1522 research outputs found
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MANAGING INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL FOR A SUSTAINED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE IRISH TOURISM INDUSTRY
Get PDFTwo central questions explored in the tourism literature on organisations and competitiveness are “Why do some tourism firms compete more successfully than others?” and “What can firms do to enhance and sustain their competitive advantage?” Within the extant strategy literature, explanations of performance difference between firms have shifted from industry level external factors to a firm’s internal components. Indeed, the source of sustained competitive advantage is increasingly being associated with the utilisation of the firm’s valuable internal intellectual resource pool (Wernerfelt, 1984; Peteraf 1993; Runyan et al., 2007). Drawing on the resource based (Barney, 1991) and dynamic capabilities views of the firm (Teece et al., 1997), the proposed paper aims to develop a framework for explaining how companies utilise and process the human, relational, and structural capital elements within Intellectual Capital (IC) to generate sustained competitiveness.
It is this paper’s contention that as valuable as the knowledge is within these three capital resources, using them in combination alone will not achieve competitive advantage; rather they must go through a transformative process, which relies on the knowledge management capabilities of the firm to achieve a sustained competitive advantage through IC (Grant, 1996). The author perceives that a firm’s knowledge management capabilities are critical to a firm’s resource deployment and reconfiguration capacities, by acquiring, disseminating and utilising the IC knowledge throughout the organisation and is the link that bridges intellectual capital with sustained competitive advantage (Bontis, 1996). More specifically, the authors see the organisation as a knowledge processing entity that utilizes its IC to generate sustained competitiveness.
However, while a significant amount of empirical work has focused on researching either KM or IC, scant attention has been directed at confirming the basic relationship between the two as a means of generating competitiveness. What has been done relates more to examining the relationship between single dimensions of IC (e.g. social capital) and KM as a means for explaining competitiveness. Therefore the proposed paper will make a unique contribution to a very significant gap in the capabilities and business strategy literature, by conceptualising a holistic model that elucidates the connections between the organizations intellectual resource and its knowledge management capability to generate firm competitiveness. Due to the scarcity of research and interest in this area, it is perceived that our ongoing study will contribute substantially to academic knowledge and practice and should highlight key areas warranting investigation going forward
TOWARDS A RESOURCE-BASED VIEW OF THE FIRM PERSPECTIVE ON ENHANCING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS IN THE HOTEL INDUSTRY
Get PDFThe Irish hotel industry is facing major challenges, with a rapidly increased bed capacity in the sector accompanied by an international economic slump. In addition, hotel guests have increasingly high levels of expectation about the quality of their hotel experience, and are sharing these views through travel sites such as Tripadvisor.com. This reinforces the need articulated in national strategy to enhance the business capability of Irish tourism firms (Fáilte Ireland 2004; Tourism Policy Review, 2003) and in particular, there is an imperative for Irish hotels to establish and maintain more effective relationships with their guests.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents the organisation’s ability to create and maintain profit maximising relationships with its customers (Zablah et al., 2004). However, CRM programmes frequently fail (Sigala, 2005). The objective of this paper is to examine how a Resource-Based View of the Firm (RBV) perspective (Wernefelt, 1984), which links company actions directly to performance (Harmsen and Jensen, 2004) can assist Irish hotels in implementing more effective CRM programmes. The rapid evolution of CRM technologies grants organisations the motivation and the instruments to create strong relationships and enhance customer value (Day and Van den Bulte, 2002). However, this is not the case for all organisations: many companies have failed to forge customer relationships through utilising CRM (Sigala, 2005), which may be due to an over-reliance on the technology aspect (Campbell, 2003; Reinartz et al., 2004). The RBV is proposed as a theoretical perspective to address the failures of CRM. The RBV is a strategic management framework that aims to elucidate the link between idiosyncratic firm resources and differentials in firm performance (Gibbert, 2006; Hatch and Dyer, 2004). It focuses on how specific resource and capability pools are employed to create and sustain competitive advantage. Firms possessing sustained competitive advantage (SCA) will enjoy profit earnings exceeding that of their competition. However, while the RBV shows potential as a theory for examining strategic issues, firms must understand it before implementation efforts are considered (Fahy and Smithee, 1999).
