1,721,096 research outputs found
Customer Involvement in Product Development: An Industrial Network Perspective
No full textPurpose: In business markets, working with customers and users has become increasingly important to get knowledge about customer needs and to develop new products. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to develop a framework for analyzing customer involvement in product development in a business market context, and (2) to apply this framework to a particular company to describe and analyze how it practices customer involvement.
Methodology/approach: The article takes its main theoretical starting point in the industrial network approach, but also uses other literature from the innovation and product development field. The empirical study applies a qualitative case study approach and focuses on one company in the truck business.
Findings: The suggested framework deals with four key aspects of customer involvement: Why, when, how, and who. The observed pattern of the truck manufacturer shows how dealers, hauliers, and truck drivers are all part of the overall understanding of the customer. These actors are involved for different, typically very clear, purposes at different points in time through surveys, product clinics, and field testing. The pattern, referred to as mixed facilitative, is not one of close collaboration with individual customers, but one of broad involvement of several customers through business intelligence and direct involvement.
Research implications: First, the article provides researchers with a framework and method for studying customer involvement in product development. Second, the case study provides an illustrative example of the customer involvement pattern pursued by a leading company in a major industry. This enhances the understanding of the focal phenomenon, leads to managerial implications, and gives ideas for future research.
Practical implications: There are several managerial implications related to the why, when, how, and who questions. For example, it is pointed out that managers should consider involving customers more extensively than what seems to be common today-for example, by using customers as codevelopers, working with them throughout the entire development process (i.e., not only early and late), and including different types of users (with different requirements and wishes).
Originality/value/contribution of the article: The contribution lies in the development of a framework centered on the four key questions of customer involvement in product development and using this framework for observing a pattern, and finding explanations and relating this pattern to how other firms are doing
Starting Up in Business Networks Why Relationships Matter in Entrepreneurship
No full textThis book offers a novel perspective on starting-up new business ventures through examining the process by which they become part of the existing business environment. The book highlights the importance of inter-organizational business relationships. Asserting that new ventures need to interact and connect with customers and suppliers, alongside policy actors and universities, Starting up in Business Networks demonstrates how beginning a new venture demands initiating and developing business relationships. Noting a lack of prior research into the process by which start-ups embed into an existing business network, this book presents examples from countries such as Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and China to analyse the emergence and evolution of start-up business networks
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Introduction: Starting-up in business networks. Why relationships matter in entrepreneurship
No full textFew people would object to the contention that relationships matter in entrepreneurship. In the research field of entrepreneurship, there has been increasing attention to the social relationships of the entrepreneur and to the role of networking in starting up a business (e.g. Fayolle, Jack, Lamine & Chabaud, 2016; Hoang & Antoncic, 2003; Hoang & Yi, 2015; Jack, 2010). Research has shown that social relationships and the networks of entrepreneurs matter because they are resource entrepreneurs that can leverage in the starting-up process. Instead of focusing on the social relationships, this book focuses on the initial customer and supplier relationships of a start-up developed at an early stage and examine why these are important in starting up a new business venture
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Goal diversity and resource development in an inter-organisational project
No full textPurpose - This paper aims to discuss the role of goal diversity for resource development organized in an inter-organizational project.</br></br>
Design/Methodology/Approach - The paper builds on a case study of an inter-organizational research project in the field of plant biotechnology in Sweden. The project had four members with differing goals: two research departments, one firm and one co-operative.</br></br>
Findings - This particular project shows a diversity of goals and seeks to explain how actors with very different goals and resources involve in inter-organizational collaboration. The case illustrates how the goals are nested in different ways and how the goals are and become related with the resources developed during the project. The explanation found is that the involved actors manage to match their goals and resources.</br></br>
Research limitations/implications - The paper identifies goal-and-resource-matching processes as an explanation behind resource development in collaboration between actors with diverse goals.</br></br>
Practical implications - Designing projects with actors who have diverse sets of resources have enormous potential, but such projects need to ensure that the goals are resources become matched, processes which can emerge during the course of the project.</br></br>
Originality/value - Few studies have focused on the interplay between diverse goals and resources in inter-organizational projects
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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