Open Voucher and the Tourist Season in Sardinia

In the year 2004 Portale Sardegna, an Italian online tour operator, launched a new product, Open Voucher (OV), with the bold objective of prolonging the tourist season on the island. The idea was conceptually simple: to create a Sardinian tourist product capable of attracting travelers to the island during the low season, while the implementation was quite difficult. Open Voucher attempted this de-seasonalization through the development of an Internet-enabled network of affiliated hotels providing availability of rooms year round and offering their product through the Open Voucher platform at a low, fixed rate. In the years ranging from 2004 to 2006, Open Voucher showed good traction in the marketplace, but in 2007 it began to record falling bookings and deteriorating results. What was happening? Had the leadership team defined the strategy to launch Open Voucher properly? Was it even possible to re-launch the Open Voucher product

L\u27evoluzione Teorica in Tema di Scelte Strategiche Nelle Imprese

Questa tesi di dottorato e articolata in due parti.Nella prima parte l\u27impegno e teso alla ricostruzione dell\u27evoluzione del pensiero strategico nella letteratura internazionale utilizzando come griglie interpretative di prima approssimazione le Scuole di pensiero considerate da Henry Mintzeberg e da Henk Elfring e Tom Volderba. Partendo dalle classificazioni da loro elaborate si sono costruiti dei filoni di studi assimilabili per le principali asserzioni teoriche sostenute. La ricostruzione, in alcuni casi, e avvenuta facendo riferimento alle principali opere di coloro che possono essere considerati gli esponenti piu rappresentativi di ciascun filone di ricerca. Si e inoltre sperimentata un ipotesi ulteriore di classificazione che assume come elementi di riferimento la valenza del tempo e dello spazio e la loro influenza sulla formulazione del concetto di strategia e delle sue applicazioni.Nella seconda parte della tesi l\u27impegno e stato orientato alla specificazione dei concetti di spazio e di tempo e all\u27evidenziazione del processo evolutivo che ha investito entrambi. Più specificamente, e stato rilevato che l\u27evoluzione del concetto di strategia risente fortemente della crescente rilevanza assunta dai fattori immateriali nella definizione dei vantaggi competitivi delle imprese. In questo ambito, dando per acquisito che il sapere esprime piu di ogni altro elemento i fondamentali connotati di genere soft della nuova era , e stato posto in risalto come il concetto di strategia possa essere meglio interpretato nella sua evoluzione con la considerazione congiunta di due fondamentali fattori immateriali: lo spazio e il tempo. Nella presente tesi di dottorato, il concetto di spazio quale fattore immateriale da porre alla base delle strategie competitive delle imprese e stato utilizzato con il significato di spazio relazionale, unico e difficilmente imitabile, mentre il concetto di tempo ha assunto il significato di fattore alla base del vantaggio competitivo delle imprese

Addressing the societal challenges in organizations: the conceptualization of mindfulness capability for social justice

Social inequalities are partly caused by habitual organizational practices. In this vein, to overcome those, organizations now need to develop new organizational capabilities aimed at enhancing their attention towards societal issues. In our study, we apply the theory of mindfulness to explain how it may help organizations overcome habitual organizing that fuels social inequalities. Guided by the microfoundational perspective of organizational capability, we conceptualize individual characteristics, processes, and structures that collectively form mindfulness capability for social justice. We perceive it as an organizational capability that reflects the extent to which an organization possesses a collective social justice awareness, i.e., awareness of the impact on social justice in society through its organizational practices. We argue that, when adopted by organizations, mindfulness, by increasing the awareness of the organizational impact on society, helps notice, examine, and question the correctness of taken-for-granted organizational practices. From our perspective, this new capability will lead to changes in organizational practices that fuel social inequalities. Our study contributes to the literature on sustainable organizational development and mindfulness research in organizations. Managerial implications and future research directions are also discussed

The intersection between SMEs' business strategies and the phases of unexpected events: a systematic review of the literature

