Effective Digital Channel Marketing for Cybersecurity Solutions

Smaller organizations are prime targets for hackers and malware, because these businesses lack cybersecurity plans and the resources to survive a serious security incident. To exploit this market opportunity, cybersecurity solution providers need to leverage the power of downstream channel members. We investigate how a supplier's digital channel marketing can encourage value-added resellers to sell that supplier’s cybersecurity solutions. Our analysis of survey data from 109 value-added resellers of a multinational supplier shows that resellers are more committed to stock and sell cybersecurity products and services if the supplier’s digital channel marketing provides tools that help them sell the solutions to end customers. This support is likely needed because cybersecurity offerings are technologically complex and systemic by nature, as supported by the finding that value-added resellers pay little attention to supplier’s campaigns and price discounts. Thus, cybersecurity suppliers should maintain trusted and informative relationships with their resellers and provide them with hands-on sales tools, because a reseller's commitment to selling cybersecurity solutions is linked with their ability to understand the offering and with the extent of their supplier relationship. These findings are in line with previous literature on the challenges perceived by salespeople in selling novel and complex technology

Using Entrepreneurial Marketing to Foster Reseller Adoption of Smart Micro-Grid Technology

This article investigates how entrepreneurial marketing can encourage resellers to adopt smart micro-grid technology. An online survey based on the literature on user adoption and entrepreneurial marketing was used to gather data from 99 power systems resellers. The data were analyzed using the partial least squares method to validate a model of the relationships between reseller’s antecedents and intention to adopt smart micro-grid technology, and the role of vendor’s entrepreneurial marketing in the adoption. The results suggest that user adoption models can only partially be applied to the reseller context, and future research should develop models that can further explain reseller’s decision making with regards to becoming involved in an emerging technology. As to the implications for practice, vendors need to demonstrate proactive entrepreneurial marketing, particularly entrepreneurial orientation, to increase the performance expectancy perceived by their resellers by increasing awareness and understanding of smart micro-grid technology to cultivate its diffusion

Cities as collaborative innovation platforms

In this article, we focus on the role of a city as an orchestrator for innovation. We argue that cities should establish active dialogue with their citizens, and private and public sectors actors to co-create, develop, test, and offer service innovations that utilize diverse sets of platforms such as living labs. Our research contributes to the discussions of open and user innovations from the perspective of cities as communities that involve and integrate citizens and companies to collaborative innovation activities. While acknowledging that cities are platforms for simultaneous and divergent innovation initiatives, we identify four principal types of collaborative innovation. Cities serve as platforms for: i) improving everyday life; ii) conducting consumer and citizen experiments; iii) experimenting and implementing new technologies and services; and iv) creating new innovations and economies. Finally, we offer guidelines for fostering collaborative innovation activities between the public and private sectors

Designing Business Models for the Internet of Things

This article investigates challenges pertaining to business model design in the emerging context of the Internet of Things (IOT). The evolution of business perspectives to the IOT is driven by two underlying trends: i) the change of focus from viewing the IOT primarily as a technology platform to viewing it as a business ecosystem; and ii) the shift from focusing on the business model of a firm to designing ecosystem business models. An ecosystem business model is a business model composed of value pillars anchored in ecosystems and focuses on both the firm's method of creating and capturing value as well as any part of the ecosystem's method of creating and capturing value. The article highlights three major challenges of designing ecosystem business models for the IOT, including the diversity of objects, the immaturity of innovation, and the unstructured ecosystems. Diversity refers to the difficulty of designing business models for the IOT due to a multitude of different types of connected objects combined with only modest standardization of interfaces. Immaturity suggests that quintessential IOT technologies and innovations are not yet products and services but a "mess that runs deep". The unstructured ecosystems mean that it is too early to tell who the participants will be and which roles they will have in the evolving ecosystems. The study argues that managers can overcome these challenges by using a business model design tool that takes into account the ecosystemic nature of the IOT. The study concludes by proposing the grounds for a new design tool for ecosystem business models and suggesting that "value design" might be a more appropriate term when talking about business models in ecosystems

A Small-Firm Perspective on the Benefits of Living Labs

Decreasing energy consumption is a global priority and the energy market is in constant change. The search for energy-saving innovations provides an opportunity to initiate a user-centered approach using the living labs model. This article describes how Process Vision, a small-yet-leading Northern European provider of energy IT systems, applied the livings labs approach to develop novel energy-efficiency management solutions. We discuss the company’s participation in the APOLLON consortium, a cross-border living labs initiative on energy efficiency. More specifically, we describe the Finland-based company’s experiences of a pilot project launched in the living lab and report on the perceived managerial challenges of applying the living labs approach from the perspective of a small firm

Linking Living Lab Characteristics and Their Outcomes: Towards a Conceptual Framework

