Social enterprise refers to a typology of enterprises whose main objectives are social or environmental. Social enterprises seek to create social value, in relation to activities and managerial practices put in place. This type of firm is increasingly observed in several countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and Italy. The phenomenon involves both non-for-profit and for-profit businesses, whose main objective is social good rather than maximizing profit. This paper explores the phenomenon in a Western European context and how these social enterprises might provide innovative solutions to pressing societal problems.
This paper explores the professional development needs of revenue management leaders. Considering the evolution of the function and the responsibilities of a revenue manager and the apparent lack of highly developed senior managers in the field of revenue management. The exploratory research determines the skills that revenue management leaders should ideally possess, identifies the areas where further professional development is needed, and examineshow related professional development should be conducted. The growingneed for the development of related soft skills, in particular communication skills,is clearly identified as well as the value of serious game as a soft skill development tool.
‘Visitor flows’ (VF) is defined as the generalized spatial movement patterns of travellers and have always been relevant in tourism studies. Nowadays, VFs are important for understanding travel networks which go beyond the specific spatial dimension to include informational or virtual dimensions such as travellers experiences. Travel network modelling is not only a valuable marketing tool helping to increase value in the supply chain but also it challenges the traditional organization of destination management organizations (DMO’s). DMO’s have to reshape their governance model from a static-central model to a dynamic network; destination managers have to change from flows of powers to power of flows (Castells, 1989). VF in this broader picture moves from merely descriptive to strategic VF (SVF). The aim of this research is to show empirical evidence of SVF in the Fribourg region in Switzerland by exploiting mobile phone data.
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.
This work provides a deeper understanding of how overweight stigma operates in a collective context. I investigate a French online community of overweight women. First, I identify the elements that contribute to experiencing the stigma of overweight and how they interact with consumption. Then, I look at the role of the community for consumers that have distanced themselves from the market. I explain how joining a community of similar others can change consumer coping from avoidance to approach. Finally, I discuss how communities contribute to approaching the market. I identify the communal practices that operate this change. I also identify how these practices are able to reverse the stigma process. In summary, this dissertation explores how an online community can have destigmatisation effects. It sheds light on a new role of the community and how it supports the market and improves consumer well-being.
This article offers a novel theoretical conception about processes of entrepreneurial leadership in the emergence of a new small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) venture. It draws on shifts in relational connections among venture participants to conceptualize entrepreneurial leadership through processes of creativity and direction. These processes demonstrate that the co-action of venture participants makes up entrepreneurial leadership and drives the new venture forward. This allows to understand the emergence of a new venture from a lived perspective, flowing from relational processes under which the establishment of the organization is (re)constructed relationally and is made eligible to participants in its narrow and broader societal surroundings.
