One of the most important phases in planning a vacation is the booking activity process. The aim of this research is to study if the country of origin and/or seasonality has a link with the booking period (BP). The data used is from the largest booking platform of self-catering accommodations in the region of the Romand Valais in Switzerland. The data set contains more than 141,000 transactions from 1st January 2010 to 26 December 2016. This research uses the Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival method for modelling the length of BP after the resampling process. Seasonality of travel shows a higher discrimination level on BP than country of origin. This demonstrates that the importance of socio-demographical factors have been over-estimated against other factors such as travel motivations that may include external constraints such as school holiday timing. For practitioners, the results shed some light on planning behaviour across different markets and seasons. For scholars, beside methodological issues, the results show that countries of origin are less relevant than seasonality in the characterisation of the planning vacation process (PVP).
Living Labs (LL) are complex multi-stakeholders ecosystems of innovation. When co-creating a service, each actor has his own strategic agenda. Finding a common ground for co-creating a service is not an easy task and requires tools to facilitate and structure the reflection. This paper examines how “service blueprinting” techniques can contribute to improve the co-creation process in a living lab setting and develop a common ground. To our knowledge, this service development method has never been tested in a living lab process and no integrative analysis of this case has been conducted so far. The aim of this paper is to test this tool, thus creating bridges between service design (SD) science and Living Labs. To test this process, a first generic blueprint of the existing service has been designed, before organising a multi-stakeholder focus group, based on the Quadruple Helix Model, in order to develop the new service. The context of the case study is to develop a service to facilitate the energy transition but it could be tested in different sectors as well. The main findings are that the combination of these two approaches (LL and SD), launches the dialogue, contributes to set a common vision in a multi-stakeholders' ecosystem and forces the participants to integrate implementation constraints right from the beginning of the co-creation process. Even though Living Lab approaches are employed rather upstream of the innovation process and blueprinting methods more down-stream, top-down planning and bottom-up participation could be complementary when combined.
Les processus de service doivent tenir compte du bien-être des employés pour créer de la valeur. L’article montre que le lien entre bien-être et création de valeur peut être aussi étudié sous l ’angle de la gestion des risques. Une approche exploratoire permet de comprendre cette problématique au sein du secteur de la gestion de fortune à Genève. Sur cette base, le modèle créé part du mal-être pour aboutir à la destruction de valeur et inclut une boucle de rétroaction négative.
Literature suggests dozens of ways of how to quantify the success of social media. However, there is no consent about the measurement of the return of investment (ROI). Only very limited empirical work is looking at the topic especially in tourism. This study is one of the first attempts to look at the ROI of tourism organizations. In doing so, various input (i.e. budget, manpower, amount of platforms used) and outcome (i.e. posts, website success and social media KPIs such as number of posts, interaction, and page performance index) variables are analysed. Responses of 150 tourism organizations to an online questionnaire and social media data collected via the monitoring tool Fanpage Karma provide insights for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Our data indicates that despite an ever increasing importance of online services for the customer journey, the monetary and manpower resources allocated to online marketing and social media is modest for most tourism organizations of the three surveyed countries. The achieved outcomes of the tourism organizations are weak especially when it comes to engagement figures. Revealed relationships such as between marketing budget and success measures for YouTube videos are presented and a discussion is provided.
This study examines how foreign R&D investment may explain interfirm variations in productivity performance of home country firms in terms of spillovers. Many have studied spillovers from MNCs to host country’s firms, but there is still scarce evidence on spillovers from outward FDI to the home country. This study analyzes spillovers from foreign R&D investment and hypothesizes that the benefit of outward R&D spillovers occurs only when knowledge accumulated in foreign R&D centers is effectively transferred to MNCs’ parent companies at home. This benefit depends on the mandate of foreign R&D units, their embeddedness in the host economy, and their entry mode. Using detailed firm-level data for Switzerland, our findings seem to support our arguments.
