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Gillette’s historically successful “razor and blade” business model (RBM) has been a promising benchmark for multiple businesses across diverse industries worldwide in the past several decades. The extant literature deals with very few nuances of this business model notwithstanding the fact that there are several variants of this business model being put to practical use by firms in diverse industries in grossly metaphorically equivalent situations.

This study adopts the 2 × 2 truth table framework from the domains of mathematical logic and combinatorics in fleshing out all possible (four logical possibilities) variants of the razor and blade business model for further analysis. This application presents four mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive possibilities on any chosen dimension. Two major dimensions (viz., provision of subsidy and intra- or extra-firm involvement in the making of razors or blades or both) form part of the discussion in this paper. In addition, this study synthesizes and streamlines entrepreneurial wisdom from multiple intra-industry and inter-industry benchmarks in terms of real-time firms explicitly or implicitly adopting several variants of the RBM that suit their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of evolution in situations that are grossly reflective of the metaphorically equivalent scenario of razor and recurrent blades. Inductive method of research is carried out with real-time cases from diverse industries with a pivotally common pattern of razor and blade model in some form or the other.

Several new variants of the razor and blade model (much beyond what the extant literature explicitly projects) have been discovered from the multiple metaphorically equivalent cases of RBM across industries. All of these expand the portfolio of options that relevant entrepreneurial firms can explore and exploit the best possible option chosen from them, given their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of growth.

This study has enriched the literature by presenting and analyzing a more inclusive or perhaps comprehensive palette of explicit choices in the form of several variants of the RBM for the relevant entrepreneurial firms to choose from. Future research can undertake the task of comparing these variants of RBM with those of upcoming servitization business models such as guaranteed availability, subscription and performance-based contracting and exploring the prospects of diverse combinations.

Smart entrepreneurial firms identify and adopt inspiring benchmarks (like razor and blade model whenever appropriate) duly tweaked and blended into a gestalt benchmark for optimal profits and attractive market shares. They target diverse market segments for tied-goods with different variants or combinations of the relevant benchmarks in the form of variegated customer value propositions (CVPs) that have unique and enticing appeal to the respective market segments.

Value-sensitive customers on the rise globally choose the option that best suits them from among multiple alternatives offered by competing firms in the market. As long as the ratio of utility to price of such an offer is among the highest, even a no-frills CVP may be most appealing to one market segment while a plush CVP may be tempting to yet another market segment simultaneously. While professional business firms embrace resource leverage practices consciously, amateur customers do so subconsciously. Each party subliminally desires to have the maximum bang-to-buck ratio as the optimal return on investment, given their priorities ceteris paribus.

Prior studies on the RBM have explicitly captured only a few variants of the razor and blade model. This study is perhaps the first of its kind that ferrets out many other variants (more than ten) of the razor and blade model with due simplification and exemplification, justification and demystification.

Global trends like digitalization and verticalization increase the complexity within the retail industry and decrease the explanatory power of prevailing retail concepts. This paper responds to the call for new ways of understanding retailers’ business activities. The purpose of this paper is to structure and stimulate the emerging conceptual debate about retail business models (RBM) by developing a literature-based and empirically-substantiated generic retail business model framework (generic RBM).

The research is based on a systematic literature review and a qualitative study with 16 expert interviews in the German retail industry.

The paper identifies six core elements and respective sub-elements of a generic RBM. Contrasting the literature with empirical data, it confirms some common elements (e.g. “value proposition”) but invalidates others (e.g. “organization” or “governance”). The empirical findings add retail specifics like “horizontal integration,” “vertical integration” and “partners and networks” as core elements of a generic RBM.

The paper is the first to develop a generic RBM based on a systematic literature review and an empirical study across retailers. The resulting generic RBM can be used as a retail concept for systemizing and typifying the appearances of retailers in retailing theory. It can also be used for building, analyzing and comparing RBMs in retailing practice. The paper further provides a guideline for generic business model design with a hybrid approach based on literature and qualitative data.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to incorporate contextual information into collaborative filtering (CF) based on the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and deep belief networks (DBNs). Traditionally, neither the RBM nor its derivative model has been applied to modeling contextual information. In this work, the authors analyze the RBM and explore how to utilize a user’s occupation information to enhance recommendation accuracy.

