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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between sales networks and effectiveness in overseas government markets with a focus on overseas home‐country officials, and local key government officials.

A random sample of American firms and their affiliates that have engaged or are engaged in project contracting with African governments was surveyed to collect data for the study using a mail survey.

Connectedness to home‐country overseas actors is positively associated with network connections involving key government officials. This local network connection, in turn, has a positive effect on sales effectiveness.

The study is limited to bidding on projects and selling to government agencies in the African context. More research focusing on different industries and markets are needed to increase knowledge regarding the effect of network connections on international sales effectiveness.

The practical implications of this study include the need for international sales managers to engage in networking involving their home‐country official overseas as well as local government officials. Therefore, exporting advocacy is important. Also, the education and training of international sales people should emphasize the concept of sales network.

The study extends understanding regarding the network approach to international sales in government markets.

This paper seeks to show that information acquired by owners of small firms from certain sources helps the firms to be competitive.

Data for this study were collected by mail from small business owners in three rural counties in West Texas.

Knowledge acquired by owners of small firms from colleagues, salespeople, trade publication family members, seminars, and social contacts is significantly associated with perceived competitiveness. Only three of these sources – colleagues, family members and seminars, have a positive effect on perceived competitiveness. The results suggest the importance of tacit and explicit knowledge for decision making and provide a framework for knowledge acquisition in small firms.

The data for this study were collected from a few rural counties in Texas, more research is required to enhance the generalization of the findings of this study. Future research is to extend this study should examine specific knowledge components associated with marketing effectiveness that are acquired from seminars, family members, and colleagues by small business owners.

The practical implications for this study include the need for small business owners to increase their knowledge acquisition efforts especially from sources such as colleagues, family members and seminars if they want to be competitive.

This study clearly extends the understanding regarding the importance of tacit knowledge as a source of a firm's competitiveness.

Crisis management has developed as an established field of scholarly research in tourism over the last three decades. More recently, the concept of resilience has emerged within this body of literature as a longer-term planning process. However, important knowledge gaps remain, especially with regards to the strategic responses of small tourism businesses in destinations prone to repeated crises.

This chapter reviews the literature related to crisis management and resilience in tourism.

Key knowledge gaps are outlined and discussed in the context of tourism research related to crisis management and resilience, with a specific emphasis on research related to small tourism businesses.

Although crisis management and resilience are fields of research that continue to generate a considerable amount of scholarly enquiry in tourism, particularly with studies related to the impacts of terrorism on tourism destinations and, more recently, the short- and longer-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism, there is very little research related to the role of small tourism businesses in this context, in spite of their key role in the tourism system of destinations around the world.

“We’re watching the wiring of the cerebral cortex of society”, said Jay Walker, founder and vice‐chairman of priceline.com, of the new Internet revolution. “It is dramatically transforming communication and marketing models; it is providing marketers with a new set of capabilities.” But with new capabilities come casualties; Jay Walker cautions that advertising will disappear on the Net, “It may take two or ten years, but it will disappear.” Walker’s hypothesis is borne out by the latest research findings from Roper Starch. In its latest report it identifies the “The advertising‐free zone brought to you by (fill in the brand)” phenomenon. Roper Starch predict “ad‐free zones will be popping up on the Internet soon, a reflection of consumers’ increasing antipathy towards advertising”. This paper examines the opportunities for effective online marketing that go beyond the now omnipresent banner advertisements, and provides guidelines for marketers as to how to harness the “new set of capabilities” through planning and evaluation. The paper has relevance to those involved with public relations in a marketing context (often called marketing PR), and those interested in planning and evaluating online communications campaigns.

We describe an educational intervention pioneered by Te Kawa a Māui (TKaM), the School of Māori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), which was designed to improve the attraction and retention of (particularly) Māori students, by involving them in a school-wide research publication – in this case a digital cultural atlas of Māori Studies. We present and describe the work of 250 students from 10 different Māori Studies courses, who have trialled and submitted map-based assessment for the Te Kawa a Māui Atlas (TeKaMA). We argue that the quality and variety of student work is itself an indication of engagement. We then discuss how digital aspects of the work facilitated engagement, using data from course and assignment evaluations, interviews, informal feedback and an online survey. In line with other findings in the literature, digital aspects of our project had to be carefully managed and balanced, so that they did not disengage students from learning. However, our TeKaMA exercises provided multiple ways by which students could engage, with cultural mapping engaging all students, not just Māori. Our chapter discusses how this was facilitated by digital technology.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain how market and technological knowledge gained by executives interact in a complementary fashion to form the knowledge structure of their business model which in turn enable them to make sense of underlying complexities surrounding management of strategic courses of action.

Unitizing, categorizing, and classifying (UCC) in conjunction with pattern-matching (power and proof quotes) as qualitative methods were used to analyse a series of semi-structured interviews with eight executives from five small manufacturing firms in Australia.

It was found that executives’ business modelling knowledge structure defined as the knowledge base that underpins their business models is developed from four interactions that exist between their market and technological knowledge. Particularly, executives can learn about technological aspects of their business model from market knowledge they acquire and also learn about marketing issues of their business model from technological knowledge they acquire. This interactive nature offers novel insights into versatility and fungibility of executives’ knowledge as a strategic resource that defines how business models evolve and shows how executives use knowledge as a non-rivalrous resource in different ways for developing different business models.

This study is limited in scope to: first, the context of executive of Australian small manufacturing firms and second, limited sources of data.

This study offers important implications for business modelling and strategic formulation of practicing managers. It particularly contributes to a fuller understanding of how executives’ learning contributes to the cognitive formation of business models. It also helps executives gain new insights into the importance of various types of knowledge and the complementary nature of their interactions in the development of novel mental models as a key managerial competency in today’s dynamic markets.

The conceptual framework developed and findings reported in this study have not been previously studied and offer novel insights into the literature on knowledge-based management, competitiveness, and business modelling.

The purpose of this paper is to identify dimensions of competitiveness, factors affecting the competitiveness and building the framework of competitiveness for the Indian auto-component industry and further develop and validate a survey instrument based on the identified factors.

Dimensions of competitiveness and factors affecting it are extracted out after extensive literature review. A theoretical framework is developed using these factors. A survey instrument is developed based on the theoretical framework and validated through a pilot survey.

In total, 30 variables are found to be reliable in establishing the potential indicators of competitiveness. There are three significant contributions to the theory of competitiveness. It provides a theoretical framework of competitiveness to address the current market conditions of volatility. Second, it incorporates the dimensions like supply chain management, presence of global value chains and employee empowerment. Third, it clearly identifies the dimensions of competitiveness relevant in current context, like ethical behavior of firms, protection of intellectual property and innovation.

The proposed approach provides a good basis for assessing the competitive performance of the companies. This can help researchers and practitioners in deciding how to improve the competitiveness of a company.

The research proposes a theoretical framework for measuring the competitiveness of firms from a specific industry. This study indicates the factors affecting the competitiveness of Indian auto-component industry. The findings can be useful for both researchers and practitioners.