Matti Tuominen

Channel collaboration and firm value proposition

In recent years, “efficient consumer response” has replaced prior management fads and rules of the competitive landscape in the field of grocery trade. This initiative thrives on creating value for the final customers through an efficient supply chain value system, and simultaneously appropriate value for the channel members involved. However, much of the evidence to date remains anecdotal, and thus, the channel collaboration – value conduct reminds a “black box”. We adopt a capabilities view and a contingency framework is proposed to test the postulated relationships between the key constructs by deploying multi‐country data. Our results indicate a strong positive association between channel collaboration and firm value proposition, and further that the relationship has a contingency specific profile. In managerial terms, business executives must carefully design a match between the strategic channel posture the firm possesses and its value creating and appropriating capability profile in managing collaborative channel relationships.

Organizational Innovation Capability: A Driver for Competitive Superiority in Marketing Channels

This paper investigates the interplay between innovation and competitive superiority in the context of channel management by adopting a capabilities view. The relevance for channel marketing and management scholars is that we developed an environment-strategy-value contingency model to address the focal phenomenon. Our empirical results clearly support the key argument that managerial and technological innovations play an essential role in understanding of how competitive superiority is achieved in constantly evolving marketing channels. As such, our contingency factors involved have a significant intermediate role in each of the research contexts examined, indicating that the innovation capability has a channel specific profile.

Entrepreneurial innovations, market-driven intangibles and learning orientation: critical indicators for performance advantages in SMEs

Historically, small firms and start-up ventures have been skilled in developing innovations in order to exploit profitable market opportunities but less effective at sustaining the competitive advantages that are based on distinguished firm-specific resources needed to exploit those opportunities over time. In the literature, however, several questions of whether the argument is valid or not, remain open, and the results are mixed. Drawing on the Resource-Based Theory (RBT) of the firm and entrepreneurship literature, this study aims to explore the effects of entrepreneurial innovations, market-driven intangibles and organisational learning on performance advantages in the context of Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). A conceptual framework is developed, and the authors use data from 159 firms to test the hypothesised relationships. Our empirical results show that technological innovation capability and strong relationships with customers and supply chain partners are the key determinants of positional and economic performance advantages. The firms commitment to learning strengthens its position in the marketplace. Managerial innovation, in turn, is contingent on learning orientation, customer-based and supply chain assets. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

Bundling of information goods: a value driver for new mobile TV services

Information goods have several characteristics that make their pricing especially challenging. From the point of view of revenue management, bundling has many advantages that seem to match the challenges of pricing information goods. Because bundling is a value-based pricing strategy, segmentation has a significant role in supporting and increasing efficiency of bundling. In this context, we develop a conceptual model showing how many characteristics of information goods support or limit the selection of bundling as a pricing strategy. The conceptual model developed and the hypotheses stated are tested with conjoint analysis in the context of a new mobile TV service bundle. The mobile TV is a new innovation, and the service is expected to be launched in Finland in 2006. Totally 164 respondents gave answers to our internet survey. In this study, bundling increased the demand in all cases. However, consumers strongly preferred two-part pricing and flat access rates of new mobile TV services. Actually, our research findings give support to segmentation on the basis of bundling.

Assessing innovativeness through organisational adaptability: a contingency approach

Characteristics of the post-industrial era include increasing knowledge and competence, competitive and technological dynamics, and growing environmental complexity. A firm can handle market- and technology- driven uncertainties if its repertoire of knowledge and competencies is expanded continuously, and its ability to exploit such a repertoire is correspondingly improved. Hence, we examine in this study how competence- based adaptability affects the level of innovativeness, and how internal and external strategic postures influence this interplay. Our findings provide strong empirical evidence for a positive association between adaptability and innovativeness. This interplay is significantly influenced by the underlying mechanism of a firms dominant business logic and environmental uncertainty. Thus, companies are able to improve success in new product development and commercialisation, by enhancing their ability to adapt to constantly changing environmental conditions, in line with the dominant business logic utilised.

Effects of Market-Related Assets on Innovativeness and Operational Performance in SMEs

Resource-based theory (RBT) has not been systematically applied to strategizing the market-related assets of the firm. By examining the role of these intangible assets in the context of small business management, the authors attempt, in this article, to put forward an environment–resources–performance contingency model, synthesizing the various findings in the literature on ‘marketing assets of SMEs’. The conceptual framework is deployed to assess innovativeness and operational superiority through market-related assets within 64 small and medium-sized firms operating in the Finnish meat-processing industry. The empirical results indicate strong positive associations between the key constructs involved, and further indicate that these relationships have a contingency-specific profile. The implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed.

Sharpening the edge of market driven intangibles and innovations

A review of the extant literature concludes that market-driven intangibles and innovations are increasingly considered to be the most critical firm-specific resources, but also finds a lack of elaboration of which types of these resources are most important. In this paper, we incorporate these observations into a conceptual model and link it to highly developed institutional settings for the model evaluation. From the point of view of firm revenue management, we can anticipate that performance advantages created through deployment of intellectual and relational capital in marketing and innovation are more likely to be superior. In essence, they constitute the integration of organisational intangibles both in cognitive and behavioural level to create an idiosyncratic combination for each firm. Our research findings show feasible paths for sharpening the edge of market-driven intangibles and innovations. We discuss the key results for research and practice.

Collaborative resources in innovation and global competition: Profitability implications

We argue in this paper that in expanding global competition, when the knowledge base of products and markets is complex and the sources of performance advantages are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in inter-firm collaboration, rather than in individual firms. By examining the role of firm resources and capabilities in innovation and business relationship management, we put forward a collaboration-innovation-performance model and derive hypotheses that link various findings in the literature on ldquomarket-oriented innovationrdquo. We test these hypotheses on a sample of 5627 firms across different industries both in the manufacturing and service sector in 13 countries. Results support our hypotheses and have implications for practice and future research on firm resources in innovation and inter-firm collaboration.