Guest Editorial: Business Models/Projects – Design, Venture, Manage and Evaluate

A number of literature reviews on business models and innovation have suggested that business models are mainly rooted in resource-based view (RBV) and transaction cost economics (TCE) theories. Since business models is a burgeoning research field in strategic management, scholars have paid a great attention toward conceptualizing what business models are, how business models are evolved, and what theories explain business models. The special issue welcomed scholars to submit their academic research on various themes in business models, including innovative ideas to architecture ideal business models, motives of innovation in business models, financing business enterprises, venture capitalists role in business projects, bank financing, leasing and contracting in new business projects, inventory and supply chain issues in projects, barriers to success in new business models, evaluating project performance, cost estimation and control in project management, and socially-driven vs. value-driven projects, among others. The special issue call for papers has received a good response from strategy and finance researchers globally. Following double blind review system, we have accepted six articles for the Issue in 2017

Size and sign of time savings

INTRODUCTION The conventional approach in the U.K. has been to value all travel time changes at a constant rate regardless of their size or direction. This ‘constant unit value’ approach was supported by the 1980-86 UK DoT Value of Time Study (MVA/ITS/TSU, 1987). However, there has always remained a vocal body of opinion critical of this approach (see Welch and Williams, 1997, for references and discussion). Some of the main objections have been the following: i. small amounts of time are less useful than large amounts; ii. small time savings (or losses) might not be noticed by travellers and any that are not noticed cannot be valued by those affected and so should not be valued by society; iii. small time savings are said to often account for a large proportion of scheme benefits, so that small errors in measurement might mean that the scheme is really of no benefit to anyone; iv. allowing small time savings to have ‘full’ value is said to inflate the measured total of benefits and so lead to schemes (often road schemes) being wrongly found to have sufficient net benefit to justify implementation; v. time savings are less highly valued than are time losses, according to surveys, and so should have a lower unit value when evaluating schemes. Both aspects relate to the possible non-constancy of the value of time for a given journey made for a given purpose (clearly, it is much less controversial, and indeed standard practice, to allow for variation by purpose and traveller type). The practical difficulties are twofold. On the one hand, it is difficult to overcome the lay reaction that small time savings have little or no value, as well as the feeling that losses are more important than gains. On the other hand, if these points have any empirical relevance, they cause major problems for the cost-benefit calculus, as losses and gains will not cancel out, and time savings cannot be directly aggregated. Although they do not recommend that values differentiated by size and sign should be used for appraisal, the HCG/Accent (1999) Report (AHCG) notes that [p 259] "For any level of variation around the original journey time, gains (savings) are valued less than losses. For non-work related journeys, a time savings of five minutes has negligible value." A recent paper by Gunn (2001) notes that corroborative results are available from a reanalysis of the 1988 Dutch value of Time study. For reasons which will be carefully rehearsed in this paper, we do not believe that the conclusion on the differences between gains and losses is safe. This is based on an extensive re-analysis of the AHCG data. We have found it harder to reach a conclusion on the issue of small time savings, we agree with AHCG that their data undoubtedly implies a lower valuation: we have some concerns, nonetheless, as to the interpretation which should be placed on this