional reform could be instrumental in the long run in this regard. Conducting such reform with the help of such “exogenous” institutions should always consider the match between these institutions and “endogenous” institutions, such as culture. That is to say, the connection between democratization, fostering accountability and curbing favoritism and cultural values leaning toward these principles should be firmly established. Finally, a point of optimism is that—based on the results of this paper—reaching a high state of development could increase the chances of realizing a more balanced SBLR mode in the long run.

This paper represents a novel contribution to a topic that has hardly been addressed in the literature. The methodology that is used identifies different state–society relation modes and focuses on power relations in SBLRs is another important contribution to the present literature in many fields, such as institutional economics, socioeconomics and political economy.

Even though social media are nowadays used in the frame of public governance to ensure citizens’ major participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, this utilization has not been expanded yet in the field of education, whose key role focuses on the cultivation of active citizenship, as it is promoted through participation. The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership’s views of Greek Secondary and Tertiary Education on the potential use of social media for participatory decision-making processes in order to identify if the e-participation model could be implemented in the Greek education field as in other public domains.

An exploratory research was elaborated, employing a survey design of quantitative method in order to explore Greek educational organizations leadership’s perspectives toward social media usage in participatory decision-making processes.

The research reveals Greek educational leadership’s positive view on the potential effects of social media usage in participatory decision-making processes and highlights anticipated benefits as well as problems to be faced, indicating the foundation for Greek leaders to implement social media in their leadership practices and exploit their affordances as in e-governance shifts.

Bringing the concept of e-participation and crowd sourcing model – key features in e-governance initiatives through social media usage – in education field, Greek educational leadership is informed to consider social media utilization more methodically in the context of participatory decision-making processes, updating simultaneously existing leadership practices.

Up till now, social media usage in participatory decision-making processes in educational settings has hardly received attention.