Servitisation and value co-production in the UK music industry

Since the rise of music on the internet, record companies have reported falling sales of physical products. This has occurred at a time when technology has radically increased choice, availability and the opportunity for the consumer to purchase music. As the music industry has moved from a product to a service business model, has the loss of sales meant they have not taken their customers with them? This paper provides a description of different music consumers based upon quantitative analysis of consumer characteristics. The paper then undertakes an exploration of the relationship between the consumer groups and their purchasing preference in relation to intangible ‘service’ purchase such as downloaded music and the purchase of a tangible physical product such as CDs or vinyl. In addition, we analyse the relationship between consumer types and their propensity to actively engage with music communities, such as through engagement with social media, and thus their willingness to coproduce greater value. Finally we explore the moderating effects of age and time devoted to listening to music on purchasing preferences and music discovery

Social Media and Hotel E-Marketing in Iran: The Case of Parsian International Hotels

With a quantitative study, this research has aimed to investigate the role of social media in Iranian hotels’ electronic marketing. A questionnaire technique was used on a sample of 140 marketers who work in the Parsian International Hotels’ marketing department. For data evaluation an SPSS program was used. Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Cochran, Regression, Non-standardized coefficients and Standard coefficient tests were carried out. Based on the findings, we can state that social media are still not an important marketing tool for Iranian hotels. Facebook and YouTube are the media which are most used for marketing purposes as videos and photos can be used on these sites more than others. The results show that the marketing abilities of Parsian Hotels improve with the increasing use of social media, but the hotel marketing sector has failed to fully utilize internet opportunity as a marketing tool

Venture idea newness, relatedness and performance in nascent ventures

Principal Topic The study of the origin and characteristics of venture ideas - or ''opportunities'' as they are often called - and their contextual fit are key research goals in entrepreneurship (Davidsson, 2004). We define venture idea as ''the core ideas of an entrepreneur about what to sell, how to sell, whom to sell and how an entrepreneur acquire or produce the product or service which he/she sells'' for the purpose of this study. When realized the venture idea becomes a ''business model''. Even though venture ideas are central to entrepreneurship yet its characteristics and their effect to the entrepreneurial process is mysterious. According to Schumpeter (1934) entrepreneurs could creatively destruct the existing market condition by introducing new product/service, new production methods, new markets, and new sources of supply and reorganization of industries. The introduction, development and use of new ideas are generally called as ''innovation'' (Damanpour & Wischnevsky, 2006) and ''newness'' is a property of innovation and is a relative term which means that the degree of unfamiliarity of venture idea either to a firm or to a market. However Schumpeter's (1934) discusses five different types of newness, indicating that type of newness is an important issue. More recently, Shane and Venkataraman (2000) called for research taking into consideration not only the variation of characteristics of individuals but also heterogeneity of venture ideas, Empirically, Samuelson (2001, 2004) investigated process differences between innovative venture ideas and imitative venture ideas. However, he used only a crude dichotomy regarding the venture idea newness. According to Davidsson, (2004) as entrepreneurs could introduce new economic activities ranging from pure imitation to being new to the entire world market, highlighting that newness is a matter of degree. Dahlqvist (2007) examined the venture idea newness and made and attempt at more refined assessment of the degree and type of newness of venture idea. Building on these predecessors our study refines the assessment of venture idea newness by measuring the degree of venture idea newness (new to the world, new to the market, substantially improved while not entirely new, and imitation) for four different types of newness (product/service, method of production, method of promotion, and customer/target market). We then related type and degree of newness to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that newness will slow down the business creation process. Shane & Venkataraman (2000) introduced entrepreneurship as the nexus of opportunities and individuals. In line with this some scholars has investigated the relationship between individuals and opportunities. For example Shane (2000) investigates the relatedness between individuals' prior knowledge and identification of opportunities. Shepherd & DeTinne (2005) identified that there is a positive relationship between potential financial reward and the identification of innovative venture ideas. Sarasvathy's 'Effectuation Theory'' assumes high degree of relatedness with founders' skills, knowledge and resources in the selection of venture ideas. However entrepreneurship literature is scant with analyses of how this relatedness affects to the progress of venturing process. Therefore, we assess the venture ideas' degree of relatedness to prior knowledge and resources, and relate these, too, to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that relatedness will increase the speed of business creation. Methodology For this study we will compare early findings from data collected through the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE). CAUSEE is a longitudinal study whose primary objective is to uncover the factors that initiate, hinder and facilitate the process of emergence and development of new firms. Data were collected from a representative sample of some 30,000 households in Australia using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone survey interviews. Through the first round of data collection identified 600 entrepreneurs who are currently involved in the business start-up process. The unit of the analysis is the emerging venture, with the respondent acting as its spokesperson. The study methodology allows researchers to identify ventures in early stages of creation and to longitudinally follow their progression through data collection periods over time. Our measures of newness build on previous work by Dahlqvist (2007). Our adapted version was developed over two pre-tests with about 80 participants in each. The measures of relatedness were developed through the two rounds of pre-testing. The pace of progress in the venture creation process is assessed with the help of time-stamped gestation activities; a technique developed in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED). Results and Implications We hypothesized that venture idea newness slows down the venturing process whereas relatedness facilitates the venturing process. Results of 600 nascent entrepreneurs in Australia indicated that there is marginal support for the hypothesis that relatedness assists the gestation progress. Newness is significant but is the opposite sign to the hypothesized. The results give number of implications for researchers, business founders, consultants and policy makers in terms of better knowledge of the venture creation process

Entrepreneurial orientation and international performance: the moderating effect of decision-making rationality

This research examines how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) influences international performance (IP) of the firm taking into account the moderating effect of decision-making rationality (DR) on the EO–IP association. Such an investigation is significant because it considers the interplay of strategic decision-making processes supported by the bounded rationality concept in the entrepreneurship field. Drawing from a study on activities of 216 firms in the United States and United Kingdom, the evidence suggests that DR positively moderates the EO–IP association. The findings suggest that managers can improve IP by combining EO with rational (analytical) processes in their strategic decisions

Flexible provisioning of Web service workflows

Web services promise to revolutionise the way computational resources and business processes are offered and invoked in open, distributed systems, such as the Internet. These services are described using machine-readable meta-data, which enables consumer applications to automatically discover and provision suitable services for their workflows at run-time. However, current approaches have typically assumed service descriptions are accurate and deterministic, and so have neglected to account for the fact that services in these open systems are inherently unreliable and uncertain. Specifically, network failures, software bugs and competition for services may regularly lead to execution delays or even service failures. To address this problem, the process of provisioning services needs to be performed in a more flexible manner than has so far been considered, in order to proactively deal with failures and to recover workflows that have partially failed. To this end, we devise and present a heuristic strategy that varies the provisioning of services according to their predicted performance. Using simulation, we then benchmark our algorithm and show that it leads to a 700% improvement in average utility, while successfully completing up to eight times as many workflows as approaches that do not consider service failures

Cross-listing, price discovery and the informativeness of the trading process

This paper analyzes the price discovery process of a set of Spanish stocks cross-listed at the NYSE. Our methodology distinguishes between two sources of information asymmetries. Market-specific information that is revealed through the trading process and public disclosures simultaneously revealed to both markets but subject to informed judgments. We compute the information share of the Spanish and U.S. trading activity during the daily 2-hour overlapping interval. Empirical results show that the NYSE contribution to the price discovery process is not negligible. But the NYSE information is basically trade-unrelated