Significant work by Day and Van den Bulte (2002) and Day (2003) on CRM within the RBV framework has identified that the Customer Relating Capability (CRC) provides a more satisfactory model of CRM, they argue that the acknowledgement of the cultural context to developing more effective customer relationships in this capability explains its positive relationship with performance. However, this capability has had limited empirical exploration. Therefore, a research agenda is presented in this paper which proposes examination of the nature of customer-relating capability within the Irish hotel industry. Research should encompass both senior managers and front-line staff, important for gaining the optimum view of an organisational capability (see Ulrich and Smallwood, 2004). This will make a significant contribution to the academic literature in further understanding of this key capability, and address a pressing need for insight into more effective customer relationship management in the Irish hotel sector
BEYOND FORMAL LEARNING NETWORK STRUCTURES: AN EXPLORATION OF EVOLVING LEARNING COMMUNITIES IN THE MICRO-FIRM ENVIRONMENT
Get PDFIn rapidly changing and increasingly competitive business environments, micro-business owner/managers seeking business survival are encouraged to seek out potential learning and development opportunities through membership of collaborative learning communities (NCEO, 2006; EC, 2006). Micro-firm cooperative learning relationships are the subject of increased academic interest (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Florén and Tell, 2004; Morrison et al., 2004; Toiviainen, 2007; Bottrup, 2005; Kelliher et al., 2009), while international studies acknowledge the value of cooperative learning in the network environment (Devins et al., 2005; Down, 1999; Gibb, 1997; Hannon et al., 2000; Taylor and Thorpe, 2004). Finally, the literature provides evidence that learning structures and key learning relationships in formal learning networks create opportunities for higher levels of learning (Florén and Tell, 2004; Reinl, 2008; Morrison and Bergin-Seers, 2001; Wing Yan Man, 2007).
Little is known about the formation, maintenance or success of these types of learning relationships after formal structures and supports reach a conclusion (Bessant and Francis, 1999). What is known is that Evolving Learning Communities (ELCs) are devoid of formal structures, consequently autonomy in their structural and relational reasoning is required. The effective management and maintenance of such learning structures and relationships requires a level of learning competence, much like that described by Wing Yan Man (2007). Where a competence shortfall arises, there is a need to reach outside the boundaries of the core learning community to providers of specialist knowledge. This paper seeks to explore these challenges, and commences with a comprehensive review of relevant literature prior to establishing a model of ELC learning which draws from the social learning perspective, in particular Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of learning.
The ELC model maps micro-firm owner/manager learning development, from the micro-firm setting to the formal learning network environment and on to the ELC learning arena illustrating the evolution of the learning community. As such, the various stages of community evolution will be reviewed in the natural succession in which they occur. Future research will inform and validate the model through an interpretivist approach that will enable the researcher to ‘induct theory’ (Eisenhardt, 2007) through the completion of a number of longitudinal cases. This study addresses calls for research to be completed in the micro-firm learning network context (for example: Devins et al., 2005; Kelliher et al., 2009), and is the first of its kind to the best of the author’s knowledge
Muslims in Ireland: adaptation and integration
Get PDFThis study explores the lived experiences of Muslims living in Ireland. It focuses particularly on challenges that Muslims face in relation to the practice of their religion and in relation to their integration with the wider non-Muslim Irish society. The research has adopted a phenomenological approach and has utilized a qualitative method of data collection. Twenty-one semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out with Muslims from a range of cultural, social and religious backgrounds. The research has found that simplified categorizations of identity and integration are inadequate to portray the nuanced levels of diversity present within the Muslim population of Ireland. It found that the significant challenges that Muslims in Ireland face in relation to the practice of their religion and their adherence to religiously prescribed rules can be overcome through adaptation to Irish culture and society. It also found that discrimination and misunderstandings of Islam constitute the major challenges that Muslims face in relation to integration and that these are fuelled by meta-narratives of Islam as enemy and media misrepresentations
An analysis of Fatigue in Women Breasts Cancer Survivors