Despite almost a decade of living lab activity all over Europe, there still is a lack of empirical research into the practical implementation and the related outcomes of living labs. Therefore, this article proposes a framework to create a better understanding of the characteristics and outcomes of living labs. We investigate three living labs in Belgium and one in Finland to learn how the different building blocks of living lab environments contribute to the outputs of innovation projects launched within the lab. The findings imply that managers and researchers contemplating innovation in living labs need to consider the intended inputs and outcomes, and reframe their innovation activities accordingly. We formulate practical guidelines on how living labs should be managed on the levels of community interaction, stakeholder engagement, and methodological setup to succeed in implementing living lab projects and to create user-centred innovations. That way, living lab practitioners can work towards a more sustainable way of setting up living labs that can run innovation projects over a longer period of time

From Idea Crowdsourcing to Managing User Knowledge

This article explores how technology companies can benefit from user knowledge in product and service innovation beyond mere idea generation through crowdsourcing. We investigate a case from the telecommunications sector to discover the ways a company can overcome the challenges of motivating users to participate in innovation activity and gaining from their knowledge in the innovation process. In particular, we seek to learn how the company has created understanding about the future uses of technology and the developments of the market with the lead users. In addition, we analyze the key means of capturing value from the knowledge gathered from the users, including the essential organizational practices that support user innovation and the ways the company makes sense of the vast volume and variety of user knowledge. Our empirical inquiry increases the understanding of how technology companies can complement and use crowdsourcing to effectively utilize knowledge resident in user communities

Neuromarketing: Understanding Customer's Subconscious Responses to Marketing

This article presents neuromarketing as a way to detect brain activation during customer engagement. Neuromarketing is a field of marketing research that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. We established a Virtual Customer Journey model based on the consultative selling process to study customer engagement by using brain scans. Consultative selling suggests that a customer’s shopping experience is managed by the salesperson’s behaviour and in-store marketing assets, and that the customer gets engaged step by step. A total of 16 test subjects were shown video clips and still pictures from a consultative sales process at Nokia’s flagship stores, and their brain activity was scanned. The results show that test subjects were able to associate themselves with people and events on the video and they felt safe and comfortable during the consultative selling process. The study implies that laboratories can build virtual environments that resemble real shopping environments where customers can participate in the buying process and respond to events displayed on the screen, and that neuroimaging is useful in providing valuable information on customer behaviour that is not achievable otherwise

Workplace bullying and violence as risk factors for type 2 diabetes : a multicohort study and meta-analysis

The aim of this multicohort study was to examine whether employees exposed to social stressors at work, such as workplace bullying and violence, have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The study included 45,905 men and women (40-65 years of age and free of diabetes at baseline) from four studies in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Workplace bullying and violence were self-reported at baseline. Incident diabetes was ascertained through national health and medication records and death registers. Marginal structural Cox models adjusted for age, sex, country of birth, marital status and educational level were used for the analyses. Nine per cent of the population reported being bullied at work and 12% were exposed to workplace violence or threats of violence. Bullied participants had a 1.46 (95% CI 1.23, 1.74) times higher risk of developing diabetes compared with non-bullied participants. Exposure to violence or threats of violence was also associated with a higher risk of diabetes (HR 1.26 [95% CI 1.02, 1.56]). The risk estimates attenuated slightly when taking BMI into account, especially for bullying. The results were similar for men and women, and were consistent across cohorts. We found a higher risk of incident type 2 diabetes among employees exposed to bullying or violence in the workplace. Further research is needed to determine whether policies to reduce bullying and violence at work may reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes in working populations. Research on the mechanisms is also highly warranted.Peer reviewe

Workplace bullying and workplace violence as risk factors for cardiovascular disease : a multi-cohort study

Aims To assess the associations between bullying and violence at work and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Methods and results Participants were 79201 working men and women, aged 18-65years and free of CVD and were sourced from three cohort studies from Sweden and Denmark. Exposure to workplace bullying and violence was measured at baseline using self-reports. Participants were linked to nationwide health and death registers to ascertain incident CVD, including coronary heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. Study-specific results were estimated by marginal structural Cox regression and were combined using fixed-effect meta-analysis. Nine percent reported being bullied at work and 13% recorded exposure to workplace violence during the past year. We recorded 3229 incident CVD cases with a mean follow-up of 12.4years (765 in the first 4years). After adjustment for age, sex, country of birth, marital status, and educational level, being bullied at work vs. not was associated with a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.59 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.28-1.98] for CVD. Experiencing workplace violence vs. not was associated with a HR of 1.25 (95% CI 1.12-1.40) for CVD. The population attributable risk was 5.0% for workplace bullying and 3.1% for workplace violence. The excess risk remained similar in analyses with different follow-up lengths, cardiovascular risk stratifications, and after additional adjustments. Dose-response relations were observed for both workplace bullying and violence (P-trend <0.001). There was only negligible heterogeneity in study-specific estimates. Conclusion Bullying and violence are common at workplaces and those exposed to these stressors are at higher risk of CVD.Peer reviewe