Toni-Matti Karjalainen

Complementing intuition: Insights on styling as a strategic tool

Product styling holds several commercial benefits for companies. Still, managers often struggle in managing the styling process, giving it sufficient priority in company strategy, and coordinating it with other company activates. To support coordination in the decision-making process, we identify a number of intermediary goals of styling based on interviews with Finnish design experts and a review of the marketing and design literature. Each of these goals can be seen as pointing to a process of attraction, and as a precondition for the success of styling in the marketplace. In addition, we propose that strategic decisions on styling can be described according to three dimensions: decisions about the present product portfolio, the succession of product generations, and the products of competitors. On each dimension, we recognise that companies can strive for similarity or difference with existing products and discuss the strategic implications of each alternative.

Entrepreneurial passion: an explorative case study of four metal music ventures

Purpose – Entrepreneurial passion has recently begun to fascinate a growing number of researchers. While only a few systematic studies exist, Cardon et al.s review suggests passion as a prevalent phenomenon among entrepreneurs. They make a call for empirical and systematic studies of entrepreneurial passion to provide insights for practice and research. This paper aims to apply the recent theoretical advances in a particular empirical setting: the heavy metal genre in the popular music industry.Design/methodology/approach – Using a qualitative in‐depth case study approach, four ventures that are considered new ventures in the metal music business are studied.Findings – The findings strongly imply that the grounds for a globally successful creative venture require the passion of at least one inventor entrepreneur. Also, at least one founder is needed to take the venture to the next stage, where business is formalized for ramp up and at least one developer is needed to grow the business after the other two...

Strategic Concepts in the Automotive Industry

The use of concept design for strategic purposes differs between industries and companies. Chapter 6 looks at the practices of concept design in a dynamic, unstable industry. This chapter provides an example from a more established market and product development environment — the car industry. As we will suggest, the activities characterised in Chapter 1 as “concept design for expectation management” and “concept design for innovation and shared vision” are of particular relevance in the automotive sector.