New intermediaries are entering the market, challenging the hospitality industry to find an appropriatedistribution channel portfolio. This research investigates how many channels hotels in Austria, Germanyand Switzerland choose and what role the various channels play. Findings based on 1014 questionnairesreveal an average mix of 8.06 offline and online channel categories. Traditional channels, such as walk-insand telephone, still play a major role; however, about one fifth of the bookings are completely generatedonline. On average, 3.61 online travel agencies (OTAs) are used. With regards to OTA penetration, anoligopolistic market structure is prevalent. Swiss and German hotels’ OTA dependency is higher thanAustrian’s. A series of a posteriori cluster analysis results in four distribution portfolio groups hotelierschoose: multi-channel-, electronic-, real time-, and traditional distributors. Distribution portfolio profilesfacilitate learning from strategies used by hotels with certain characteristics such as target group andstar-rating.
While business model innovations are critical to a company’s long-term survival, they are still poorly understood compared with other kinds of innovations. In this paper, we systematically investigate prior research and reframe business model innovation. We report on a discourse analysis of interviews with CEOs of small and medium enterprises from the tech industry, with the aim of recording their definition of business model innovation. This research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the meaning and process of business model innovation from a practitioners’ perspective. We derive implications for business model and innovation scholars based on the responses analyzed. These findings open new directions for theory development and empirical studies in the business model and strategic management literature.
Research has shown that individuals' level of identification with an organization tends to result in positive outcomes such as higher motivation and effort. However, the influence of organizational identification on another vital element of organizational life, creativity, has hitherto largely been ignored. We study identification and creativity in the context of open innovation. More specifically, we explore whether external participants in ideation generation contexts who strongly identify with the client organization produce ideas of better or worse quality for this organization. As hypothesized, grounded in the social identity approach, HLM results provide evidence that individuals who identify more with the client organizations produce ideas of lower quality. At the same time, exerting persistent effort towards improving specific ideas leads to higher quality ideas. Implications for theory and managerial practice are derived.
Academic research is currently paying more attention to the time and speed aspects of the internationalization process. In line with this development, this study investigates the role of internationalization age and its impact on internationalization speed. It investigates as the main research problem the very impact that early versus late internationalization has on foreign sales’ subsequent growth and on the number of countries served once companies have decided to diversify geographically. The study’s emphasis is not restricted to the immediate post-entry speed of internationalization, but takes a longitudinal view as well. New data from a sample of Swiss SMEs provides evidence of a path dependency. The older an SME when it first expands abroad, the slower its subsequent internationalization speed. Internationalization age’s negative impact does not lessen in the short or mid-term, but even affects Swiss SMEs in the long term.
This paper contributes to existing research by integrating the notions of opportunity recognition and international entrepreneurial orientation into the body of the new venture theory of internationalization. It helps to explain and understand which factors compel SMEs to take the fast track to internationalization or a stage-wise approach. A conceptual framework is developed that presents potential relationships between key concepts from the field of entrepreneurship on the one hand, and the degree of internationalization and performance of an internationalizing SME on the other. Our results suggest that internationalization may not just be the result of one or multiple push or pull factors, but that internationalization itself may significantly influence the international entrepreneurial orientation and the opportunity recognition capabilities of a firm. Consequently, internationalization may be seen as an independent variable, a fact that was largely neglected in past research on SME internationalization.
While business model innovations are critical to a company’s long-term survival, they are still poorly understood compared with other kinds of innovations. In this paper, we systematically investigate prior research and reframe business model innovation. We report on a discourse analysis of interviews with CEOs of small and medium enterprises from the tech industry, with the aim of recording their definition of business model innovation. This research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the meaning and process of business model innovation from a practitioners’ perspective. We derive implications for innovation and entrepreneurship scholars based on the responses analyzed. These findings open new directions for theory development and empirical studies in the business model and entrepreneurship literature.
The resource allocation problem is a traditional kind of NPhard problem. One of its application domains is the allocation of educational resources. In most universities and business schools today, students select the courses they would like to attend by ranking the proposed courses. However, to ensure the quality of a course, the number of seats is limited, so not all students can enroll in their preferred courses. Therefore, the school administration needs some mechanism to assign the available resources as soon as possible, trying to optimize the students' wishes. In this paper, the course allocation problem has been modeled as a Constraint Satisfaction Optimization Problem (CSOP) and two metrics have been defined to quantify the satisfaction of students. The problem is solved with Gecode, and its results are compared with a greedy-based algorithm showing how the CSP approach is able to optimize the allocation of resources optimizing the students'satisfaction. Another contribution of this work is related to the possibility to allocate simultaneously several courses, generating feasible solutions in a short time. The allocation procedures are based on preferences for courses defined by students, and on the administration's constraints that define the available resources at Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne. Ten data sets have been generated using the distribution of preferences of students for courses, and a complete experimental analysis has been carried out using these data sets evaluating the performance of the algorithms considered.
The current research in progress manuscript proposes a shift to a new approach to team coordination in IS projects. Previous studies have regarded team coordination through variance analyses. They identified explicit and implicit coordination mechanisms that are significantly related to team coordination, depending on some contingencies (e.g. team and task configuration, context). While such studies have greatly advanced our knowledge of the factors that impact team coordination, we have little knowledge of the activities and events that make up team coordination, and thus how team coordination concretely occurs. We propose a process model of coordination based on psycholinguistics in which we identify the fundamental activities that IS teams perform to coordinate : interacting and contributing. We highlight the propositions that will be tested by analyzing conversations from six teams involved in scenario based projects from the AMI meeting corpus. Our process model will unveil the fundamental activities involved in both explicit and implicit coordination.
Risk-based portfolio strategies, such as minimum variance, maximum diversification, equal weight and risk parity, to name the most famous, have become increasingly popular in the investment industry. This paper aims to help investors better understand the commonalities and differences between these strategies.We offer a general unifying analytical framework, allowing the discussion of key distinctive features such as capital concentration, market beta, volatility, sensitivity to risk parameters, preference for low-volatility assets, turnover or tracking error, while not being dependent on a specific sample. We confirm the validity of these theoretical results by an empirical investigation of a large sample of international developed equity markets over the period 2002–12.
Selecting the right people for the right place the right way is vital to companies in the context of a fiercer war for talent nowadays. Many studies have shown that structured interviews have better predictive validity than unstructured interviews. Despite these repeated findings, most of the recruiters still prefer to use unstructured interviews notably because they allow more freedom for them. The aim of our study was then to examine the degree to which job interviews are structured in the selection practices of Swiss hotels. In addition, we compared if interview structure varies between hotels differing in size, between chain and independent hotels and between 3-star, 4-star and 5-star hotels. Results obtained on 150 recruiters indicate that overall job interviews are rather unstructured in all the categories of hotels surveyed. For example, very few recruiters ask past behavior and situational questions. Moreover, most of the recruiters base their hiring decisions on overall impressions formed during the job interview. Therefore, there is a gap between what human resources researchers recommend and what practitioners do. Our study also shows that job interviews are more structured in larger hotels than in smaller hotels. They are also more structured in chain hotels than in independent hotels. Finally, and contrarily to our hypothesis, job interviews are not more structured in 4-star and 5-star hotels than in 3-star hotels. Reasons for these results and for the gap between the management models that researchers recommend and the practices that professionals still stick to will be discussed in this paper. Practical implications for both researchers and practitioners will also be presented.
