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The purpose of the paper is to examine the benefits delivered to traditional retailers from using shopping portals as their entry mechanism to the online trading environment. The paper also aims to highlight the possible drawbacks inherent in such an approach.

A case study approach was used with an online portal, combining documentary analysis and semi‐structured interviews, using a team‐based interviewing approach. This facilitated the development of a multi‐layered picture of the organisation.

Using a shopping portal delivers several benefits to traditional retailers in terms of marketing synergies, site traffic generation, access to web site management and fulfilment services, and the ability to offer customers a multi‐channel retailing experience. Drawbacks may include partner interdependence and turnover, restricted organisational learning and restricted delivery capabilities.

Highlighting the benefits and drawbacks of shopping portals generates guidelines that traditional retailers can consider to help them decide whether such portals are the right choice for their individual firm or not.

This paper expands the literature on the phenomenon of the online portal by demonstrating its potential as a mechanism for traditional retailers to engage in electronic retailing.

Given their immense value-creating potential, ecosystems?and whether to build, buy, or join one?have become a top agenda item in boardrooms around the world.

Haier, a highly successful Chinese multinational corporation has developed an effective set of practices for managing an emergent, ecosystem-based business model.

The Haier case illuminates the unique challenges of leading a sprawling, ecosystem-based enterprise that must continually evolve.

Haier employees fall into three categories? platform owners, microenterprise owners and entrepreneurs.

As a strategic innovator, Haier grouped its independent microenterprises into “Ecosystem Micro-Communities” (ECMs) of loosely connected, multi-disciplinary capability clusters organized around end users.

Most business organizations put lots of thought and effort into how to sell and deliver to customers a product or service that meets their needs at a particular point in time. But they often neglect to think about what is important to the customer to get the most value from the product or service after the sale is complete. For example, customers may be concerned about product maintenance, ongoing monitoring, protection in the event of breakdowns or the need to fund overhaul or replacement of the product when it wears out. The author discusses case examples of companies that do a good job of anticipating and addressing these needs, which often leads to highly profitable recurring revenue streams for providers. The author proposes six key strategies for companies considering going down this path.

In this article, the author cites a number of case examples of businesses that have built recurring revenues from after‐sales service offerings. Examples industries included in the article include the consumer home services and commercial capital equipment. The author then draws lessons that can be applied broadly by any company considering ways to build recurring service revenues from its customers.

The author proposes six strategies for building service plan businesses: create awareness of potential losses; lower the barriers to sign up; make it an easy add‐on; incentivize front‐line salespeople; make it self‐renewing; and trade on your company's good name.

This article sheds light on the economics and benefits of well‐designed service plans. When done well, this can often transform a servicing cost center into a highly profitable business line that can help carry product businesses through lean periods of new product sales.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between audit characteristics (ACs) and audit fees on classification shifting (CS) among German-listed non-financial firms.

Using a sample of 130 German-listed (Deutscher Aktienindex, Mid Cap dax and Small caps Index) firms from 2010 until 2019, this study investigated the impact of audit committee size, audit committee meetings, audit committee financial expertise and audit fees on CS.

This study found the evidence of CS, meaning that managers misclassify recurring expenses in the income statement into non-recurring expenses to inflate core earnings. This study also found that the audit fee ratio, audit committee financial expertise and frequency of audit meetings are negatively associated with CS among German-listed firms. However, the audit committee size does not influence CS.

This study will help the board improve its internal auditing practices and provide essential information to investors to assess how ACs affect the quality of financial reporting.

This study focused on a bank-oriented economy, i.e. Germany, with lower investor protection and low transparency. This paper documents new evidence on how ACs and audit fees impact CS among German firms, as most of the previous studies on CS mainly focused on market-oriented economies such as the UK and the USA.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between board characteristics (BCs) on classification shifting (CS) among listed non-financial German firms.

Using 870 firm-year observations of German non-financial firms from 2010 to 2019 listed on DAX, MDAX and SDAX index, this paper examines the relationship between BCs (board size [BS], board meetings [BM], board independence [BI] and board gender diversity [BGD]) and CS.

This study found that managers of German firms use CS and move recurring expenses to non-recurring expenses to inflate their core earnings. Also, this study found that BCs including BS, BI and BGD have a mitigating effect on CS practices of German non-financial firms. However, the number of BMs does not influence earnings management.

This paper recommends that German firms’ board must be constituted with more independent members and female representation because these board mechanisms help to curb CS.

The focus of this study is Germany, which is a bank-oriented economy with low transparency and investor protection. This paper provides new evidence on how BCs impact CS among German firms, whereas previous CS studies focused mainly on market-oriented economies like the USA and the UK.

