Alexander Grablowitz, Monika Rudeloff and Gerhard Voss
Support for environmental research has a long tradition at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A new funding priority establishes a new substantive priority area �…
Abstract
Support for environmental research has a long tradition at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A new funding priority establishes a new substantive priority area – sustainable management. The purpose is to develop strategies and solutions for sustainable management and test them in real life through cooperation between research institutions, industry and consumers. The results of 18 collaborative projects should help to exploit the potential for sustainable management in the private sectors, set new priorities in research on business management and initiate standardisation processes towards sustainable management. A support process has to pass the results of the projects as well as their implications for sustainable management on to potential users. The research projects altogether cover four priority areas; namely, information technology instruments, controlling instruments, planning instruments and communication instruments.
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Fabian Hunke, Gerhard Satzger and Tuure Tuunanen
This research investigates the systematic reuse of service concept elements within modular service design, aiming to offer actionable insights into effective conceptualization of…
Abstract
Purpose
This research investigates the systematic reuse of service concept elements within modular service design, aiming to offer actionable insights into effective conceptualization of services and extending methodological underpinnings to enhance the approach of service design.
Design/methodology/approach
Employing a design science research approach, this study investigates the intentional and targeted reuse of service concept elements for modular service design. It develops four general design principles and applies them in a real-world context to demonstrate and evaluate the purposeful integration of service concept elements.
Findings
This research reveals the efficacy of reusing service concept elements for modular service design, highlighting the benefits of this approach in conceptualizing new services. It theorizes generalizable design knowledge by formalizing four design principles that allow to underpin the reuse of service concept elements.
Originality/value
This research contributes to service design literature by providing actionable insights into the systematic reuse of service concept elements, particularly within the framework of modular service design. We develop and test general design principles and, specifically, apply them for analytics-based digital services.
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Zeynep Bilgin-Wührer and Gerhard A. Wührer
Understanding the customer has been the focus of attention of businesses and academia for many decades. Starting in 1960s, complex buyer behavior models developed by Nicosia, by…
Abstract
Understanding the customer has been the focus of attention of businesses and academia for many decades. Starting in 1960s, complex buyer behavior models developed by Nicosia, by Howard and Sheth (1969), were followed by Engel, Blackwell and Miniard in 1978 (Engel, Blackwell, & Miniard, 1990) to understand the buying process, shaping the thoughts today about consumers’ experiences in an omnichannel world. Interest in customer perceptions and expectations (Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1991), SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Leonard, 1985) and SERVPERV (Cronin & Taylor, 1994) moved the academia to discuss the relationship marketing (Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Parvatiyar & Sheth, 1999; Peterson, 1995; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). Wilson’s model (1995) of buyer–seller relationships extended the former models with additional concepts like social bonds, comparison level of alternatives, power roles, technology, structural bonds and cooperation as influencers on relationship development stages. His emphasis reflects a high relevancy in the omnichannel world of customers’ interactions today. Winer (2001), a pioneer to discuss the customer relationship management focused on a database to know about customers’ purchase history and interests. The millennium look at customer lifetime value is again relationship focused. For Fader, Hardie, and Lee (2005) rather the long-term focus of the consumer value and actions are important to understand the loyalty and nonlinear nature of relations. While Reinartz and Kumar (2003) focused on profitable customer lifetime and customer heterogeneity, Verhoef (2003) analyzed the impact of customers’ relationship perceptions and relationship marketing instruments on both customer retention and customer share development. The customer-centric thinking was first discussed by Grönroos (2006) within a new definition of marketing. The service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) resulted in the next highlight, the co-creation of value with customer involvement and customer advisory (Güngör, 2012; Güngör & Bilgin, 2011; Messner, 2007) empowering the customers and giving them the control over the supplier networks. Different factors will be influential at different stages of the buying process of customer clusters. The Web- and non-Web-based customer-centric measures can be multifold. Andersson, Movin, Mähring, Teigland, and Wennberg (2018) and Bank (2018) emphasize the importance of technology readiness focus throughout the customer–supplier journey. The question to be answered is, to which extent the empowered customers and the suppliers of this age are ready to adopt, embrace and finally use new technologies in the omnichannel world of holistic interactions that form new visions, expectations, values and desires in a tremendous speed. Ideas and experiences are shared and exchanged in online communities without the need of the involvement of the suppliers. This “holistic view” challenges firms further through the seamlessness it requires to create unity. Customer-centric research needs a new push for the development of instruments and measures to cope with the consumer decision process challenges. Process thinking is needed to capture the purchasing habits in an omnichannel world and to build a new thought for customer journey experience with the aim to understand technology-linked value propositions of customer clusters to optimize channel interactions. Customer journeys have to focus and describe the online/offline experiences at the hybrid shopping mile, trace the behavioral influential factors of the customers’ and sellers’ world in a technological environment. This chapter will discuss “Technology based Orbit Interactions” for “The Hybrid Shopping Mile and its Customer Journey Mapping” with a “Customer Intelligence Framework.” The outcome of the hybrid customer journey mapping gives orientation for customer-management decisions in developing new approaches.
