Alison Rieple

Inter–organisational relationships in the worldwide popular recorded music industry

This paper analyses the worldwide popular recorded music industry and examines how product, firm and industry features result in key resources coagulating around the two firm types; the major and independent. We argue that these firm specific resources are complementary and participating firms would benefit from their union. However though complementary, they are inimical and close association risks damaging their value. Collaboration between the two firm types that hold these resources therefore needs to be designed not along traditional concerns of protection from opportunism, or the requirement to control key resources. Instead competitive advantage may be gained by designing and managing structural relationships that protect each partner’s resource set from the hostile elements of the others; a contamination rather than an appropriation focus.

Identify Innovative Business Models: Can Innovative Business Models Enable Players to React to Ongoing or Unpredictable Trends?

Abstract Socioeconomic trends (such as makers, crowdsourcing, sharing economy, gamification) as well as technological trends (such as cloud computing, 3D printing technology, application, big data, TV on demand and the Internet of things) are changing the scenario and creating new opportunities, new businesses and, as a result, new players. The high level of uncertainty caused by the fast speed of innovation technology along with an enormous amount of information difficult to analyse and exploit are characterizing the current framework. On the other hand, businesses such as Netflix – with its 44,000 users and a long tail business model – show a new service based on TV on demand where innovation starts from the convergence between two different industries (TV and the Internet) and spreads on the need of new users. Quirky, with its innovative open business model, is manufacturing new products designed and developed by the community and finally produced with the use of 3D printing technology. While Google in a multi-sided model are giving their new glasses to different developers who build their own application on them, Kickstarter finds its business funders in the crowd, and pays them back with its future products, according to what the organization needs. Another element that adds complexity to the previous framework is the new customer. He or she is showing a social attitude in favour of transparency, openness, collaboration, and sharing. Every second more than 600 tweets are posted on Twitter and around 700 status updates are posted on Facebook. At the same time, people are receiving text messages, e-mails and skype or phone calls and simultaneously consuming TV, radio and print media. In this scenario characterized by trends where employees, funders, customers and partners do not play a stable role but work together with a sort of “platform organization” to create a product or service completely customized for different market niches, how can an organization set up an innovative business model in a defined trend? Is it possible to identify a sort of framework, able to inspire new business models, with an examination of trends? In this article we will use a mix of different approaches to inspire new business model.

Learning-by-doing as an approach to teaching social entrepreneurship

Many studies have explored the use of learning-by-doing in higher education, but few have applied this to social entrepreneurship contexts and applications: this paper addresses this gap in the literature. Our programme involved students working with different stakeholders in an interactive learning environment to generate real revenue for social enterprises. Our results show that learning-by-doing enables students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and enhance their knowledge of social businesses. The findings also show that students became more effective at working in teams and in formulating and applying appropriate business strategies for the social enterprises. Overall, the learning-by-doing approach discussed in this paper is capable of developing the entrepreneurial skills of students, but there are challenges that need to be addressed if such an approach is to be effective.

Institutionalizing idealism: the adoption of CSR practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the idiosyncratic features of the adoption and institutionalization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper in which current theory on the institutionalization of practices within organizational fields is extended. This is achieved through considering how well established models of the institutionalization process accommodate the idiosyncrasies of CSR practices.Findings – Established models of the institutionalization process do not properly account for the patterns of CSR adoption that are identified. This is because CSR has some features that differentiates it from other organizational initiatives, including idealism, delayed discovery of instrumental benefits, public attention, and the tension between public and private logics.Research limitations/implications – This is a conceptual paper which now needs to be explored empirically, either at the level of the CSR practice or...

Product development within a clustered environment: The case of apparel design firms

Abstract A great deal of recent academic attention has been paid to the role of location and proximity on the organizing of production. This body of work has identified the likely benefits to firms of co-locating, but despite this, there are gaps, especially in the treatment of creative clusters and the links between location and product creation processes. In this theoretical paper we discuss how clustered apparel designer firms interact with their environment, and how this geography impacts on their designing processes and the designs that emerge. We focus especially on how co-locating with other designers and creative organisations allows them to draw upon a multiplicity of intangible resources such as street scenes, social moods and atmosphere in order to create new designs. These factors are critical in the apparel design sector, but unlike factor inputs such as talent, materials or the financial and physical resources, have hardly been considered in academic writings.

