Reshaping Loyalty Programs for Sustainability: Harnessing the Power of Mobile Marketing

With technologies embedded throughout much of business and society, new pathways are opening to address mounting externalities like climate change. Today, there is an opportunity to leverage ICTs to address sustainability issues head-on through digital marketing and other business activities that go beyond traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR). Across four studies, we instigated how mobile promotions administered via retail loyalty programs impacted the consumption of sustainable products. Multi-level mixed-effect Tobit regression models were used. Data were included for weekly purchases of 21 brands of plant-based beverages made across 242 stores located in Quebec, Canada between 2015 and 2016. Overall, mobile promotions had a positive direct impact on demand (B=0.232, p\u3c0.0001) but increased their price sensitivity (B=-0.898, p\u3c0.0001). Mobile promotions that awarded loyalty points were the most effective at generating demand directly. Advertisements with everyday low pricing increased price sensitivities the most (B=-0.702, p\u3c0.0001). Implications for theory and practice are discussed

Accounting for multiscale processing in adaptive real-world decision-making via the hippocampus

For adaptive real-time behavior in real-world contexts, the brain needs to allow past information over multiple timescales to influence current processing for making choices that create the best outcome as a person goes about making choices in their everyday life. The neuroeconomics literature on value-based decision-making has formalized such choice through reinforcement learning models for two extreme strategies. These strategies are model-free (MF), which is an automatic, stimulus–response type of action, and model-based (MB), which bases choice on cognitive representations of the world and causal inference on environment-behavior structure. The emphasis of examining the neural substrates of value-based decision making has been on the striatum and prefrontal regions, especially with regards to the “here and now” decision-making. Yet, such a dichotomy does not embrace all the dynamic complexity involved. In addition, despite robust research on the role of the hippocampus in memory and spatial learning, its contribution to value-based decision making is just starting to be explored. This paper aims to better appreciate the role of the hippocampus in decision-making and advance the successor representation (SR) as a candidate mechanism for encoding state representations in the hippocampus, separate from reward representations. To this end, we review research that relates hippocampal sequences to SR models showing that the implementation of such sequences in reinforcement learning agents improves their performance. This also enables the agents to perform multiscale temporal processing in a biologically plausible manner. Altogether, we articulate a framework to advance current striatal and prefrontal-focused decision making to better account for multiscale mechanisms underlying various real-world time-related concepts such as the self that cumulates over a person’s life course

Tracing Digital Transformation Pathways from Subsistence Farming to Equitable and Sustainable Modern Society: Revisiting the eKutir ICT Platform-Enabled Ecosystem as an Interstitial Space

Digitalization has impacted how new practices emerge. In this study, we examined the genesis of new practices during the implementation of an ICT platform-enabled ecosystem in communities of subsistence farmers who were opening to modern development. The platform ecosystem, led by the eKutir social enterprise (Odisha, India), leveraged micro-entrepreneurs to establish networks of actors to support farmers. We view the eKutir model as an interstitial space, i.e., a transition space (combining physical, digital, and human components) that brings actors from different institutional fields together. Five focus groups (n=83 farmers) and semi-structured interviews (n=18 individuals) were conducted. Transcripts were analyzed using inductive methods. The study reveals a six-step institutional process: (i) forming physical and digital connections, (ii) gaining legitimacy, (iii) establishing inter-field resource dependencies, (iv) distributing power, (v) standardizing practices, and (vi) sustaining changes in practices. This study contributes to research on ICT for development and interstitial spaces

Food convergent innovation webinar series : pulse program

Convergent innovation (CI) for food, refers to the point of convergence of food, targets for sustainable development, and affordable healthcare. The article describes this “sweet spot” in terms of: what consumers want; what they need for vitality and health; what they can and want to pay; what the planet can offer sustainably; and what the agriculture and food sectors produce in a cost-effective and profitable manner. A CI for food webinar series has been developed, with features on legumes, pulses and plant breeding; part of a scaling up strategy to accelerate what pulses can contribute as food solutions to sustainable development