Digital solutions (DS) that build on recurring revenue models (RRMs) offer new opportunities to continuously create and capture superior value. However, many firms fail to engage their sales force in digital solution selling (DS selling), leading to agency problems that receive little attention in literature. This study aims to examine the drivers of agency problems that surface in the transition toward DS selling and the sales control systems that resolve these problems.

The authors conducted a qualitative, inductive study. Data were collected from interviews with 72 marketing and sales managers representing 53 industrial firms transitioning toward DS selling.

DS selling is subject to adverse selection and moral hazard caused by motivation-related, opportunity-related and ability-related drivers. Input, capability, activity and outcome controls – detailed in this study – can resolve these agency problems.

The limitations of this study’s methodology and scope suggest several directions for future research. Methodology-wise, the authors mainly relied on cross-sectional interview data from informants in Central and Northern Europe. Scope-wise, more research is needed on the capabilities, processes and steering instruments supporting DS sales. Finally, only now do the authors begin to understand which compensation plans motivate DS selling.

The controls identified in this study help managers to steer their sales force in DS sales.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate DS sales control systems. Thereby, the authors enhance prior understandings of solution selling, agency problems and sales control systems.

The story of budgeting practices in Louisiana strongly resembles its political history. The last decade was no exception. The relatively peaceful beginning of the decade was followed by two major natural disasters in 2005 − Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which suddenly changed the economic outlook of the state. The disaster was followed by a global boom in oil prices which benefited Louisiana greatly. Then, of course, the Great Recession hit. The immediate consequence was a projected budget shortfall of $1.6 billion over upcoming fiscal years 2011 and 2012. Such dramatic events create a perfect opportunity for understanding and analyzing Louisianaʼs “innovations” in the area of budgeting and financial management. Furthermore, the analysis of these developments is enhanced by the multiple perspectives of various participants with intimate knowledge of the political processes and mechanisms employed by the state in its dealings with consequences of the Great Recession.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This case study concentrates on General Motors (GM) product and innovation trajectory over a period from 1990 spanning into a future where electric vehicles become mainstream. Reducing the number of models being manufactured and introducing service-based recurring revenue streams such as the “OnStar” in-vehicle communication service were among the crucial elements that allowed GM to survive against intensifying competition in their market.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists, and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.

This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.

Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.

This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.

The focus of this paper is to highlight the research findings with regard to the performance of client advisors in retail banking by analyzing their revenues and the underlying determinants of those revenues. Retail banking activities are increasingly important to understand in terms of productivity and performance management due to the high degree of competitiveness. This paper takes external and internal determinants of bank advisor revenue performance comprehensively into account. The author also derives practical implications for bank managers.

Based on the theoretical framework, empirical models are developed, which are based on a cross‐sectional ordinary least squares analysis. In total, four regression models are employed – being the base model, and the three variants of that using differing parameters in order to ensure the robustness of the results. The database encompasses quite sensitive and specific data on 521 retail banking client advisors in Switzerland. Additionally, it is enriched by explanatory variables on a regional level considering the degree of competitiveness and the population in a region, which are expected to be important determinants in retail banking.

First, bank advisors with closer proximity to clients and less distance to the community, combined with a longer period of work experience in that field, are more successful with regard to revenue performance. Second, the size of client portfolios, measured in number of clients and assets under management, client acquisition, client retention, the upgrades and downgrades across client segments, all have significant effects on revenue performance. Third, the competition and the population in a specific region need to be included in performance measurement and management by bank managers in order to ensure useful comparability across regions.

The hypotheses, as well as the findings, are also discussed with bank managers in order to validate the results and to enhance their practical relevance to the banking industry. Important practical implications are: first, regional differences and competitive pressures need to be taken into account in the performance measurement systems in order to ensure comparability. Second, collaboration across client segments is crucial and needs to be fostered by appropriate organizational structures and incentives. Third, retail bank advisors, which are close to the clients and have more work experience are most successful, which is important for hiring activities.

A better understanding of the determinants of bank advisor revenue performance is crucial as performance management systems in banking are difficult to predict due to the varying methods of implementation by bank managers in their daily business. This is especially the case for performance measurement and incentive systems, which also entail social implications with view on potentially detrimental effects, for instance for too aggressive targets without properly taking the client's credit worthiness into account. Furthermore, retail banking is a pivotal area in banking as most people are depending on retail banking infrastructure, services and products.

This paper contributes to the current research by improving the understanding of a bank advisor's performance, as there is very limited research in this field to date, especially when considering the quality of empirical data. The paper adds to research by improving bank managers’ understanding of the determinants of a bank advisor's revenue performance. Especially original is the detailed inclusion of external factors such as competition and population, and their effect on the revenues. In addition the analysis is comprehensive and includes a broad range of relevant factors with a high degree of data quality.