Article by L. HERWEYERS, I. MOONS, C. BARBAROSSA, P. DE PELSMACKER, E. DU BOIS
Publised in Journal of Cleaner Production
The production and consumption of single-use plastics (SUP) has disastrous consequences for the natural environment. Understanding which consumers are more likely to avoid SUP and why is crucial. Building on a comprehensive action determination model of ecological behavior, this study aims to specify the most relevant drivers and barriers to consumers’ intentions to avoid SUP. The results of a qualitative study (N = 32) and a quantitative study (N = 3,000), conducted across multiple countries (United States, Russia, and Belgium), reveal that positive attitudes and subjective norms regarding SUP alternatives enhance consumers’ intentions to avoid SUP. Our analysis also shows the existence of four consumer segments—SUP addicts, SUP avoiders, the apathetic, and situation-driven SUP users—who differ in their intentions to avoid SUP and their motivations. While habits in using SUP, and situational constraints and hygienic concerns regarding SUP alternatives do not play a significant role in the whole cross-national sample, they represent crucial barriers for specific segments such as SUP addicts and situation-driven SUP users. The study concludes with several marketing and design recommendations for promoting and developing reusable alternatives for single-use plastics.
Article by Abhishek Behl, Vijay Pereira, Achint Nigam, Samuel FOSSO WAMBA (TBS Education), Rahul Sindhwani
Publised in Journal of Knowledge Management
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of NFTs in revolutionizing innovation management and information systems. Innovations done by firms are blatantly used by other firms to develop cheap knock-off. This leads to huge economic loses to the firm investing in research and development activities. Firms are in need of trusted, immutable and verifiable means of storing information which cannot be used by others, even if publically available without their consent. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) appear to be one such solution to this problem that has recently attracted a lot of investor interest. Using NFTs the information is tokenized and is stored in a secure manner.
Design/methodology/approach
Through this scoping review, the authors investigate the influence of NFTs towards the innovation management from the dual aspects of management and information systems. This scoping review is underpinned by the five-stage framework by Arksey and O’Malley. The five stages of Arksey and O’Malley’s framework were used in this analysis to classify the literature through five stages of identifying the initial research questions; locating relevant studies; study selection; charting the data; and compiling, summarizing and reporting the results.
Findings
This study suggests that NFTs on the blockchain have significant potential to revolutionize innovation management and information systems. Theoretical frameworks used in investigating the role of digital tokens in blockchain management are mainly based on contracts, diversity theory, portfolio theory and faking likelihood theory. The study reveals gaps in the literature, particularly in the under-researched areas of behavioural psychology and social psychology theories. The appropriate regulation and regulation authority for different types of digital tokens are required. The study also presents archetypes that represent patterns in the current landscape of blockchain tokens, which have significant potential for future research and practical applications.
Originality/value
This study is unique in its approach to assessing the future of NFTs in the field of innovation and information management. While many existing reviews have focused on describing the progress and development of NFTs in the past, this study takes a forward-looking perspective and projects the future potential of NFTs. This innovative approach allows for a deeper understanding of the potential impact of NFTs in various fields such as entrepreneurship, innovation management and tokenomics. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on NFTs by providing insights and recommendations for future research and practical applications.
Article by Timo Mandler
Publised in Journal of Business Research
This paper examines the influence of stakeholder orientation on the design of managerial incentives. Our tests exploit the quasi-natural experiment provided by the staggered adoption of directors’ duties laws (i.e., state-level laws that explicitly expand board members’ duties to act in the best interests of all stakeholders).
We find that the enactment of these laws results in a significant decrease in the sensitivity of CEO wealth to the stock price. This decrease is mostly driven by firms most exposed to pressures to maximize short-term stock price. Our results suggest that the decrease in the sensitivity of CEO compensation to the stock price is an important channel boards use to internalize stakeholder orientation.
Article by Samuel FOSSO WAMBA (TBS Education), Muriel Fotso, Elaine Mosconi & Junwu Chai
Publised in Annals of Operations Research
Plastic waste management represents a fundamental challenge in terms of environmental pollution and health in many emerging countries. Yet, some firms believe improved plastic waste management could lead to value creation and capture, especially from a circular economy perspective.
