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The aim of this paper to shed light on the strategies adopted by chefs and to identify the most successful in terms of Michelin rating and profitability.

In‐depth exploratory interviews with 20 great chefs located in France, Belgium, the UK and Switzerland having gained two or three Michelin stars over the last ten years.

Chefs use three different strategies for revenue‐generation: core business, full diversification and partial diversification. The reasoning behind the choice of strategy varies between two‐ and three‐star restaurants. The first strategy seems to lead to higher Michelin star ratings, and strategy, the second seems superior in terms of profitability. The third strategy yields inferior results, but is less risky.

The observations are constrained to “recently successful” restaurants, and hence may not be applicable to longer‐standing restaurants.

Concentrating on the core business leads to higher star rating, but lower profitability. Full diversification increases profitability but can jeopardize Michelin rating. The middle‐of‐the‐road approach seems inferior in any case.

To this day, little research has been conducted on the way in which great chefs having two or three stars in the famed Michelin Red Guide run their businesses. In particular, very little is known about their revenue‐generating strategies: what options are available and which revenue models are the “best”. This paper is exploratory in nature and aims to inform further research about luxury restaurants.

The haute‐cuisine industry must cope with two, apparently antagonist demands from customers: providing reliable advice about the choice of restaurant, while concurrently preserving the “magic of discovery” and creativity every haute‐cuisine restaurant should provide. This paper has the objective of analysing how the Michelin guide “star system” operates as a “signalling device” in the industry, and handles these two market requirements. The research also explores how secrecy contributes to preserve chefs' creativity for the benefit of customer satisfaction.

The research is derived from 20 exploratory field interviews of chefs belonging to the “star system” in France, Switzerland and the UK.

Field research and analysis reveal the pressure to minimize type II errors, i.e. of selecting restaurants that do not merit inclusion and, consequently, increase type I errors. This behaviour explains the stability, reliability and consistency of the system.

Further research is needed to analyse the extent to which the phenomenon observed in the haute‐cuisine industry is manifest in other artistic (i.e. fashion) or hospitality (i.e. hotels) related sectors.

There is no unique route to the star system. The best way for chefs to increase the odds to get promoted is to focus on quality, develop their own style and be patient. The policy of the Michelin guide opens the door for competing guides willing to take more risk of type I errors.

This exploratory research is the first attempt to analyse the role of gastronomic guides in the haute‐cuisine sector.

This paper introduces the special issue on service innovation management.

Provides a brief review of the papers within the issue.

Compares and contextualizes the contributions, finding that the papers use state of the art methodologies and each furthers knowledge of service innovation management – a recently emerged academic discipline.

The perspectives considered represents a small sample of the diversity that exists within this area.

This study aims to explore how haute cuisine excellence is and can be self-represented on the websites of three-star restaurants and juxtaposed onto the websites of external authoritative food guides.

In total, 26 French Michelin three-star restaurant websites and their reviews in the prominent Michelin and Gault and Millau dining guides were examined. This data was then processed using lexicometric software.

Five semantic universes emerged, showing that restaurants and dining guides do not emphasize the same elements of culinary excellence. While restaurant websites emphasize the charismatic leadership role of the chef through family history, professional recognition and vicarious learning, the two iconic guides are far from rating the criteria they claim to: For the Michelin Guide, criteria other than cuisine appear central. Conversely, Gault and Millau, far from its nouvelle cuisine principles advocating democratization at lower cost, insists on fine products.

It remains essential for restaurants to use a repertoire of cultural components and symbols, capitalize on the charismatic and architectural roles of their chef and showcase fine products that are representative of classical cuisine. Storytelling and dynamic narrative add-ons, regularly updated on large-audience social media, appear central to increasing restaurants’ perceived value, communicating innovation and attesting to their singularity and uniqueness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to overlap the lexical perspectives of three-star restaurants and iconic guides’ websites.

