Search results

The purpose of this study is to explore and summarize the strategies organizations can follow when adopting a multi-sided platform (MSP) business model. MSPs benefit from direct and indirect network effects, quick scaling, fast innovation and new revenue streams.

This study draws from the literature on business model innovation to identify five strategies in which organizations can transform by creating or acquiring an MSP. This taxonomy is confirmed with a classification of 20 MSPs adopted by 18 organizations, 5 short case studies and an interview with an executive involved in the launch of an organization’s MSP.

To implement an MSP, companies can expand their offerings, intermediate their industry with a marketplace, expand to new geographies or market segment, co-innovate their core product or service and co-innovate complementary offerings.

Organizations are presented with five distinct approaches to transform their business model and benefit from MSP interactions. The cases, quotes from executives and analyzes will serve organizations in designing a platform strategy.

This study provides executives and researchers with insights about how organizations can transform their business models with MSPs.

Many startups and incumbents seek to benefit from a platform business model, but the literature on digital platforms has primarily focused on the success of a few blockbuster companies such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb, offering little insights into how to launch and scale platform business in the current competitive business environment. This paper aims to provide managerial insights to help platform leaders successfully launch and scale their businesses.

The study relies on 16 emergent, successful and failed digital platform cases.

The paper organizes platform strategy in a coherent framework and identifies seven mistakes frequently made when managing digital platforms.

Drawing from the authors' experience teaching platform entrepreneurs, advising digital platform startups, and studying and consulting for incumbent organizations seeking to launch or grow platform ventures, the authors extend research on the difficulties of executing a digital platform strategy.

Digital platforms enable the sharing economy and have become dominant business models in many industries. Despite their many benefits, negative externalities associated with the growth of for-profit digital platforms, such as Uber and Google, have ignited concerns among market participants, policymakers and society as a whole, without corrective market forces in sight. One way to address this problem is through a combination of government regulation, criminal enforcement actions and private antitrust litigation. This study aims to analyze an alternative approach, called the nonprofit digital platform (NDP), which is an emerging business model capable of unleashing free-market forces and enhancing the sharing economy’s social benefits.

This study documents the negative externalities (actual and potential) of for-profit digital platforms, uses the product attributes model to explain the market position and strategy of NDPs with respect to for-profit digital platforms and provides recommendations for the successful launch and management of NDPs.

An NDP is a market-based alternative to antitrust, regulation and litigation that enhances the social value created by the sharing economy, but its success requires startup-like management that attracts and retains talent, capital, effective advertising and positive network externalities.

NDPs can force free-market adjustments in the industries they enter, reduce the negative spillovers of for-profit digital platforms and increase social value by incrementally raising the level of competition.

This study conceptually explores the value that nonprofits could bring to the sharing economy in fulfilling its promise and provides strategic recommendations for social-digital entrepreneurs and nonprofits.

To compete in the current digital economy, organizations need a workforce capable of developing novel products/services using digital technologies to create value. The purpose of this study is to explore and understand the antecedents of digital innovativeness so that we can appropriately train the workforce.

The authors theorize a model linking four individual characteristics (entrepreneurial orientation, digital literacy, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and digital technology self-efficacy) to digital innovativeness. They frame four hypotheses and validate them using a survey.

This study reveals that two antecedents of individual digital innovativeness linked to personal beliefs of competency are correlated to an individual's digital innovativeness. It also challenges long-held assumptions in technology education and industry by revealing that two other factors typically associated with digital innovativeness – basic digital literacy and entrepreneurial orientation – do not relate to the individual's digital innovativeness.

We believe that the study is the first of its kind to examine the antecedents of digital innovativeness with an eye on the characteristics necessary to innovate with digital technologies to create value. By hiring employees exhibiting high levels of these characteristics, promoting a culture of experimentation and educating its workforce to gain confidence in its abilities to execute and deploy digital technologies, organizations can secure their strategic position in a business landscape driven by digital innovations.

This purpose of this investigation is to compare the perceptions of competitive advantage through cost leadership and differentiation with sustainable practices of wineries from the USA, Italy and Spain.

Data are collected via self-report web-based surveys in California, Tuscany and Catalonia in 2010-2011 during a severe economic downturn in the wine industry.

Of the 260 respondents among the three country samples, over 75 per cent are family-owned and family-managed. Respondents indicate who has implemented a clear business case for an Environmental Management System (EMS) and who has not. Benefits and challenges of implementing sustainability practices are also addressed.

A comparable percentage of respondents across the three countries indicated a “clear business case for EMS”. Wineries in all three countries perceive that they have competitive advantage through implementation of EMS and commitment to sustainable practices. Top perceived benefits for respondents from the USA and Italy are focused on cost reduction strategies, while top perceived benefits for Spanish respondents are focused on differentiation strategies.

Activities that create competitive advantages for wine businesses in different countries are understudied; this research bridges that gap.

The purpose of this study was threefold: to trace the extent to which digital transformation strategies are being implemented in organizations; to statistically measure, validate, predict and examine how digital leaders perceive a synthesized digital transformation model (DTM); and to explore whether leaders with different demographic characteristics perceive the DTM similarly.

The study authors surveyed 778 leaders/managers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to assess the synthetized DTM consisting of four dimensions and nine perception constructs that represent how leaders manage employees in a digital environment. The survey questions were adapted from the 2014 Westerman leading digital book published in Harvard business press.

The general findings revealed that UAE organizations that were already in the digital transformation stage before COVID-19 reacted and responded extremely quickly to speed up the implementation of their respective digital transformation strategies. We concluded that our proposed and synthetized DTM is valid and predictable, and can be adapted to trace the stages of digital transformation by leaders. A positive relationship was found between the DTM’s four dimensions and their related constructs as perceived by the leaders, regardless of differences in their demographic characteristics.

The synthesized digital transformation model is unique in that the authors believe there is no other research that purports to synthesize, validate and correlate using the digital transformation campus dimensions and its related constructs, reflecting leaders' perceptions toward adopting this campus. As well, this is the first UAE study to explore and compare the perspectives of leaders on their digital practices after COVID-19 in a country that has an established IT infrastructure.

The Spanish lycanthrope arrived successfully to Spanish screens with The Mark of the Wolfman (Eguiluz, 1968), introducing iconic actor and scriptwriter Paul Naschy as werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. This persona would be later developed in more depth in The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (Klimovsky, 1970) and Curse of the Devil (Aured, 1972). Furthermore, Daninsky’s construction responded to the historical repressive context of Francoist Spain, and the strong ideal of masculinity imposed and promoted under the fascist regime (Pulido, 2012).

After a long hiatus in the horror genre, the more recent film Game of Werewolves (Martínez Moreno, 2011) revisits the figure of the Spanish lycanthrope by introducing two different sets of characters embodying two different types of masculinity and, more significantly, by linking the strong, traditional male identity to the myth of the werewolf, paying homage to Waldemar Daninsky.

Thus, through the film’s historically contextualized textual analysis, the chapter seeks to study the myth of the werewolf in twenty-first-century Spain, in relation to the changes in the masculine identity and the historical context to which it refers, exploring the struggle of men to move from the traditional male identity imposed during the dictatorship to a more progressive one.