This study draws on a longitudinal research approach that involved 12 organizations in assessing plastic waste management’s contribution to Cameroon’s circular economy. Our findings suggest that plastic waste management for value creation is still embryonic in Cameroon. Moving to the full value creation and capture stage will require overcoming various challenges identified and presented in the paper. We then discuss our findings and put forward several future research avenues.
Article de Christophe BERNARD (TBS Education) et Sébastien MITRAILLE (TBS Education)
Publié dans la revue : International Journal of Industrial Organization
This article delves into the intriguing dynamics of how information asymmetry impacts task allocation between a manufacturer and its supplier.
The authors specifically focus on scenarios where tasks exhibit horizontal differentiation, and the comparative edge in terms of marginal costs fluctuates throughout the production process. Our findings illustrate that the manufacturer tends to excessively outsource tasks to a generalist supplier, while not leveraging enough from a specialist supplier based on the efficiency spectrum.
The underlying driver of these patterns lies in the presence of balancing incentives. Interestingly, when the manufacturer’s internal costs are acceptably low, it opts to offload some of its high-performing tasks while keeping the underperforming ones in-house. These dual distortions occur simultaneously, thereby influencing the contract offered to the generalist supplier.
Article by David LE BRIS (TBS Education) and Alain ALCOUFFE (Université Toulouse Capitole)
Published in : European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
At the end of the 19th, Georges d’Avenel produced a highly original work in various fields. Unsatisfied with the usual way to write history, he turned his attention to quantitative data to understand the past. In particular, he built series of prices of multiples goods and services from 1200 onwards.
He proposed a documented analysis of long-term changes in prices as a result of the technical progress, in income and wealth inequalities as captured by the top 1%, as well as in the evolution of mentalities.
His approaches were criticized both by both new professional “Republican” historians than by Conservative analysts. However, his data used by Pareto, Fisher, Frisch or Marshall are still used in current economic history and his analysis fertilized various fields in particular the Ecole des Annales.
Discover TBS professor Louise Curran’s point of view on the effect of COVID-19 on international trade policies.
As COVID-19 has spread across the world it has had major impacts on supply chains. It is reasonable to assume that the impact on trade flows may be even greater than that for the GFC in 2009, where world trade fell by over 20%. Most of this is an entirely natural result of the closure of many production structures around the world. However, some trade impacts are the direct result of trade policy interventions by governments, which presage a more major and long-term impact from the current crisis. Discover more in the video below:
[Série – Face à la crise Covid-19] How will Covid-19 impact international trade policies ? from FNEGE MEDIAS on Vimeo.
Discover TBS professor Timo Mandler’s point of view on building brands in markets that have reached the post-globalization stage.
Consumers in Western markets are increasingly critical towards globalization and re-embrace local values. Companies thus must decide whether to continue to pursue global branding strategies and/or rejuvenate local branding strategies. To explore the implications of market globalization for consumer preferences, we use signaling theory to investigate the role of perceived brand globalness and localness as signals of brand credibility, related downstream effects and boundary conditions, across two countries with differing levels of globalization. In globalized markets, brand globalness is a weaker signal of brand credibility than brand localness, whereas in globalizing markets, the two signals are of equal importance.
Building Credible Brands in (Post-)Globalizing Markets from FNEGE MEDIAS on Vimeo.
To establish an innovative business model, disruptive start-ups use a strategy resting on two complementary processes: building a discourse which will engage clients and partners in the new ecosystem, also known as framing, and continuous adaptation of their business model in response to the needs of clients. This will be illustrated by the case of Salesforce versus Siebel in the business software industry at the start of the 2000s.
Cases of successful disruptive innovation, where a start-up manages to radically transform the functioning of an industry, remain exceptional. Among the best-known are Amazon with the distribution and sale of books or Netflix which revolutionised the film distribution industry in the United States. They have resulted in the creation of a new business model which shifts the industrial ecosystem’s centre of gravity away from the historic leader and towards the start-up, and ends up creating a new ecosystem around the start-up. Business
model innovation is characterised by new sources of value creation, the arrival of new clients and partners and the implementation of a new kind of organisation, which rivals the business model of the historic leader and gradually replaces it.
Revealing one’s intentions from the outset
Up until now, studies of disruptive innovation have been more interested in the reaction of existing businesses, and much less in the manner in which the start-up succeeded in establishing its business model. Hence, the importance of understanding the processes set
in motion by the disruptor, which starts off with slender means with which to attract clients, partners, the media and analysts, and ends up taking the lead over an established and much more powerful competitor, and in some cases, making it disappear.