Prior research on born globals have investigated internationalization strategies in the context of the host, developed markets. However, little research has been done on strategies of born globals entering emerging markets which are characterized by complexity and instability. Therefore, the aim of our paper is the investigation of Swiss born globals’ internationalization strategies in Brazil as the host market. Our findings point to an impact of the institutional factors on the internationalization strategies of western born globals and their implementation in the host, emerging markets.
Un certain nombre de travaux ont montré l’intérêt des espaces de discussion dans la prévention des risques psychosociaux. Cependant, il n’existe pas à ce jour de validation empirique quantitative de leurs effets et de leurs antécédents. Cet article propose tout d’abord un outil de mesure de la présence des EDD et de leur qualité. Il montre les effets des EDD sur la limitation de l’épuisement professionnel et met l’accent sur les conditions managériales permettant l’émergence et le bon fonctionnement des EDD dans une organisation. L’analyse empirique s’appuie sur une enquête quantitative auprès de 1 373 agents, menée en 2015 dans une collectivité territoriale.
Grounded on social identity theory, we explore the identities and actions of 41 angel investors who invest in early-stage companies in the field of ICT. Our study reveals the existence of four pure types of angel investor identities and suggests how these identities shape their investment behavior and consequent exchange of resources with investees. We summarize our results in a typology that sheds light on the diverse meanings investors associate with angel investing and advance understanding regarding why fundamental differences in angel investment decisions and actions exist among investors.
Cette recherche examine la gestion des résultats comptables par les dirigeants d’entreprises françaises sujettes à des opérations de fusions-acquisitions. La recherche comptable suggère que les transactions de fusions-acquisitions offrent un cadre propice à la gestion des résultats pour les dirigeants de l’entreprise acquéreur (Easterwood, 1998 ; Erickson et Wang, 1999 ; Louis, 2004 ; Constant et Jennifer, 2006 ; Francoeur et Rakoto, 2006 ; Baik et al., 2007 ; Pastor et Poveda, 2007 ; Pungaliya et Anand , 2009. etc. ). Notre étude se propose d’enrichir la littérature comptable à travers l’analyse de la manipulation des résultats comptables par les firmes acquéreuses qui se distinguent par leurs modes de financement dans un contexte institutionnel différent, celui de la France. Sur un échantillon d’entreprises françaises composé par 113 acquéreuses par échange d’actions (APEA) et 73 offres publiques d’achat (OPA) entre 1997 et 2009, nos résultats montrent une gestion significative des résultats comptables (mesurée par le niveau des variables comptables de régularisation discrétionnaires) en période de pré-acquisition pour les APEA. Cette manipulation comptable provient surtout de la composante courante des variables comptables de régularisation à savoir le besoin en fonds de roulement. Par contre, les acquéreuses liquides qui se traduisent par des offres publiques d’achat (OPA) présentent des niveaux négatifs de variables comptables de régularisation discrétionnaires avant l’évènement.
Cet article s’inscrit en géographie de la finance et montre, à l’aide de diverses études de cas, com-ment l’industrie financière, en s’appropriant le concept de développement durable de manière par-ticulière, a construit sa propre approche de la « valeur financière durable » dans le cadre des fonds d’investissement socialement responsable (ISR). Il explique la manière dont l’industrie financière auto-valide son action en matière de finance « durable » par le recours à des organisations (agences de notation extra-financière et ONGs), des personnalités (experts, leaders d’opinion) ou des institu-tions (organisations internationales) qui, par leur réputation ou leur position, légitiment la « valeur durable ». Or, si ces acteurs parviennent à animer le débat médiatique, scientifi que et politique, ils restent largement sous l’influence de l’industrie financière et ne remettent pas en cause l’essence même des produits financiers, la coupure au territoire. L’absence de territorialisation et de contex-tualisation territoriale empêchent toute approche forte de la durabilité, fondée sur les acteurs locaux et une opérationnalisation sur un territoire donné.