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Jürgen Hauschildt and Gerhard Schewe
A characteristic of agile organizations is the development of innovative products and processes. It has been shown that a key factor of success in managing innovative projects is…
Abstract
A characteristic of agile organizations is the development of innovative products and processes. It has been shown that a key factor of success in managing innovative projects is the existence of key persons. Empirical studies on innovation management show that key persons who are able to overcome existing innovation barriers play a decisive role for innovation success. The basic theoretical concepts behind these findings are the “gatekeeper concept” and the “promotor model”. The two concepts are compared under a static and a dynamic perspective. It will be shown that under a dynamic view, one can combine the gatekeeper concept and the promotor model to a powerful management concept for supporting agility in organizations.
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Eugine Tafadzwa Maziriri, Brighton Nyagadza, Brian Mabuyana, Tarisai Fritz Rukuni and Miston Mapuranga
This paper aims to examine how health consciousness, perceived nutrition of cereals, hedonic eating values and utilitarian eating values would influence consumers’ attitudes…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how health consciousness, perceived nutrition of cereals, hedonic eating values and utilitarian eating values would influence consumers’ attitudes towards cereal consumption, willingness to pay for cereals, actual consumption of cereal products, cereal product consumption satisfaction and continuance of cereal consumption.
Design/methodology/approach
The research embraced a quantitative approach. The examination was completed in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa (SA). A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 380 Generation Z consumers of cereal products. Structural equation modelling analysis was used using the smart partial least squares software to test the hypothesized model.
Findings
The results uncovered that the study variables were significantly associated, and surprisingly, the relationship between hedonic eating values and attitudes towards cereal consumption was found to be insignificant. It was also found that attitudes toward cereal consumption positively and significantly mediated the relationship between health consciousness and willingness to pay for cereals, perceived cereal nutrition and willingness to pay for cereals, hedonic eating values and willingness to pay for cereals and utilitarian eating values and willingness to pay for cereals.
Originality/value
This research adds new, fresh knowledge to the established body of knowledge on cereal consumption behaviour. This area has had little research attention in developing African countries like SA.
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THE Deutsche Luftfahrtschau, or as it is more generally known, the Hanover Air Show, is held every two years by the Bundesverband der Deutschen Luft‐ und Raumfahrtindustrie e.V…
Abstract
THE Deutsche Luftfahrtschau, or as it is more generally known, the Hanover Air Show, is held every two years by the Bundesverband der Deutschen Luft‐ und Raumfahrtindustrie e.V. (Federal Association of the German Air and Spacecraft Industries). This year's Show will be held from April 29 to May 8 at the Hanover Langenhagen Airport and will be held at the same time as the Hanover Fair.
Lucas Baier, Niklas Kühl, Ronny Schüritz and Gerhard Satzger
While the understanding of customer satisfaction is a key success factor for service enterprises, existing elicitation approaches suffer from several drawbacks such as high manual…
Abstract
Purpose
While the understanding of customer satisfaction is a key success factor for service enterprises, existing elicitation approaches suffer from several drawbacks such as high manual effort or delayed availability. However, the rise of analytical methods allows for the automatic and instant analysis of encounter data captured during service delivery in order to identify unsatisfied customers.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on encounter data of 1,584 IT incidents in a real-world service use case, supervised machine learning models to predict unsatisfied customers are trained and evaluated.
