Priscila Silva Esteves

The Incubation Process and the Strengthening of the Firm: a Study in Brazilian Companies

High mortality rate and an environment in constant change set up a context in which the search for innovation becomes essential to business’ longevity. Incubation has been proposed as an alternative to start-up companies, giving support for their development. Seeking to explore which characteristics enable a firm’s development through incubation, a multiple case studies were performed. Interviews were carried out with two Incubated, and three Graduated companies. Results indicate that the incubation process is important to strengthening of the firm. This was observed when innovative strategies employed by companies were analyzed. Was founded an evolution from Incubated to Graduated. During the incubation process, the companies showed a greater focus on strengthening their knowledge bases, seeking to establish qualification relationships and invest in an innovation strategy based on better human resources allocation while the Graduated ones attempt to achieve further innovation by structuring and coupling their own commercial and R&D departments.

Third-agers on the Internet: Impacts on Word-of-Mouth and Online Purchase Intentions☆

Abstract Scientific development and technological advances have allowed for a considerable increase in human longevity. Elderly people, or “third-agers”, have come to make up an increasing percentage of the population in both developed countries and developing ones like Brazil. A major challenge for the elderly in this context is their adaptation to the demands of the modern world, especially in relation to Internet use. Nowadays these people have started to show a greater interest in new technologies. According to a study conducted in Brazil (CGI, 2009), usage frequency among older consumers who access the Internet is as follows: 47% daily, 29% at least once a week, 17% at least once a month and 7% less than once a month. These data confirm the promising market represented by elderly people. Given the change in population structure, combined with the considerable technological development resulting from the growth of Internet use in day-to-day life, it is important to understand Internet usage among elderly consumers. To analyze this, it is important that future studies concern themselves with the purpose of use, frequency of access and the future impacts that the Internet may have upon such customers. This theoretical article is organized with such questions in mind. Based on the literature, we have constructed a model to be tested in a subsequent study to help identify the relationships between the several variables surrounding this consumer behavior and the use of the Internet.

As emoções dos consumidores da terceira idade no processo de escolha de destinos de viagens

Emotions have great importance in purchasing decisions, however, only recently, researchers started to study them by qualitative approaches. In this context, this study sought to examine them in a still unexplored segment: elderly consumers. For this purpose, this research concentrated in a service for which they have shown a lot of interest – tourism – in order to analyze the emotions present in the choice of travel destinations and their influence on future purchasing decisions. That was done with the use of in-depth interviews aided by the Photo Elicitation Technique (PET). It was then observed that emotions affect the choice for a particular travel destination because the sensations experienced during previous trips are stored in memory and have a strong influence on future decision-making processes. This work also brings interesting contributions for future research because it investigated the occurrence of emotions in 3 separate stages of the consumption process – before, during and after the trip – and not only as just one element in this decision, as normally occurs in most researches about emotions. By demonstrating that this was a favorable decision to better understand the emotions throughout the entire purchase decision process, new paths are opened for further research with different methodological approaches.