Attachment and eating: A meta-analytic review of the relevance of attachment for unhealthy and healthy eating behaviors in the general population

Attachment relationships play an important role in people's wellbeing and affliction with physical and mental illnesses, including eating disorders. Seven reviews from the clinical field have consistently shown that higher attachment insecurity—failure to form trusting and reliable relationships with others—systematically characterized individuals with eating disorders. Nevertheless, to date, it is unclear whether (and if so how) these findings apply to the population at large. Consequently, the objective of the present meta-analysis is to quantify the relationship between attachment and unhealthy and healthy eating in the general population. Data from 70 studies and 19,470 participants were converted into r effect sizes and analysed. Results showed that higher attachment insecurity (r = 0.266), anxiety (r = 0.271), avoidance (r = 0.119), and fearfulness (r = 0.184) was significantly associated with more unhealthy eating behaviors, ps = 0.000; conversely, higher attachment security correlated with lower unhealthy eating behaviors (r = −0.184, p = 0.000). This relationship did not vary across type of unhealthy eating behavior (i.e., binge eating, bulimic symptoms, dieting, emotional eating, and unhealthy food consumption). The little exploratory evidence concerning healthy eating and attachment was inconclusive with one exception—healthy eating was associated with lower attachment avoidance (r = −0.211, p = 0.000). Our results extend previous meta-analytic findings to show that lack of trusting and reliable relationships does not only set apart eating disordered individuals from controls, but also characterize unhealthy eating behaviors in the general population. More evidence is needed to determine how attachment and healthy eating are linked and assess potential mechanisms influencing the attachment–eating relationship

Best Practices in the U.S. Lodging Industry: Overview, Methods, and Champions

When a lodging operation is doing an innovative and excellent job in a particular area, the industry benefits from spreading the word about the practice. But first one has to discover those best practices

Managing for Excellence: Conclusions and Challenges from a Study of Best Practices in the U.S Lodging Industry

Perhaps the real challenge of innovation is to continue innovating

Scaling up private sector engagement in food security through convergent food innovation : proof of concept and theory of change

To help food businesses develop nutritious food products and make them commercially viable, the project developed the Food Convergent Innovation Accelerator, a virtual platform comprising global and Indian partners spanning societal and industrial sectors. Collaborative leadership was fostered between various partners, including the McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE, Montreal, Canada) and the National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTEM) – a public research university (Sonipat district of Haryana, India). The programme initially focused on pulse foods (and later, millets) as naturally nutritious agricultural commodities that promise high human and economic development impact in India

Multi-indicator supply chain management framework for food convergent innovation in the dairy business

A comprehensive integrated framework of indicators currently used in lean, agile, sustainable and resilient supply chain paradigms is developed under the umbrella of convergent innovation (CI) and applied to the management of the supply chain of a dairy company, including procurement, processing and distribution of their products to customers. CI is a meta-framework that opens new frontiers for commercial innovation, supply chains and market systems by making the convergence of economic, social and environmental outcomes the target of business and actor decisions throughout society to build supply and demand for commercially viable outcomes. This framework provides a company with a multi-indicator supply chain management tool designed to accommodate the supply chain paradigms of being lean, agile, sustainable and resilient, as well as providing milk-based essential nutrition within a process called convergent innovation. The proposed analytical framework can serve as a decision support tool to systematically evaluate and improve the dairy supply chain from plant production to retailers. In jurisdictions without a quota system for milk production at the farm level, the system constructed in this paper could be expanded to handle farm production and shipment to dairy processing plants.The authors would like to express their appreciation to personnel at focal dairy manufacturer company for their thoughtful inputs that contributed to the quality of their paper. This research work is supported by funds PT76740 (MITACS - Multi-Criteria Supply Chain Design and Management Framework for Food Convergent Innovation in Dairy Business) to the first author with Parmalat Canada as an industry partner. Partial financial support was also provided by a SSHRC research grant (PT62411, Paths of convergence for agriculture, health and wealth: Foundational work for a Trans-disciplinary whole-of-society paradigm in food and nutrition context)