Roslyn Russell

Business plan competitions in tertiary institutions: encouraging entrepreneurship education

The development of entrepreneurial skills and knowledge is a priority for governments that want to encourage an innovative and enterprising society. Furthermore, education institutions are becoming increasingly required by employers to produce graduates that have practical, real‐world skills. Business plan competitions, although primarily aimed at producing start‐ups, have been found to provide a range of benefits to participants, the most important being the development of entrepreneurial skills, access to mentors, opportunity for networking and increased self‐confidence and risk‐taking propensity.

Condominium developments in maturing destinations: potentials and problems of long-term sustainability

Since the emergence of mass tourism, destinations are constantly faced with the challenge of providing an adequate supply of suitable accommodation. The introduction of condominium style accommodation seemed to be the answer to the problem of meeting the increasing tourism demand at some popular destinations, although in some destinations investment in property development has increasingly become a supply driven activity. However, the resulting complexities brought about by the many stakeholders involved in managing the condominiums (including strata title legislation, investment incentives, and long-term maintenance of condominium developments) have introduced previously unforeseen problems to destinations reaching maturity. This study investigates the impacts of the growth of condominium developments and their potential for inhibiting destination rejuvenation. The study was conducted on Australias Gold Coast, a classic example of a mass tourism resort where ironically, the growth of condominium style accommodation was a major factor in attracting large numbers of tourists, but may, in fact, prevent successful rejuvenation in the future.

Discussions on long-term financial choice

We analyse focus group discussions about long-run (retirement) financial decisions, and explore the extent to which participant responses are related to the oft-used behavioural explanations of financial choice. We find that persons of all ages understand the importance of long-term savings, but face many challenges in preparing for retirement. There is mixed support for a range of associated behavioural explanations. Complexity, relevance of decisions, and uncertainty come up repeatedly in all focus groups, irrespective of the age of the participants. The use of heuristics, confidence, costs of mistakes, mental accounting, and the importance of social interaction appeared of less immediate relevance to all groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for how the financial services and superannuation industries communicate with members. There appears to be a general view from the focus groups that breaking large, complex retirement decisions into more manageable pieces (based on personal circumstances) and providing more focused and relevant information to investors would result in more effort and care expended on retirement decisions.

The demand for creative arts in regional Victoria, Australia

A healthy creative arts industry can contribute significantly to the economic and social fabric of a community. Unfortunately, regional areas often suffer from a lack of supply and demand for the creative arts. This article explores the demand for the creative arts in three regional locations in Victoria, Australia, using three broad dimensions of demand: attitudes towards the arts; frequency of participation in the arts and level of expenditure on the arts. The analysis of demand patterns uses the general modelling approach of Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette (1996) as a basis and makes use of the ordered probit class of models for its statistical analysis. The study confirms that individual levels of demand are contingent on a range of demographic characteristics and also identifies factors such as festival attendance and increased past creative arts expenditure as being important determinants of demand for the arts.

Economic abuse between intimate partners in Australia: prevalence, health status, disability and financial stress

Objective: Economic abuse is a form of domestic violence that has a significant impact on the health and financial wellbeing of victims, but is understudied. This study determined the lifetime prevalence of economic abuse in Australia by age and gender, and the associated risk factors.

Exploring the impact of mobile money services on marketing interactions in relation to consumer well-being in subsistence marketplaces – lessons from rural Cambodia

Abstract The mobile phone has increasingly become a channel for providing access to formal financial services. There is a need to understand how financial service offerings, increasingly accessed through mobile phones, impact marketing interactions, specifically marketing exchange activities and social network relationships, to enhance consumer well-being (CWB) in subsistence marketplaces. Through interviews and contextualised observational research in rural Cambodia, findings reveal that the impacts of mobile money services on marketing interactions in relation to CWB can be categorised at two distinct levels. The first-level impact is the actual physical money transfer transactions as part of the marketing exchange activities which leads to the second-level impact on the social network relationships at interpersonal, social group and cultural levels. Drawing from these insights, policy-makers and industry stakeholders can formulate strategies and develop innovative service offerings through mobile phone technology to enhance CWB in subsistence marketplaces.

A Structured Abstract: Exploring Mobile Money Services as an Innovative Solution for Micro and Small Enterprises in Emerging Economies – Lessons from Rural Cambodia

Over 4 billion people, termed as the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP), live in subsistence marketplaces with an estimated annual income below US

When exchange logics collide: Insights from remote Indigenous Australia

3,000 in local purchasing power (Hammond, et. al. 2007; Viswanathan and Rosa 2007). By the end of 2011, more than 2.5 billion adults were predicted to lack access to any formal financial services accounts to save, borrow or transact. Furthermore, it was predicted that 59% of the adult population in subsistence marketplaces lacked access to any formal financial services accounts to save, borrow or transact (Demirguc-Kunt and Klapper 2012). However, global mobile phone subscriptions accelerated from about 960 million in 2001 to about 6 billion in 2011, reaching 86% of the total global population and 75% of the subsistence marketplaces population (ITU 2012). Although lacking access to any formal financial services, the BOP can have access to mobile phones. Hence offering access to financial services using mobile phone technology called “mobile money services” can potentially transform lives within the BOP living in subsistence marketplaces by providing a convenient access to finance. The mobile phone has been widely used as a channel for providing microfinance services, hence the term defined in this research as “Mobile Money Services”. This phenomenon has since been given a range of terminologies such as mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile finance (Donner and Tellez 2008). By the end of 2012, over 150 mobile money projects are deployed in more than 70 countries (GSMA 2013).

Entrepreneurship, chaos and the tourism area lifecycle

The introduction of money into previously non-monetary, alternative economies can lead to many socio-cognitive tensions, if money is perceived as having been imposed from the ‘outside’, and disconnected from traditional ways of life. In this paper, we employ the lens of institutional theory to frame the phenomenon of money-use in remote Indigenous Australia. Through an immersive study in two remote communities, we develop themes of socio-cognitive tensions that arise as a result of disparity in exchange logics governing marketplace exchange in monetary marketplaces vis-a-vis historically non-monetary alternative economies. We draw upon emergent insights, and derive macro-marketing implications for the design of marketplace-literacy education, aimed at alleviating these tensions and enhancing well-being.