The proposed approach is based on the RBM. The authors employ user occupation information as a context to design a context-aware RBM and stack the context-aware RBM to construct DBNs for recommendations.

The experiments on the MovieLens data sets show that the user occupation-aware RBM outperforms other CF models, and combinations of different context-aware models by mutual information can obtain better accuracy. Moreover, the context-aware DBNs model is superior to baseline methods, indicating that deep networks have more qualifications for extracting preference features.

To improve recommendation accuracy through modeling contextual information, the authors propose context-aware CF approaches based on the RBM. Additionally, the authors attempt to introduce hybrid weights based on information entropy to combine context-aware models. Furthermore, the authors stack the RBM to construct a context-aware multilayer network model. The results of the experiments not only convey that the context-aware RBM has potential in terms of contextual information but also demonstrate that the combination method, the hybrid recommendation and the multilayer neural network extension have significant benefits for the recommendation quality.

Result-based management (RBM) is common approach used in the development sector to initiate, plan and implement projects. However, to the knowledge of the authors the approach has hardly been used in delivering projects in other sectors, for example, information technology, infrastructure or business. The purpose of this paper is to document a case study in which the RBM approach was used to guide the delivery of a business project in Botswana.

A case study strategy was used to document the delivery process of the project. Data were collected from a variety of sources that included review of documents, interviews, focus discussions and a site visit. The content analysis technique was used to analyse the collected data.

The case illustrates the possibility of using the RBM approach to initiate, plan and implement a project in the business sector.

Being a case study, the approach needs to be tested with more case studies.

Apart from illustrating the possible use of RBM approach, the paper illustrates systematic processes used in the case study for project delivery. It also outlines some of the resultant challenges which may be appreciated by practitioners, academics and trainees.

The use of RBM approach in guiding the delivery of a business project.

The purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical model that integrates two different mechanisms to explain knowledge sharing. First, adapted from traditional reward systems, the calculative-based mechanism (CBM) serves as the benchmark. Second, the relational-based mechanism (RBM) plays a complementary role. RBM is founded on social interaction and consists of two social network constructs: relational deposits (i.e. network and valued network centralities) and withdrawals (i.e. network and valued network densities).

This study collected survey data in collaboration with a health-care organization. The data collected from 180 respondents were tested against the research model using a partial least squares analysis.

This study found the CBM to be beneficial for knowledge sharing. The findings support the RBM prediction of a positive relationship between the deposit construct and knowledge sharing, but fail to support the RBM prediction on the withdrawal construct. The RBM explained about 15 per cent more of the variance than the CBM. In addition, the withdrawal construct of the RBM predicts respondents’ beliefs in reciprocal obligation.

RBM does not as strongly associate with economic benefits as the CBM, but it still plays a noteworthy role in increasing the possibility of an individual knowledge sharing.

The study is the first to propose the concepts of relational deposits and withdrawals. The authors use a roster-based sociometric approach to collect the social network data and to benchmark the effect of RBM with that of CBM on individual knowledge sharing and his/her beliefs in reciprocal obligation.

Recent US federal court rulings have provided new guidance on the use of economic models of bargaining in estimating reasonable royalty damages in patent cases. After reviewing relevant case law and providing an overview of the bargaining range approach, we describe one analytic method (the Rubinstein Bargaining Model) for developing a quantitative starting point with which to divide a bargaining range and explain how it can be tied, at least in part, to the facts and circumstances of the parties around the time of the Hypothetical Negotiation. We also describe how this approach can be used in conjunction with an analysis of other quantitative and qualitative factors related to the bargaining power of the parties, to help estimate reasonable royalty damages.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contribution of public value theory in understanding executive adaptation of results‐based management within a public sector environment.

