Lucia Aiello

Tourism destination management in sustainability development perspective, the role of entrepreneurship and networking ability: Tourist Kit

In the recent decade, the tourist destination management is considered as a destination in which a complex product composed of different elements required a coordination system. This implies that this destination should be organised in the sustainability perspective. We propose an interdisciplinary paper that is built following both a managerial and organisational perspective. The approach is the resource-based view theory and the concept of capabilities. The method used is the desk analysis spread in two phases: review of the literature on the main topics, destination management and coordination system; presentation of a case study. The finding of the work is that a sustainable tourist destination is possible if we start from definition of tourist destination as integrated and multilevel, where all main actors of the territory aim for sustainable development. This study presents the main characteristics for a developed country destination.

Supply Chain Management and the Role of ICT: DART-SCM Perspective

Information technology infrastructure has a crucial role in improving Supply Chain Management (SCM) capability and in supply chain strategy. The increase in the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) reduce interaction and transaction costs and has an influence on logistics, procurement, vendor relationship management, and customer relationship management. In this perspective, the e-tools have stimulated and changed the supply chain. The paper in a first phase analyses the main literature on Service Dominant Logic and Dialogue-Access-Risk Benefits-Transparency (DART) framework in order to investigate how the academics and practitioners put this framework in action in the international scenario in Supply Chain Management. The last phase discloses a case study where the ICT are pervasive, the approach of the procurement process has changed. Through a case study focalized on e-procurement in a multinational enterprise that operates in the chemical-pharmaceutical sector, the research aims to highlight the coherence of e-tools with DART perspective.

SHARED VALUE, CROWDSOURCING AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

The crisis currently affecting the firms, joined to the technological development and more intense global competition have transformed the current competitive environment for most firms. Firm’s competitive advantage is now more dependent on continuous knowledge development and enhancement, so knowledge becomes a central theme in strategic management. Furthermore, the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined. The business needs a successful community, both to create demand for its products and to provide critical assets and a supportive environment and, also, community needs successful businesses to provide wealth creation opportunities. This scenario calls for a broader definition of business success which includes customer engagement methods and shifts the central goal of companies into creating shared value. This aim becomes more influential especially for those companies who operate in a new market space through electronic means that enable electronic marketing relationships from the perspective of non-conventional marketing and social-media marketing. Social Media (SM) and ICT enable the interaction with the market that allows spreading development burden amongst companies and individuals. Firms increasingly have needs of gathering ideas for innovations and providing solutions to existing problems and/or for maintaining the competitive advantage. More and more companies apply the wisdom of crowds to certain tasks and challenges, making the crowdsourcing a recognized mechanism for problem-solving. While both phenomena are not new, their overlapping requires considerable attention in practice, related to the crowdsourcing opportunities and benefits that have been enabled by new web 2.0 technologies. Crowdsourcing presents a number of potential applications, open to future developments and seem to provide new channels and ways to enable this in practice and to create new shared value and firm value. Based on theoretical conceptualization, combined with empirical evidence, we develop an analysis framework for approaching crowdsourcing in a SME context. In particular, we aim to highlight the influence of customer-social engagement through new technologies on shared value creation and stress the role of crowdsourcing process in knowledge-building process. Finally, authors analyze if those instances are able to contribute to build and develop the firm’s performance.