Alejandro Lago

Innovation Management Practices, Strategic Adaptation, and Business Results: Evidence from the Electronics Industry

This research contributes to the understanding of how different practices of innovation management are related to mid- and long-term growth and profitability. Governments and regional development agencies invest relevant budgets to foster innovation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and improve their innovation management practices to make them more competitive. Nevertheless, it is not clear what impact these practices have on a company’s performance over a long period of time. We propose a model to audit and classify innovation practices and empirically test the impact of innovation practices on the firms’ long–term financial performance, using a broad sample of companies in the electronics sector. Our empirical results show that, within a regional context, companies that are similar in terms of size, position in the value chain, and ownership structure follow similar innovative practices. Furthermore, the use of a systematic approach for innovation leads to revenue growth but does not necessarily increase profit or productivity.

Myopic Inventory Policies Using Individual Customer Arrival Information

In this paper, we investigate the optimality of myopic inventory replenishment policies in a periodic-review single-echelon system, with nonstationary, correlated, stochastic demand and cost, and nonincreasing stochastic prices. Using the single-unit decomposition approach, we provide certain general conditions on the demand and cost processes under which a myopic policy is optimal. Under these conditions, the optimal policy is a myopic state-dependent base-stock policy, which can be expressed in closed form as a base-probability policy. Specifically, the order associated with a given customer should be placed if and only if its arrival probability within the leadtime is higher than a threshold. Our results generalize earlier conditions for the optimality of myopic policies. Namely, we show that myopic policies can be optimal even when the demand is correlated or stochastically decreasing.

The Role of Quick Response in Accelerating Sales of Fashion Goods

Quick response has been proposed as an appropriate operational strategy to serve volatile markets. In fashion, postponing design, production, and distribution as much as possible may indeed reduce the uncertainty related to product success. In this paper, we provide an empirical study of the influence of lead time and sourcing origin on product success, based on data provided by a European fast fashion retailer. We provide a model of sales diffusion over time where product success is characterized by the speed of sales. We then evaluate how the speed of sales is influenced by the design time and the time-to-market of each particular product. We find that delaying the time of design is very beneficial, because it allows the firm to learn about fashion trends. The effect of time-to-market is more subtle. For a shorter time-to-market, speed of sales is considerably higher, but there is limited learning obtained by postponing design. In contrast, for longer time-to-market, speed of sales is lower, but the learning is higher, so for products designed late in the season, the speed of sales is similar to that of items with short time-to-market.

A Service Perspective of Cultural Entities and Their Customers

This chapter ends the part of the book devoted to operations management. In it we focus on cultural institutions as service providers and on the important role played by customers and employees in providing the service. We complement the matters discussed in previous sections by giving a view focused primarily on the design, rather than the ongoing management, of a service. We therefore do not limit ourselves to Facilities but also include the other three dimensions, Brand, Focus, and Brain.

MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF INTERNATIONAL LOGISTICS OUTSOURCING PARTNERSHIPS: A DYADIC PERSPECTIVE ANALYSIS

We analyze the validity of five performance measures of international logistics outsourcing partnerships, using information from both partners. Each partners assessment of performance is captured by a single construct, which underlies four of the measures. This construct, however, is different for each party. Consequently, we examine a focal partners perceptions of the other partners performance assessment, and show that these inter-party perceptions are a poor measure of the latters actual performance assessment.

Assisted vs. self-checkout in retail: An empirical analysis of the impact of operational process dimensions on customer satisfaction, recommendation and reuse

In this paper we compare check-out alternatives with different levels of customer participation with regard to the impact that operational process dimensions have on customers. The study was conducted in a supermarket offering two types of check-out options: conventionally assisted, and self-service. Our analysis focused on the impact of three operational dimensions of check-out processes (efficiency, assistance, and convenience) on customer satisfaction, recommendation and reuse. Our results show that the impact of these dimensions on customers is relevant, but varies according to the level of customer participation (assisted vs. self-check-out). This has important implications for the adoption and management of self-checkout in retail practice.

The ‘la Caixa’ Foundation: Art exhibitions

The attendees at the weekly meeting to coordinate cultural activities of the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (FLC) understood quite clearly that they definitely had a problem. After nearly two years of preparation, the exhibition on painter Joaquim Mir, a twentieth-century landscape artist, at the CaixaForum center in Barcelona, had been a great success since its opening on February 3, 2009. But, as had been noted by the FLC’s deputy director of production, if the Mir exhibition ended as planned on April 26, there would not be enough time to prepare the space for the following exhibition of Andrea Palladio, a famous Renaissance architect. As he explained, he had met with the various contractors used by FLC, and the conclusion was clear: the physical preparation of the rooms required more time than was currently available between the closing of the Mir exhibition and the scheduled opening for the Palladio exhibition. Either they had to close the Mir exhibition sooner or delay the opening of the Palladio exhibition.

Putting your client to work A good way to achieve great service at low cost

The adequate design and management of customer contributions to a company’s services processes has become a key source of competitive advantage, as the contributions can be leveraged both operationally as well as strategically.