No full textAbstract The purpose of this study is to investigate how indigenous software companies are pricing and licensing their product and service offerings. Nearly a decade ago, almost all software product companies sold software by offering perpetual licences and the software companies performed local installations on their clients’ premises. Today the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is having a profound influence on the way software is currently charged and licensed. In place of an upfront payment in the form of a licence fee the cost of the service, upgrades, backups and support are all included in a specific fee (subscription). The Ireland-Newfoundland Partnership (INP) fund supported this research project. The research focused on Irish and Newfoundland indigenous software companies and with the help of the INP fund, the researcher collected part of the primary data in Newfoundland, Canada. Conducting the study in two jurisdictions enabled the researcher to identify similarities and differences amongst the indigenous software vendors in the two regions. Mixed-methods surveys are pursued to achieve the research objectives. The primary data used in this study was gathered through a questionnaire administered to 220 indigenous Irish software companies, with a response rate of 29% and a series of six semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted with owners and managers in Ireland and Newfoundland. This mixed-method survey enabled the researcher to establish information as regards the industry sector, gain an in-depth understanding of how software companies are pricing and licensing their software offerings and understand exportation of software. The findings that emerged from this research show that pricing was dependent on a vendor’s software business model. The outcome of this study shows that there appears to be a mixture of software licensing methods used by software vendors surveyed. Some vendors are using the traditional software licensing methods while others are using contemporary methods such as usage-based methods. A second finding that surfaced from this study relates to the pricing methods used by software vendors surveyed. In general, vendors’ pricing methods are categorised as cost-based, competition-based or customer-based. It emerged that despite the software owners indicating that they use customer-based methods, a cost-based approach dominated both the questionnaire and interview findings. It was also discovered that software vendors were no longer offering pure product or pure services to their customers and that SaaS was increasing in popularity as a pricing model amongst the Irish and Newfoundland software vendors. The outcome of this study offers a software-pricing template attached as Appendix F, which would help practitioners to learn from their experience and induct staff assuming responsibility in this area
New Role of Policy-based Management in Home Area Networks – Concepts, Constraints and Challenges
Get PDFThe management of Home Area Networks (HANs)
is problematic. On the one hand there are increasing numbers of IP enabled devices that are connecting to the HAN (wired and wirelessly), some of which need to be managed, especially in terms of granting external access to certain services running on certain devices (e.g. home security, home monitoring, external media access). On the other hand, of any area of network management, the home network is the one where there is least likely to be a capable network manager physically there. So the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have an interesting challenge: do they leave the management to the user and risk the degraded user experience that results, or do they offer to help manage the network for the home users, at potentially very high costs? This
means that automated or autonomic (self-governed) network
management approaches could potentially offer a solution. Policybased Network Management (PBNM) is a promising network
management paradigm that potentially makes administration
tasks easier and lessens the complexity involved in the
management process for the end user. In this article, we present the potential for PBNM in HAN. Significant concepts,
constraints and challenges related to the PBNM implementation are discussed. The potential is that ISPs can use PBNM to improve end user experience in HANs without incurring excessive support costs
The Irish Working Group on Information Literacy (WGIL) - Part II: Report of Cross-Sector Activity 2006 - 2008 and Recommendations for Action
Get PDFMultidisciplinary applications of tree-ring analysis in Newfoundland and Labrador
Get PDFArticle from the Irish Journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Research ‘Ktaqamkuk Across The Water Thar Muir’ which was originally published in 2009 by the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies
The Pink Pound
Get PDFIN these recessionary times, there‟s one group that will continue to carry on regardless and it seems that they are dodging the relentless misery that has now become known as Ireland. The Pink Pound or the Dorothy Dollar as it is known in American is an idiom used to describe the spending power of the gay economy and now with gay lifestyles being more overtly expressed in monetary terms, marketers have begun to brand this highly lucrative sub-culture with the very fitting buzz phrase „The Pink Pound.‟ Ms. Marie O‟ Dwyer is a lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at Waterford Institute of Technology and she said, “The whole idea that members of the gay community are successful, have big dual income households with substantial disposable incomes and live in mostly urban areas with the likelihood of no children, means that this is one market segment that is here to stay. This growing sub-culture has an escalating discretionary income that far exceeds their heterosexual counterparts.” The Pink Pound is estimated to be worth a staggering six billion pounds annually across the Irish and UK economies and a whopping 350 billion dollars to the American economy but yet this market is being widely ignored. [ ...
Non-Mechanically Scanned DFTS
Get PDFNon-mechanically scanned dispersive Fourier transform spectrometry (DFTS) is reported for dispersioninsensitive
measurements of thermally-induced change in dispersive group delay; optical path scan lengths of 260μm yield
0.5fs resolution for a dispersive optical sample