Strategic Planning - Niche Marketing in the Agriculture Industry

The purpose of the research is to improve our understanding of the adaptation process in agriculture at the farm level and the influence through the value chain. The research identified critical managerial decision areas in the strategic planning process of blackcurrant growers in Alberta and the South Island of New Zealand. The work was a comparative study of growers that attempted to determine the correspondence between the results of case study observations and a set of theoretical propositions that were developed from a review of the relevant literature. Results indicate that growers understand their own firm’s core competencies, plan strategically and contingently to maintain flexibility and retain niche advantages. Data gathered on the blackcurrant sectors in Canada and New Zealand provided the contextual basis for the selection and analysis of the grower case studies. The sector analysis reached across the value chain. Among the findings reported was the interesting observation that although niche marketing is an accepted strategy in the marketing literature as a means to adaptive change, and although the flexibility inherent in this approach is critical to the success of traditionally resource-starved small firms, it is not clear that the firms reported on in this study engaged in niche marketing as a planned strategy but rather came upon the opportunity through serendipity. In terms of country comparison, results indicate that there may be some specific factors that contribute to the success of the blackcurrant industry in New Zealand. Closer examination of these factors may be beneficial to assisting the Canadian sector. Keywords: Niche marketing, strategic planning, adaptation flexibility JEL Codes: D81, L1, M31, O13, Q13Niche marketing, strategic planning, adaptation flexibility, Farm Management, Marketing, D81, L1, M31, O13, Q13,

What determines FinTech success? — A taxonomy-based analysis of FinTech success factors

Value creation in the financial services sector has been fundamentally transformed by digitally born financial technology (FinTech) companies. FinTech companies synthesize information systems with financial services. Given its disruptive power, the FinTech phenomenon has received great attention in academic research, practice, and media. Still, limited systematic research provides a structure and holistic view of FinTechs’ success. Aiming to enhance understanding of the factors enabling FinTech success, we classify success factors across extant scientific literature on distinct FinTech business model archetypes. Our analysis reveals that the “cost–benefit dynamic of the innovation,” “technology adoption,” “security, privacy, and transparency,” “user trust,” “user-perceived quality,” and “industry rivalry” are crucial factors for FinTech success and can be seen as “grand challenges” for the FinTech ecosystem. In addition, we validate and discuss our findings with real-world examples from the FinTech industry and two interviews with stakeholders from the FinTech ecosystem. Our study contributes to the knowledge of FinTechs by providing a classification system of success factors for practitioners and researchers

Improving the Representation and Conversion of Mathematical Formulae by Considering their Textual Context

Mathematical formulae represent complex semantic information in a concise form. Especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, mathematical formulae are crucial to communicate information, e.g., in scientific papers, and to perform computations using computer algebra systems. Enabling computers to access the information encoded in mathematical formulae requires machine-readable formats that can represent both the presentation and content, i.e., the semantics, of formulae. Exchanging such information between systems additionally requires conversion methods for mathematical representation formats. We analyze how the semantic enrichment of formulae improves the format conversion process and show that considering the textual context of formulae reduces the error rate of such conversions. Our main contributions are: (1) providing an openly available benchmark dataset for the mathematical format conversion task consisting of a newly created test collection, an extensive, manually curated gold standard and task-specific evaluation metrics; (2) performing a quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art tools for mathematical format conversions; (3) presenting a new approach that considers the textual context of formulae to reduce the error rate for mathematical format conversions. Our benchmark dataset facilitates future research on mathematical format conversions as well as research on many problems in mathematical information retrieval. Because we annotated and linked all components of formulae, e.g., identifiers, operators and other entities, to Wikidata entries, the gold standard can, for instance, be used to train methods for formula concept discovery and recognition. Such methods can then be applied to improve mathematical information retrieval systems, e.g., for semantic formula search, recommendation of mathematical content, or detection of mathematical plagiarism.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Clinical metagenomics.

Clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), the comprehensive analysis of microbial and host genetic material (DNA and RNA) in samples from patients, is rapidly moving from research to clinical laboratories. This emerging approach is changing how physicians diagnose and treat infectious disease, with applications spanning a wide range of areas, including antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome, human host gene expression (transcriptomics) and oncology. Here, we focus on the challenges of implementing mNGS in the clinical laboratory and address potential solutions for maximizing its impact on patient care and public health

A method for capturing customers’ preferences for housing customisation

The housebuilding sector has used mass production systems and reduced portfolios for many decades in different countries, countering the constant changes in society, resulting in neglecting the increasing diversity of customers’ requirements. Housebuilding companies should be able to meet this requirement’s diversity by offering a higher product variety and at the same time maintaining costs within market expectations. Mass customisation strategies have been presented as efficient alternatives to keep the balance between fulfilling clients’ specific needs and maintaining reasonable prices in housing by focusing on value generation. Moreover, there are limited ways of increasing value generation in housing considering its tradeoff with product cost, emphasising the need for the delimitation of a set of options (i.e.: solution space) adequate to customers’ preferences. Some research opportunities highlighted in the literature for adopting mass customisation in housing include solution space clear definition and the need for methods to explore the value perceived in product alternatives and reduce trade-offs between preferences and choice complexity. Accordingly, the main aim of this investigation is to propose a method for capturing customers’ preferencess and supporting customer integration in mass customisation strategies for housing. The design science approach was used as methodological underpinning for building the solution in this investigation. This thesis was structured in three academic papers. The first paper provides an overview of the available practices in house building and focuses on developing a framework of customer integration and core decision categories that support the definition of mass customisation strategies. In the second paper, a method for identifying customers’ preferences and support solution space definition was proposed, based on preference modelling and willingness-to-pay approaches regarding customer value and its balance with operations costs. In paper 3, another method is presented by adapting menu-based choice for housing and its implementation in an empirical study. The main contributions of this thesis include the method for capturing customers’ preferences, a framework of decision categories, and approaches for modelling customers willingness-to-pay for customised housing

Methodology for Seamless Supply Chain Planning

Today, enterprises are typically in a constant process of acquiring and updating its information technologies, however typically without an overall view of the global inter and intra enterprise’s system integration. Researchers have been proposing methodologies and platforms to assist such integration of applications and data. However, implementing new technologies in organizations is a difficult task, since its quality needs for architectures development are more exigent and critical than ever, due to the systems complexity, dimension and to the interoperability requirements to interact with third party applications and infrastructures. This paper proposes a methodology for seamless Supply Chain Planning (SCP), by using a domain reference ontology, data model representation standards, software components evaluation and interoperability checking processes. The methodology VALTE is used to assure that enterprises use tools for SCP compliant to semantics, represented in a common reference ontology, created by the MENTOR methodology. These two horizontal methodologies are vertically supported by interoperability checking processes, which assure an interoperable supply chain planning system

Old and new approaches to marketing. The quest of their epistemological roots

In recent years the marketing discipline faced a considerable increase in the number of approaches. Some of the new "labels" are probably just new names advertised to sell old products. But some may contain significant new issues that need to be identified and discussed. Do these new marketing denominations (viral, retro, vintage, postmodern, judo, tribal, buzz, and many more) identify distinctions on subjects being studied, without particular methodological implications, or rather, do new labels and new subjects imply orientations that start from different epistemological premises and involve different research methodologies? This paper try to investigate if the proliferation of labels related to alleged new methods of marketing analysis actually implies a distinctions of subjects being studied and different epistemological premises.marketing trends, marketing epistemology