This is the process that we call the disruptor strategy, whose aim is to reduce uncertainty in order to engage consumers and partners as players in the creation of the new ecosystem: from the outset, in order to get their attention and support, the start-up reveals its
intentions and ambitions through framing, ie, the construction of an effective discourse and presentation. At the same time, it must adapt its business model and its product to achieve the best possible offer for its clients and partners. The combination of these two actions
creates a virtuous circle and puts the historic leader on the horns of a dilemma: retaliate at the risk of legitimising the new business model, or do nothing and risk being overtaken.
Salesforce and the emergence of the cloud
The study of the emergence of Salesforce between 1999 and 2006 against Siebel in the management and client relation (CRM) software sector illustrates the concept of disruptor strategy. Originally, software publishers (Siebel, SAP) sold their clients CRM software and
costly products associated with maintenance and consulting services. Salesforce’s innovation consisted of coming up with a much less expensive business model, based on cloud computing, with SaaS services available by subscription. In the first instance, this product was aimed at consumers who were not part of the Siebel ecosystem.
Before Salesforce had even launched, it was already addressing the ecosystem with a discourse emphasising its unique affinity with the “no software” revolution, and then its leadership, via press releases, interviews and dramatic stunts. This framing found an echo with start-ups and small-to-medium-sized businesses lacking the means to invest in a heavy system; with partners interested in the new ecosystem; and with the media and analysts who relayed and amplified Salesforce’s discourse and took up a more critical position in relation to Siebel. At the same time as new consumers were starting to get interested in the product, Salesforce was continually improving it to reach the standards expected by the majority of existing consumers. By combining these two framing processes and adapting the business model, the start-up had started to seduce Siebel’s clients and partners within two or three years.
In the face of Salesforce’s offensive, Siebel didn’t react at first. The firm stayed with its old model without taking account of the new needs created by a competitor which it didn’t yet perceive as such. It only launched into the cloud in 2003, three years late. A vicious circle, symmetrical with Salesforce’s virtuous circle, falls into place: poor responses, mounting criticism in the media and from analysts, mass exodus of clients and partners to the new ecosystem. Finally, in 2006, Salesforce became the leading supplier of CRM services, while Siebel was bought by Oracle.
A situation that was hard to predict
The Salesforce-Siebel case is a prime example of the establishment of a new business model. It highlights the importance of these two complementary processes of framing and adaptation in the disruptor’s strategy. This is, of course, an individual case, but it shares elements with other cases of successful disruption like Amazon and Netflix. For businesses, there are a number of lessons to be learned from these results. For the disruptors, it’s about the importance of pulling on both levers at the same time, given that the temporal window is limited. That means they have to find a way to reveal themselves clearly, but without being too precise, so as not to limit their scope for adaptation. In its framing, Salesforce presented itself as the leader by stating that it was offering a better value product and that its service was cheaper, but without going into the key points of the new business model.
For the leader, it’s hard to know how to react. Siebel had logical reasons for not responding to Salesforce in a market sector in which – at first at least – it had no interest. It’s very tricky to predict whether a start-up will be successfully disruptive or not. The problem is that Salesforce gained a competitive advantage by learning faster than Siebel. Siebel didn’t ask itself the right questions for several years, and the needs of Salesforce’s start-up clients were ahead of the needs of its own clients. When the firm did finally take action, its cloud didn’t function as well as Salesforce’s one, despite an R&D budget and far greater human resources.
To avoid this, existing businesses must therefore develop a strategic vision, an understanding of what is happening in their environment, in order to try to learn more quickly than the start-ups and be attentive to the market of tomorrow. But it’s very difficult for a firm to say that in 10 years’ time its clients will want products that are completely different from those it has on offer today.
Methodology
This article is a synthesis of the publication “An Ecosystem-Level Process Model of Business Model Disruption: The Disruptor’s Gambit”, published in the Journal of Management Studies. It presents the results of a longitudinal study carried out by Yuliya Snihur (Toulouse Business School), Llewellyn D.W. Thomas (Imperial College London, Universitat Ramon Llull) and Robert A. Burgelman (Stanford School of Graduate Business), from the case study of Salesforce and Siebel, combining a theoretical approach and the analysis of a documentary base of historic data.