Bourdieu's non-material forms of capital:Implications for start-up policy

The role of Bourdieu’s non-material forms of capital (cultural, social and symbolic) in the entrepreneurial process has received little dedicated research attention. Similarly, the link between occupationally distinct entrepreneurship and accumulation of non-material capitals is understudied. Addressing this, we examine the non-material capitals of different nascent entrepreneurs by occupational classification who participated on two enterprise-training programmes funded by the 1997-2010 Labour Government; each with considerably different foci. Findings demonstrate that professional and higher technician entrepreneurs possess valuable non-material capitals, in contrast to non-professional entrepreneurs. Against the backdrop of recent business enterprise policy, findings suggest that policy-makers should prioritise focused support that nurtures the valuable, productive non-material capitals of professional and higher technician entrepreneurs. Furthermore, initiatives should be tailored to improve the less distinguished non-material capitals of non-professional entrepreneurs

Supporting new product commercialization through managerial social ties and market knowledge development in an emerging economy

University of Tasmania, Australi

Measuring new product and service portfolio advantage

The current study introduces the concept of new product and service portfolio (NPSP) advantage by creating and validating a three-dimensional measurement method that reflects novelty, meaningfulness and superiority – the three characteristics of NPSP advantage. Based on industry-wide homogeneous generalizable quantitative data from 108 manufacturing companies, the results indicate that these three characteristics of NPSP – novelty, meaningfulness and superiority – are distinct characteristics that together constitute NPSP advantage. This paper contributes to the literature on new product development, as its findings suggest that when measuring the concept of NPSP advantage, the three-dimensional construct that includes the three aforementioned characteristics has a better fit to the data than the unidimensional structure. Because it considers both new products and services, the current study offers an integrated approach to measure the desired innovation process outcome (NPSP advantage). In this way, this paper bridges the research on new product development with that on new service development.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Investigating political brand reputation with qualitative projective techniques from the perspective of young adults

Capturing and understanding the images and reputations external stakeholders assign to brands can be confusing and challenging. This is reinforced by explicit calls for more pragmatic tools and methods to comprehend the external orientation of brands. We respond by investigating the applicability of qualitative projective techniques in exploration of the external current image and long-term reputation of the UK Conservative Party corporate brand from the perspective of young voters aged 18-24 years. This is achieved by comparing and contrasting the external brand images prior the 2015 UK General Election with the findings collected before the 2010 UK General Election. We demonstrate that qualitative projective techniques are useful applications to capture, deconstruct and understand current image and long-term reputation of political brands. Organisations including those beyond the political context will be able to use this paper as a guide to generate a deeper understanding of their brands image and consistency of their reputation

Why doesn’t our branding pay off: Optimising the effects of branding through innovation

Purpose: Recent branding failures (e.g. Kodak and Krispy Kreme) have cast considerable doubt on the widely accepted contention that to develop a strong brand, firms must continuously strive to be brand oriented or innovation oriented. This study aims to examine the curvilinear and interactive effects of brand orientation and innovation orientation on brand performance. Design/methodology/approach: Survey data were drawn from a sample of 181 firms operating in the consumer goods sector (i.e. fashion, consumer electronics and automobile) and tested through a hierarchical regression analysis. Findings: This study finds that the sole and exclusive focus on either brand orientation or innovation orientation is detrimental to the realisation of superior brand performance because increased levels of this focus lead to diminishing returns. Critically, this study finds that the key to achieving superior brand performance lies in the extent to which the firm integrates both brand orientation and innovation orientation. Originality/value: This study extends current knowledge by showing that focusing on either brand orientation or innovation orientation in isolation is actually detrimental to the firm’s realisation of superior brand performance. The integration of brand orientation and innovation orientation is the key to achieving superior brand performance because the inherent limitations associated with each are overcome by their integration

Status consumption in newly emerging countries: The influence of personality traits and the mediating role of motivation to consume conspicuously

In emerging countries, individuals’ tendency to consume status products to display their wealth and new lifestyle is rising. To unlock the underlmathying reasons for consuming status products in emerging countries, this study brings attention to the mediating role of motivation to consume conspicuously as a missing link between consumers’ personality traits - susceptibility to interpersonal influence, need for uniqueness and status consumption. Using social identity and social comparison theory and drawing on data from 269 Bangladeshi individuals, we found that status consumption is positively influenced by susceptibility to interpersonal influence and need for uniqueness. We also found that the relationship between susceptibility to interpersonal influence and status consumption is partially mediated by the motivation to consume conspicuously. However, the results show that the relationship between need for uniqueness and status consumption is not mediated by the motivation to consume conspicuously

Using Network Alignment to Identify Conserved Consumer Behaviour Modelling Constructs

Extracting topological information from networks is a central problem in many fields including business analytics. With the increase in large-scale datasets, effectively comparing similarities and differences between networks is impossible without automation. In some cases, computational search of simple subgraphs is used to understand the structure of a network. These approaches, however, miss the “global picture” of network similarity. Here we examine the Network Alignment problem, in which we look for a mapping between vertex sets of two networks preserving topological information. Elsewhere, we showed that data analytics problems are often of varied computational complexity. We prove that this problem is W[1]-complete for several parameterizations. Since we expect large instances in the data analytics field, our result indicates that this problem is a prime candidate for metaheuristic approaches as it will be hard in practice to solve exact methods. We develop a memetic algorithm and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Network Alignment problem as a tool for discovering structural information through an application in the area of consumer behaviour modelling. We believe this to be the first demonstration of such an approach in the social sciences and in particular a consumer analytics application