An exploratory case study design was performed in three separate sectors of the Canadian federal government. The key research data consisted of 79 executive interviews.

The research found that the elements of public value theory contribute to an increased understanding of the constraints in adopting results‐based management. However, the research concluded that the components of public value theory, service, outcomes and trust, do not have an equal weight in their contribution to increased understanding. The research found that greater managerial control and influence over programme outcomes supported stronger acceptance of results‐based management.

This paper examines three areas of the Canadian public sector based on qualitative case studies. Thus, the findings, while noting strong replication between case studies, represent analytical not statistical generalizations.

The paper demonstrates conceptual issues underlying the implementation of results‐based management within the public sector.

This research examines and assesses how public sector executives have responded to changes introduced by results‐based management, through the perspectives of executive public servants themselves. In seeking greater understanding of the underlying drivers of results‐based management adaptation, this paper investigates the theoretical contribution of public value theory in assessing the executive behaviour.

Because of the extensive user coverage of news sites and apps, greater social and commercial value can be realized if users can access their favourite news as easily as possible. However, news has a timeliness factor; there are serious cold start and data sparsity in news recommendation, and news users are more susceptible to recent topical news. Therefore, this study aims to propose a personalized news recommendation approach based on topic model and restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM).

Firstly, the model extracts the news topic information based on the LDA2vec topic model. Then, the implicit behaviour data are analysed and converted into explicit rating data according to the rules. The highest weight is assigned to recent hot news stories. Finally, the topic information and the rating data are regarded as the conditional layer and visual layer of the conditional RBM (CRBM) model, respectively, to implement news recommendations.

The experimental results show that using LDA2vec-based news topic as a conditional layer in the CRBM model provides a higher prediction rating and improves the effectiveness of news recommendations.

This study proposes a personalized news recommendation approach based on an improved CRBM. Topic model is applied to news topic extraction and used as the conditional layer of the CRBM. It not only alleviates the sparseness of rating data to improve the efficient in CRBM but also considers that readers are more susceptible to popular or trending news.

The Reduced Basis Method (RBM) generates low-order models of parametrized PDEs to allow for efficient evaluation of parametrized models in many-query and real-time contexts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of the RBM in microwave semiconductor devices, governed by Maxwell's equations.

The paper shows the theoretical framework in which the RBM is applied to Maxwell's equations and present numerical results for model reduction under geometry variation.

The RBM reduces model order by a factor of $1,000 and more with guaranteed error bounds.

Exponential convergence speed can be observed by numerical experiments, which makes the RBM a suitable method for parametric model reduction (PMOR).

International development practice has had as its dominant paradigm the rational-analytic model of project planning, management and evaluation. This is reflected in the widespread adoption by donor agencies of results-based management (RBM), side by side with conventionally used tools for monitoring and evaluation (including logical framework analysis (“logframe”), logic model and results frameworks). Donor agencies rely upon such tools to generate the evidence base for measuring “success” across the spectrum of their work, even though projects differ enormously in their nature, scope and time-span. Process-led capacity development projects and input-led infrastructural or straightforward service delivery projects require very different yardsticks of performance monitoring and appraisal. Drawing on insights from the complex adaptive systems (CAS) literature, the purpose of this paper is to explore how projects focused on capacity development necessitate a more eclectic approach, including – but not restricted to – RBM methodology.

Using the insights of CAS theory, and with particular reference to projects which have capacity development as their prime focus, this paper explores a broadening of conventional project management practices.

The paper posits an integrative approach to managing international development projects focused on capacity development – one which would recognise the values of instrumental utility and goal-setting associated with the application of the tools of RBM, while situating that within a more open, system focused and holistic approach to projects and their outcomes, placing emphasis on context, adaptability and learning.

The research enquiry presented is discursive rather than empirical, and builds on established theory and constructs of three distinct conceptual fields: first, the RBM approach to project and programme implementation; second, the “complexity” strand of organisational management literature; and third, the capacity development strand of international development discourse.

The paper intersects disciplinary boundaries between project management, organisational studies and international development theory and practice.