Antonella La Rocca

Value creation and organisational practices at firm boundaries

Purpose – Growing awareness that value for the customer is created in relationship between the supplier and the customer has consequences for sales and marketing functions, and businesses are increasingly experimenting with new organisational approaches and solutions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate organisational issues involved in implementing value programs in B2B firms and examine implications for managerial action. Design/methodology/approach – After a literature review on value creation in business relationships, the authors illustrate the case of a large industrial business experimenting with organisational solutions to support value-creation processes in customer relationships. Findings – The authors identify three issues management has to address in organising the customer interface: involvement of a variety of actors to access elements of effective customer-value solutions; supporting and orchestrating the interaction processes among those involved; and differentiation of the custome...

Good for science, but which implications for business? An analysis of the managerial implications in high-impact B2B marketing articles published between 2003 and 2012

Purpose – This article aims to analyze a set of features in the managerial implications of the most-cited business-to-business (B2B) marketing articles which are related to their managerial relevance. The purpose is to further identify which are the most recurrent features of managerial implications, as well as the connections between such features. Finally, the articles aim to verify if these features of managerial implications vary depending on the scientific impact of the article. Design/methodology/approach – The 60 most-cited articles were selected from both generalist and specialized academic journals and a content analysis was conducted. Then the article assesses the formal features (e.g. dedicated space), the language (e.g. consulting or normative), the translation of scientific results (e.g. message efficacy) and such other features as time orientation, specificity and abstraction of the managerial implications in these high-impact articles. The article also analyses patterns and associations bet...

Corporate associations in B2B: coping with multiple relationship-specific identities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate associations emerge in business networks focusing on mutually attributed identities in customer-supplier relationships. The role of the mutually perceived identities for interaction behaviours of the parties is examined and consequences of multiple emergent identities for management are discussed. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual one starting from an overview of prior research on corporate associations in marketing, findings on distinctive features of business markets and review of studies on identity in interaction processes. Findings – Departing from various strands of research on the origin and role of corporate associations in the literature the authors argue that corporate associations, in business networks are relationship specific and continuously emergent, and that businesses acquire multiple identities in relation to main stakeholders as customers and suppliers. The relationship specificity, emergent nature and...

Construction of meanings in business relationships and networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address an issue related to the role of interaction processes in the development of customer-supplier relationships in business markets. Design/methodology/approach – Focusing on the role of cognition in interaction behaviours in business relationships, the authors examine two research streams that offer perspectives on interaction processes akin to the IMP – the socio-cognitive perspective and the practice-based approach to markets and marketing. Findings – The two research streams analysed contribute to understanding the link between cognition and interaction behaviours by pointing to the construction of meanings as an important factor in interaction behaviours and indicating storytelling as a tool to construct meanings among the actors. Originality/value – This paper is among the few studies that focus the attention on communication processes in business relationships and networks.

Netnography approach as a tool for marketing research: the case of Dash-P&G/TTV

Purpose – Online communication technologies have profoundly affected consumption and buying behaviours, and put pressure on businesses to find ways of dealing with these developments. Businesses are increasingly experimenting with new approaches and tools to keep up, and netnography – ethnography applied to the web – has become popular. However, exploiting the potential of netnography requires companies to cope with new problems and acquire new capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to examine the organizational and managerial implications of using the netnographic approach in market research. Design/methodology/approach – After a literature review on netnography in marketing research, the authors present a case study of best practice of netnography for market research: the research project of Dash-Procter & Gamble on Motherhood Support. Findings – The authors found four issues as critical for exploiting the potential of netnography as a tool of market research: first, immersive involvement; second, m...

Learner Satisfaction in Marketing Simulation Games Antecedents and Influencers

Simulation games have become widespread in business courses, yet the understanding of their learning effects remains limited. The effectiveness of using simulation in marketing classes is not uniform, and not all students welcome it to the same extent. Drawing on a survey among 173 students engaged in a simulation game as part of a course in a 2-year business graduate program, we employ “expectation–confirmation theory” and the “unified theory of acceptance and use of technology” to develop a model to investigate the relation between Learner Satisfaction and Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy with a marketing simulation game. In addition, we examine the influence of Age, Gender, Course Type, Course Stage, and Recalled Performance. We report that Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy drive Learner Satisfaction. We also find Recalled Performance of students to be related to Learner Satisfaction. We discuss the implications of our results for the use of marketing simulation games in business programs in relation to experiential learning theory linking Learner Satisfaction to learning outcomes. In light of our results, instructors can affect the learning experience from simulation games by acting on Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy as antecedents of Learner Satisfaction.

3 Starting Up: Relating to a Context in Motion

The odds that a start-up succeeds are low. The risk of failure during the first three years is estimated at 85 %; statistics show that only a few newly started businesses survive more than a handful of years (Short, McKelvie, Ketchen, & Chandler, 2009). Despite these odds, the number of entrepreneurs who want to start their own business continues to grow, and the interest among policy makers and investors remains. Since such unfavourable statistics persist, despite research on entrepreneurship and the support which start-ups receive, our understanding and knowledge about the process of establishing and developing a new business venture is apparently rather limited or not fully relevant. Following a certain tradition in new venturing studies (Gartner, 1985), in this chapter we use the notion of ‘start-up’ when we refer to the pre-organizational stage, and that of ‘new business venture’ when the enterprise acquires the features of an organized activity system (drawing a clear line is of course arbitrary but this is not really central to our purpose in this chapter).

Coordination between primary and secondary care: the role of electronic messages and economic incentives

BackgroundIn Norway, a government reform has recently been introduced to enhance coordination between primary and secondary care. This paper examines the effects of two newly introduced measures to improve the coordination: an ICT-based communication tool/standard and an economic incentive scheme.MethodThis qualitative study is based primarily on 27 open-ended interviews. We interviewed nine employees at a hospital (the focal actor), 17 employees from seven different municipalities, and a representative of a Regional Health Authority.ResultsICT-based communication is perceived to facilitate information exchange between primary and secondary care, thus positively affecting coordination. However, the economic incentive scheme appears to have the opposite effect by creating tensions between the two organizations and accentuating power asymmetry in favor of secondary care.ConclusionsThe inter-organizational nature of coordination in health care makes it crucial for policymakers and management of care organizations to conceive incentives and instruments that work jointly across organizations rather than at only one of the health care organizations involved. Such an approach is likely to favor a more symmetrical pattern of collaboration between primary and secondary care.

4 When Start Ups Shift Network: Notes on Start Up Journey

Start-ups are often born in some kind of ‘hosting’ environment such as business and university incubators or science technology parks. For decades, this has been considered an important measure of enhancing academic entrepreneurship (Grimaldi, Kenney, Siegel, & Wright, 2011) and the beginning of a start-up’s journey towards becoming a full-grown business. In this chapter, we aim to examine the challenges that start-ups meet when they begin to acquire the shape of a business venture and attempt to develop commercially viable business relationships with customers and suppliers.

Introduction: Controversies in Healthcare Innovation – Service, Technology and Organization

The chapters of this volume help answer the question: what is the role of controversies in innovation? Being anchored in different theoretical frameworks (organization studies, theories of industrial networks, and infrastructure theory), studies in this volume converge in taking a practice- and process-oriented approach to innovation, and focus on some controversial aspects relating to how innovation (in the forms of a new medical artefact, an IT system, a new organizational solution or a public-driven change/reform) unfolds in practice. While controversies might be perceived as barriers to creative change and a hindrance to innovation, observations reported in this volume produce a somewhat different view – that controversies can also have an energizing role.