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Recent guidance from the United States Food and Drug Administration discusses patient-reported outcomes as endpoints in clinical trials (FDA, 2006). Using methods consistent with this guidance, we developed symptom indexes for patients with advanced cancer. Input on the most important symptoms was obtained from 533 patients recruited from National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) member institutions and four non-profit social service organizations. Diagnoses included the following 11 primary cancers: bladder, brain, breast, colorectal, head/neck, hepatobiliary/pancreatic, kidney, lung, lymphoma, ovarian and prostate. Physician experts in each of 11 diseases were also surveyed to differentiate symptoms that were predominantly disease-based from those that were predominantly treatment-induced. Results were evaluated alongside previously published indexes for 9 of these 11 advanced cancers that were created based on expert provider surveys, also at NCCN institutions (Cella et al., 2003). The final results are 11 symptom indexes that reflect the highest priorities of people affected by these 11 advanced cancers and the experienced perspective of the people who provide their medical treatment. Beyond the clinical value of such indexes, they may also contribute significantly to satisfying regulatory requirements for a standardized tool to evaluate drug efficacy with respect to symptomatology.

This paper aims to investigate key antecedents to the use of radical innovation of the business model of a service firm to achieve competitive advantage. “Business model” emerged fairly recently as an academic concept, competing with “sustainable strategic competitiveness”, “strategic fit” (Porter, 1996) and “dominant logic” (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986) to give key explanatory understanding of firm performance.

The article is based on action research, in which the re-engineering of a service business turned into radical innovation of the business model.

Radical innovation (conceived of as a new dominant logic) of the business model of a service firm is shown to give sustainable competitive advantage. It shows how fundamental the concept of business model is to understanding the nature of the business and links it to fundamental academic discussion of recent decades around concepts such as “sustainable competitive advantage”, “structural capital” and “tacit knowing”.

This is based on a case, and more research is needed to generalize the findings.

In contrast to the knowledge management and structural capital evangelization, much tacit knowing cannot be converted to structural capital.

Business model is a central concept to understand business performance, but must not be conceived as all-encompassing. We give a model for what the concept should cover and contrast it with other important models.We show the role of tacit knowledge in a business model.

The death-positive movement can be described as a de-centralised contemporary social movement originating and operating predominantly in the global West, specifically the United States, connecting death workers, educators, artists, journalists, etc., and geared towards encouraging open dialogue about death and dying. It has succeeded in capturing significant media attention over the last few years and is largely driven by its strong social media presence. This chapter looks at ‘playfulness’ within the death-positive movement. Examining the dimension of ‘playfulness’ addresses the affective aspect of communication that in this movement is inseparable from the message. First, the author investigates the aesthetics of representation through death-positive merchandise, produced and advertised by The Order of the Good Death’s (subsequently – The Order) core members. Second, the author considers some of the cultural output produced under the umbrella of death-positivity, but not by the core movement members, specifically taking the first video game to be explicitly marketed as death-positive – A Mortician’s Tale (Laundry Bear Games, 2017) as a case study. Finally, the author analyses the role of entertainment value in the movement’s leaders’ discourse on death, taking leader of The Order Caitlin Doughty’s playful rhetoric on her YouTube channel, Twitter profile, and Instagram pages. The manifesto, found on the movement’s official website (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/) encourages its participants to break the ‘culture of silence’ around death, indicating that the whole premise of the movement is based on the supposed presence of death denial in Western countries. Ultimately, the author argues that by eliciting playfulness, this challenge to the social climate becomes a somewhat jovial and enjoyable endeavour and generates response from outside the movement.

Managers must make numerous strategic decisions in order to initiate and implement a business model innovation (BMI). This paper examines how managers perceive the management team interacts when making BMI decisions. The paper also investigates how group biases and board members’ risk willingness affect this process.

Empirical data were collected through 26 in-depth interviews with German managing directors from 13 companies in four industries (mobility, manufacturing, healthcare and energy) to explore three research questions: (1) What group effects are prevalent in BMI group decision-making? (2) What are the key characteristics of BMI group decisions? And (3) what are the potential relationships between BMI group decision-making and managers' risk willingness? A thematic analysis based on Gioia's guidelines was conducted to identify themes in the comprehensive dataset.

First, the results show four typical group biases in BMI group decisions: Groupthink, social influence, hidden profile and group polarization. Findings show that the hidden profile paradigm and groupthink theory are essential in the context of BMI decisions. Second, we developed a BMI decision matrix, including the following key characteristics of BMI group decision-making managerial cohesion, conflict readiness and information- and emotion-based decision behavior. Third, in contrast to previous literature, we found that individual risk aversion can improve the quality of BMI decisions.

This paper provides managers with an opportunity to become aware of group biases that may impede their strategic BMI decisions. Specifically, it points out that managers should consider the key cognitive constraints due to their interactions when making BMI decisions. This work also highlights the importance of risk-averse decision-makers on boards.

This qualitative study contributes to the literature on decision-making by revealing key cognitive group biases in strategic decision-making. This study also enriches the behavioral science research stream of the BMI literature by attributing a critical influence on the quality of BMI decisions to managers' group interactions. In addition, this article provides new perspectives on managers' risk aversion in strategic decision-making.

We study the decision-making process behind business model change, focusing specifically on the tactics managers employ to gain support for such changes. We first argue for the prominent role of middle management in business model change, and second, we revisit the literature on issue selling and championing as they may apply to business model change decision-making. We subsequently analyze the case of a business model change initiative in the Dutch water authority sector, revealing two specific tactics that middle management employed to obtain top management’s agreement to business model change: leveraging external agreements and continuously informing top management. We discuss how these findings extend and in some ways suggest a rethink of the literature on organizational change. Finally, we describe the specificities of business model change that distinguish it from other types of change. In sum, this paper demonstrates the interest of research at the nexus of business models and organizational change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many consumers to pause and rethink the impacts of their consumption behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore changes to consumers’ preferences and shopping behavior in retail using a sustainable consumption lens to understand the long-term effects of the pandemic on retail services.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants to gain insights into shopping behaviors and preferences during the pandemic and to investigate changes in attitudes or behaviors toward sustainable consumption as a result of the pandemic. Data analysis involved an iterative inductive process and subsequent thematic analysis.

The results reveal a strong move toward sustainable and conscious consumption with three key changes occurring as a result of the pandemic, including changes in consumers’ ethos, move to purpose-driven shopping and drive to buy local and support national.

This paper reveals insights into consumer shopping behaviors and preferences that can potentially counter the collapse of “normal” marketplace activities in the face of the current global pandemic by providing a framework for how retail services can respond, reimagine and recover to move forward long term.

This study uncovers the importance of services marketing in endorsing and promoting sustainable consumption by shaping subtle shifts in conscious consumption as a way to recover from a global pandemic and move to a “new” service marketplace.