Offenders and Entrepreneurship

This paper reports on a study into the potential which offenders have for entrepreneurial activity, and discusses some policy implications for the training of prisoners and ex-offenders in small business skills. The study had a number of elements; firstly a survey of current small business training and support within prisons and the probation services in the UK; secondly, a survey of prisoners and probationers to establish their potential for entrepreneurial activity, experience of working in their own businesses and intentions of doing so in the future. The questionnaire included a psychometric test which assessed individuals across five well- established entrepreneurial traits; and finally case studies of three ex-prisoners who were intending to start up their own businesses once they left prison.

UK Fashion Designers Working in Micro-sized Enterprises; Attitudes to Locational Resources, Their Peers and the Market

This paper contributes to an understanding of the importance of locally based resources and interactions in a globalised industry, fashion design. It examines the product design stage of the fashion production chain, rather than the manufacture and commercialisation of apparel products. We studied the use of their geographies by UK-based fashion designers working in micro-sized enterprises ( < 10 employees) especially because of their likely sensitivity to various aspects of proximity, including their dependence on external resources to supplement their own. Factor and cluster analysis identified four different types of designers, which differed in the manner in which they interacted with peers and markets, and accessed location-based resources. The paper advances explanations for the patterns of behaviour observed in the various clusters, and in making recommendations for further research predicts the types of design position each is likely to prefer.

Stimulating learning about social entrepreneurship through income generation projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of income generation projects as a pedagogic method to assess students’ learning about social enterprises. The authors are interested in how and why this innovative approach might improve students’ understanding of the different aspects and attributes of social entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach – The study used thematic analysis of qualitative data comprising the reflective logs of 87 students on an undergraduate entrepreneurship module in a university business programme. The major attributes of social entrepreneurship were identified from a review of literature, and the paper uses the logs to judge whether students had learnt about these attributes. Findings – The results show that students developed an understanding concerning social enterprises’ diverse stakeholder environment, market needs, social enterprises’ ideological foundations, resource mobilisation processes and performance measurement – both social and financial. In additio...

Entrepreneurial decision making in a microcosm

This study investigates when, how and why students use opportunity management behaviours (causation, effectuation and bricolage) within a fundraising project that acted as a microcosm of the entrepreneur’s world. Such a pedagogical device reveals students’ use of different opportunity management behaviours over the different stages of entrepreneurship. Although research has confirmed the use of these behaviours by entrepreneurs, how student entrepreneurs learn, and practice, them, remains underexplored. Causation is the predominant focus for university teaching, yet our data reveal that students adopted all three behaviours at different stages of the fundraising project as they responded to different contextual forces. Our findings suggest that opportunity management theories should take a more prominent role in the higher education entrepreneurship curriculum. Educators also need to provide a better means of facilitating students to learn about, and practice, a greater repertoire of opportunity management behaviours than is currently the case.

Uncovering the influences on decision making in the popular music industry; intuition, networks and the desire for symbolic capital

Abstract This article uncovers the influences on decision-making in the popular music industry, and especially the role of intuition, network participation, and the desire for symbolic capital. Based on the analysis of interview and observational data from thirty-six respondents in twenty firms and a dataset of forty decisions, we provide evidence of how strategic decisions are being made within music industry micro firms in the USA. Our findings confirm the pattern of strategic decision-making (SDM) modelled by Liberman-Yaconi, Hooper, and Hutchings (2010), but adds a new element, symbolic capital, to the model. Our data showed that aggrandisement was used in order to increase perceived status, an important aspect in an industry beset by uncertainty and insecurity. In addition to creating an enhanced model of decision-making in micro-sized firms, the paper also suggests areas for further research.