Findings
We show that the identification of unsatisfied customers from encounter data is well feasible: via a logistic regression approach, we predict dissatisfied customers already with decent accuracy—a substantial improvement to the current situation of “flying blind”. In addition, we are able to quantify the impacts of key service elements on customer satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
The possibility to understand the relationship between encounter data and customer satisfaction will offer ample opportunities to evaluate and expand existing service management theories.
Practical implications
Identifying dissatisfied customers from encounter data adds a valuable methodology to customer service management. Detecting unsatisfied customers already during the service encounter enables service providers to immediately address service failures, start recovery actions early and, thus, reduce customer attrition. In addition, providers will gain a deeper understanding of the relevant drivers of customer satisfaction informing future new service development.
Originality/value
This article proposes an extendable data-based approach to predict customer satisfaction in an automated, timely and cost-effective way. With increasing data availability, such AI-based approaches will spread quickly and unlock potential to gain important insights for service management.
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Ajay Jha, R.R.K. Sharma and Vimal Kumar
The study aims to add to the body of knowledge of open source tangible product management (also called open design). The objective is also to develop a guideline for efficient…
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to add to the body of knowledge of open source tangible product management (also called open design). The objective is also to develop a guideline for efficient open source tangible product development and adoption.
Design/methodology/approach
The exploratory research design using secondary data (like newspapers, magazines, research articles, bogs, papers, etc.) is used to analyze open source tangible product design challenges and enablers. The success stories of Open Source Software projects (OSS) were studied for identification of critical success factors and further their relevancy was tested in the two popular cases of open source drug discovery (malaria and tuberculosis)
Findings
Open innovation has become a part of competitive strategy of current businesses. It requires an efficient intellectual property protection regime for its implementation. However, in a market dominated by proprietary benefits, the open source technology development can serve as remedy for innovation needs of neglected sectors. The OSS literature revealed managing two classes of factors, namely technology sponsor level factors and environmental factors for efficiency and effectiveness. The case study analysis in the context of applicability of these OSS critical factors showed their limitations in open source tangible products, and highlighted understanding additional challenges and remedies.
Research limitations/implications
Open source innovation is a collaborative effort involving inputs from various/diverse players, hence monitoring the effort and motivation level of the contributors is a cumbersome task. Only the information that is available online and in print media is taken as research inputs in this work. Also the data taken were from two case studies; a lot more case studies in the open design domain can progress the theory. The implications of this study are far-reaching in the areas where profit motivated proprietary efforts lack in addressing societal need. It provides guidelines for addressing those unmet needs by developing products in a collaborative way without intellectual property hurdles.
Originality/value
The essence of open design is becoming more vital, and there is a pressing need to build theory to support it, which still is elusive and dispersed. The study fills the gap using secondary data and case study approach.
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The paper describes the method and the results of a pilot‐study on recreational effects of holidays. The objective of the study was to get first insights in the psychological…
Abstract
The paper describes the method and the results of a pilot‐study on recreational effects of holidays. The objective of the study was to get first insights in the psychological process of recreation during holidays: E.g. How can recreation be measured? What kind of changes in the emotional state do occur during long term recreational processes? Do people perceive themselves as «recreated» during or after a holiday? A sample of 59 German teachers were asked to fill in psychological questionnaires before, during and after their summer holiday 1992. The questionnaires used measured different dimensions of personal condition (mood), individual effects of work load, and some data concerning organisational and motivational aspects of the holiday trip as well as sociodemographic data.
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Holger Sievert, Carolin Lessmann and Jonas Henneboehl
One of the most important challenges of our society is to cope with the transition of our society into a more and more digital one. Thus, the political and governmental system has…
Abstract
One of the most important challenges of our society is to cope with the transition of our society into a more and more digital one. Thus, the political and governmental system has to face and adapt to those transitions as well. This chapter focuses on the social media communication of the British, German and French national governments. The goal of this chapter is to compare the social media communication of these three countries in 2015 within each other as well as to draw a comparison between the results of two predecessor studies in 2011 and 2014. A new special focus of this chapter will be on the interactive discourse between society/citizens and governments.