Framing of the research: Despite the relevance of crisis management for SMEs, existing literature primarily targets large firms, therefore paying less attention to smaller businesses. As a result, the manner in which SMEs transform their business strategies during the specific phases of unexpected events remains an unexplored research topic. Purpose of the paper: The present conceptual paper aims to develop a framework examining the kind of strategies that may be implemented by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) throughout the different stages of unexpected events. Methodology: The paper reports a systematic literature review (SLR) to summarize how SMEs react in times of crisis and illustrate core themes in previous research in relation to the phases of crisis prevention, response, and recovery. Findings: The study develops a circular event framework and illustrates the leading business strategies implemented by SMEs in different moments of unpredicted circumstances: (1) flexible planning, financial resources equipment, proactiveness, and collaboration during the crisis prevention phase; (2) cost minimization and cash flow protection, revenue generation - operations and business model pivoting, stakeholder relationships, and dynamic approaches during the crisis response phase; (3) business model re-configuring, and stakeholder and employee relationships re-establishment, in the crisis recovery phase. Research limits: The conceptual nature of this work stimulates further theoretical and empirical studies. Future research should empirically test and validate the proposed framework within specific research settings. Practical implications: The present research represents a useful benchmark for managers and practitioners to better understand what strategies are suitable according to the specific moment of the crisis. Originality of the paper: This study analyzes the evolution of SMEs’ business strategies in times of crisis from a novel perspective by pointing out the prevention, response, and recovery phases’ circularity

Value Co-Destruction: a Text-Mining-Based Mixed Method Study on Social Media Interactions

To better understand how big data interconnects firms and customers, we analyse the role of customers’ emotions in the process of value co-destruction in a social media context. We perform a text mining based algorithm capable of identifying anger, expectation, disgust, fear, and sadness in peaks of problematic social interactions. The developed algorithm associated with an in-depth qualitative analysis shows how to employ unstructured big data to understand the role of negative emotions in the process of value co-destruction

Digital Transformation Through the Lens of Digital Data Handling: An Exploratory Analysis of Agri-Food SMEs

This study aims to explore digital transformation and the level of sophistication in the digital data handling strategy by agri-food small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By developing an exploratory multiple-case study that involves fourteen food processing SMEs, this paper identifies a data processing flow made up of the following phases: data generation, data acquisition, data storage, data analysis, and data exploitation. In addition, it shows how data processing flow may occur in a number of ways, thereby classifying the agri-food SMEs’ digital transformation as paper master, digital wannabe, and digital champion. Hence, the article contributes to providing the conceptualization of a data processing flow, which includes the progressive stages in data management identified across firms by proposing a data handling strategy framework. Such a framework offers a snapshot of firms at various levels of digitization in their handling of various kinds of data, thus clarifying how the strategies of data processing flow occur

Time to clean up food production? Digital technologies, nature-driven agility, and the role of managers and customers

This article employs a multiple-case study research design to unpack the complex relationship between digital transformation, agility, and environmental sustainability in the agri-food industry. Our findings show that to achieve a cleaner food production that does not compromise the natural life cycle, firms need to deploy naturedriven agility, a novel type of agility. We conceptualized nature-driven agility as the firm ability to flexibly and effectively utilize natural resources to adapt the full production process to market changes and capture new value-creation opportunities within nature constraints. This study found that nature-driven agility relies on digital technologies to make predictions about natural resource dynamics that may impact the critical steps of the agri-food production process. We also identify some factors that clarify how the benefits of nature-driven agility on cleaner food production strongly depend on managers’ commitment to environmental sustainability and the pressure of customers for new products aligned with ecological sustainability purposes. Finally, we synthesized the findings in the Nature-driven Agility (NaDrA) framework, which practitioners can use to design proper operations that capture value-creation opportunities while improving agri-food firms’ environmental performance

Combining exploitation and exploration through crowdsourcing: The case of Starbucks

In this paper, we explore the concept of crowdsourcing as a driver of the ambidexterity innovations capabilities and as a strategic tool to combine exploitation and exploration strategies in the innovation generation process. In doing so, we focus on the case of Starbucks Corporation, an international coffee and coffeehouse chain considered the largest coffeehouse company in the world