The purpose of this paper is to address global sourcing organisational design through the following research questions: how do the roles performed by International Purchasing Offices (IPOs) change over time?; what are the resources/capabilities required by an IPO for an effective performance and how do they change over time?; and what are the contingent factors affecting such changes?

The authors employed an exploratory multiple case study approach and analysed 14 Western IPOs located in China for a period between 2007 and 2012. The data were primarily collected through 34 direct, semi-structured interviews of IPO heads and sourcing managers or senior buyers.

The authors identify and discuss the importance of ten roles played by IPOs and 12 required resources/capabilities. Furthermore, considering the changes that occurred to these IPOs over a five-year period (2007-2012), the authors observe three distinct evolutionary behaviours (i.e. “overall development”, “selective development”, and “stable configuration”) and highlight three contingent factors that jointly affect these behaviours (i.e. the architectural and technological complexity of the sourced items, annual volume sourced abroad, and experience in the foreign context).

This paper contributes to the resource-based view of the firm in a global sourcing context by highlighting the resources/capabilities required by IPOs and discussing their characteristics. Furthermore, it proposes a typology of IPO micro-organisational evolutionary behaviours. Finally, it applies contingency theory and identifies three factors that might affect the evolutionary behaviours.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of an experiential learning approach, available to students in all disciplines that combined a hands-on entrepreneurial and enterprise experience with professional consultant mentoring by using a competition to win business start-up funding.

Students at a UK University had the chance to enter a competition in which they developed an entrepreneurial idea and then designed and presented a business plan to win business start-up capital. Students who were entrepreneurially motivated, but who lacked capital to start-up their business, were targeted, as these students have been argued to benefit the most from a combination of business plan training and entrepreneurial development. Feedback and data were obtained from the students at each stage of the process and was thematically analysed to assess the development of students’ entrepreneurial skills and knowledge through the experience.

The research found that the benefits gained from this approach included both enterprising and entrepreneurial skills, with the greatest impact being on student confidence and belief in their ability to start a business. The practical skills had a “demystifying” effect on students that made them feel like entrepreneurship and enterprise start-up were attainable.

The research focused on students at one UK University and centred on entrepreneurship in a retail business. The competition thus appealed mainly to students who were interested in retail start-up, thus leaving out some enterprising students whose feedback may have been different. In addition, while entrepreneurial skills are assessed in the data, the students who would be interested in the competition would be assumed to be proactive, and this skill was not able to be analysed. This research is a single case, and thus could be enhanced by more cases and looking at other enterprise start-up means beyond retail.

This research makes a case that, in light of literature critical of the use of business plan training in entrepreneurship education, certain students are appropriate candidates for this approach. Specific skills and knowledge can be developed in university students using a live enterprise experience, supported by entrepreneurial mentoring. By making the event extracurricular, the study sought to capture the feedback of students who self-selected into the programme, who can benefit most from combined entrepreneurial and business plan development experience.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a research framework to explain the relationship between overall restaurant quality and customer satisfaction.

To test this model, the authors deploy 48 mystery shoppers to evaluate 496 Taiwanese restaurants. Further, the authors performed two different regression models and performing the Baron and Kenny (1986) procedure to test the hypotheses.

This study investigates whether restaurants are susceptible to the quality and level of restaurant service, and the restaurant’s physical atmosphere. Further, this study investigates whether these two constructs are likely to improve customers’ perception of restaurant quality, and whether such a strategy may also lead to customers’ satisfaction and facilities word-of-mouth recommendations.

The evidence suggests that the construct of “restaurant service” and “physical atmosphere” are strong determinant of improving customers’ perception of overall quality of restaurant. That is, there is a tendency to innovate when restaurant managers prioritize customers’ satisfaction. Further, managers who believe that service and physical atmosphere issues are top priorities will also improve the overall quality in their restaurants.

Measuring the relationships between Michelin star evaluation criteria via a large observation sample is rare in the present literature. As far as the authors know, this is the first paper to exam the relationships between Michelin star evaluation criteria.