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Traditionally, senior management has focussed on a customer‐oriented search for competitive advantage in improving its marketing performance. There have been many systems, procedures and measurement approaches created for improving a company’s overall performance which have achieved varying levels of success. Until recently, little attention has been given to the consideration of the most suitable management competences for improving the quality of marketing decision making in services management. Takes a conceptual approach to addressing the question of what management competences might be and how they can be integrated for services marketing. Considers pertinent issues in relation to relevant marketing management competences which are necessary if the quality of marketing decision making in services is to be improved.

The paper aims to propose a novel strategic approach, named a Scorecard‐Markov model, combining an evaluation scorecard and a hidden Markov model (HMM) for new product idea screening (NPIS) decisions.

A scorecard is constructed to evaluate new product ideas on several criteria, including customer needs, marketing strength, competency, manufacturing compatibility, and distribution channels, involving a consideration of risk buy. A HMM is then developed accordingly to predict the overall performance of new ideas in terms of success probability. To implement the model, it is trained and tested by the historical dataset of a world‐class, leading company in the power tools industry through a case study.

The approach is proven to be encouraging and meaningful. The scorecard can serve as a guide for new product idea evaluation to convert experts' linguistic judgments to quantifiable and comparable data, whereas the HMM can determine the success probability of new product ideas to support NPIS decision making based on their computed evaluation performance. The optimal cut‐off value for making either a go or kill decision on each idea can thus be determined. Concerning the case company, a go decision should be made when the probability lies in the interval [0.53, 1].

The model can prevent companies from undertaking risky and failed new product development projects. Further, it is believed that this study can assist decision makers in choosing winning new product ideas towards commercialization in an effective and certain manner, thus enhancing the new product success rate in the innovation industry.

The approach incorporating the scorecard method and HMM is novel. Illustrated by the case study, the application of this approach to NPIS decisions is confirmed to be effective.

The reason for this study is to help increase understanding concerning the service elimination decision and implementation since it remains a highly under‐investigated topic. In doing so, an empirical investigation of the successful vs not‐so‐successful elimination practices from eight service industries were examined.

The data were secured by means of a lengthy and structured questionnaire, instrumented through personal interviews as part of a much wider examination of the service elimination decision‐making process in Greece entitled “Project ServDrop”. The companies included in the sample were drawn from a population of 1,964 service companies listed under selected service sectors, namely, insurance, banking, advertising, professional services, freight forwarding, marine, telecommunications and lodging.

The analysis reveals that treating the elimination as a strategic issue, considering how resources can be more effectively re‐allocated, paying attention to market consideration regarding the consequences of a potential elimination and adoption of a systematic behavior, building interdisciplinary teams to deal with the decision and keeping the time between the making and the implementation of the decision short, are all important dimensions of “successful elimination”.

However, the findings should be cautiously adopted because of the limitations of the study: the use of a retrospective methodology in the data collection, the use of the key‐informant approach, the limited number of variables included in the conceptual framework are issues that cannot be neglected. Nonetheless future research that will be directed towards tackling these limitations may dispel these concerns.

Despite its limitations, this study has significant implications for practitioners. It mainly points to the strategic nature of the elimination decision and its implications. Also, it unveils certain behavioral changes that must accompany the effort to treat the elimination decision as part of the greater strategy for managing the firm's offerings. Thus, the contribution of this study is twofold. For academia, it is a step forward towards a stronger understanding of the service elimination issues, while, for practitioners, it helps to clarify certain important issues that can help improve the outcome of the decision to drop a service from the firm's portfolio.

When offering product/service bundles to customers, marketers must decide how best to configure the bundles such that consumers do not find the bundle‐choice particularly difficult. This paper examines perceived decision difficulty in selecting from a menu of bundles, where the bundles vary on the number of component services, the number of unique services between competing bundles, and their perceived similarity. It is found that larger bundles make decisions more difficult, more unique services between the competing bundles increases decision difficulty for small, but not large, bundles and similar bundles pose greater choice difficulty than dissimilar bundles. Implications of the results are discussed.

Expert systems are computer systems, built through interaction with actual experts, that mimic human experts within a narrow domain. This paper describes the development of an expert system, NEWPRODEX, designed to screen industrial product concepts, identify potential financial successes, and diagnose opportunities for concept enhancement to improve its chances of success on the international marketplace. A running example illustrating a sample application of the NEWPRODEX system is provided. The concluding section discusses directions for model improvement.

George Lasiter sells special-events T-shirts and must decide how many to order for an upcoming concert. He has high, medium, and low estimates of both concert attendance and the percentage of attendees who will want a shirt. In addition, he has assessed the relative likelihoods of each estimate. The case can be used to introduce or reinforce the fundamental issues surrounding decision making under uncertainty.

In every manufacturing company, irrespective of size, product and other variables, management are constantly involved in quality‐related decisions which have a direct effect on product quality. An analytical method is described for assessing an organisation's approach to quality management. On application, managers are provided with information on the reality of their quality assurance activities. An overview of some of the issues involved in decision making is provided, followed by an outline of the research methodology, and, finally, the “method” is presented with some results arising from its application.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.