Extracting consumers needs for new products a web mining approach

Here we introduce a web mining approach for automatically identifying new product ideas extracted from web logs. A web log - also known as blog - is a web site that provides commentary, news, and further information on a subject written by individual persons. We can find a large amount of web logs for nearly each topic where consumers present their needs for new products. These new product ideas probably are valuable for producers as well as for researchers and developers. This is because they can lead to a new product development process. Finding these new product ideas is a well-known task in marketing. Therefore, with this automatic approach we support marketing activities by extracting new and useful product ideas from textual information in internet logs. This approach is implemented by a web-based application named Product Idea Web Log Miner where users from the marketing department provide descriptions of existing products. As a result, new product ideas are extracted from the web logs and presented to the users

Establishing a mission-based culture : analyzing the relation between intra-organizational socialization agents, mission valence, public service motivation, goal clarity and work impact

This study contributes to our understanding of how organizations can craft a mission-based culture by examining the relationship between mission valence, PSM, goal clarity, and work impact. More specifically, the study assesses how value-laden communication with multiple intra-organizational socialization referents is related with the cited variables. The developed hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling and a sample of 585 non-managerial employees employed by a public welfare organization. The findings confirm the claim that position in an organizational hierarchy is not likely to influence the analyzed relationships. The magnitude of the relationships, however, diverges. In contrast to previous research, the study results indicate that, in the case of lower-level employees, PSM is the most powerful predictor of mission valence. Furthermore, the results indicate that exposure to organizational values via interaction with internal socialization agents is positively related with their perceived importance. The results thus not only confirm the relevance of incorporating the institutional setting when analyzing mission valence, but also provide further proof for an institutional theory of PSM by highlighting that different organizational socialization agents could play a distinctive role in crafting PSM and a mission-based culture

The organization's mission statement: give up hope or resuscitate? A search for evidence-based recommendations

The increasing complexity and dynamicity of their environment compels health-care managers to search relentlessly for effective management instruments. One strategic tool that both academics and practitioners have deemed critical to the success of any health-care organization is the development of a meaningful mission statement. However, despite the seemingly omnipresence of the concept, studies indicate that creating an effective mission statement seems to be extremely difficult, if not downright frustrating for a lot of health-care managers. This inability to create an effective mission statement roots for the greater part in the fact that the previous literature has provided little practical guidance on how health-care administrators should formulate and deploy mission statements. Given the increasing pressure on health-care organizations to develop an effective mission statement, this chapter (1) provides a detailed analysis of the mission statement concept based on a thorough literature analysis and (b) offers empirically based recommendations on how to successfully formulate and implement a mission statement within a health-care organization based on a systematic analysis of relevant empirical research. These analyses and the derived evidence-based recommendations will help health-care managers to revive their mission statement and make it more than a piece of paper

Do they see eye to eye? The impact of communication on the level of strategic consensus between hospital nurses and their TMT: a questionnaire survey within a Flemish hospital

This study builds on the concept of strategic consensus to investigate the level of strategic consensus among non-management members and how it is influenced by perceptions of organizational communication. Strategic consensus is defined as “the extent to which intraorganizational perceptions converge on shared understandings of strategic priorities (Rapert et al., 2002: 301). Data from 195 non-management health care providers working in a Flemish health care organization were used to examine the level of strategic consensus on five health care related strategic dimensions. In addition, stepwise multiple regression was used to assess if perceptions of job-related information, organizational information, vertical communication, and horizontal communication influence the level of strategic consensus. The results indicates a lack of strategic consensus between the sample of health care providers and the organization’s management team on the overall measure of strategic consensus and the sub dimensions “Human Resource Cultivation” and “Customer engagement”. The stepwise multiple linear regression model explains 36% of the variance in strategic consensus and indicates that strategic consensus is positive and significantly influenced by the variables “organizational information”, “job-related information”, “vertical communication” and “organizational tenure”

Constrained optimization of data-mining problems to improve model performance: A direct-marketing application

D/2005/7012/16 Constrained optimization of data-mining problems to improve model performance: A direct-marketing applicatio