Although there are opposing theoretical arguments on the relationship between the strength of a country's employment protection laws (EPLs) and innovation, empirical evidence tilts towards a positive ...relationship. However, research has mainly focused on the early stages of the innovation process, such as R&D and patenting. This study examines the role of EPLs in the later stages of the innovation process: the commercialization of new products. In particular, we focus on EPLs' relationship with two different new product commercialization outcomes: the launch and subsequent sales of new products. Using data on small European firms, we find that, controlling for invention, stricter EPLs are negatively associated with firms' likelihood of launching new products, but positively associated with the sales from new products. We discuss the implications of our results for theory and practice.
•Past research mainly focuses on employment protection laws (EPLs) and invention.•Focus on EPLs and two aspects of new product commercialization: launch and sales.•EPLs relate negatively to new product launch decisions.•However, EPLs relate positively to new product sales.•The results hold when controlling for, and are independent of, R&D intensity.
In the first decade of the 21st century product development in networks was predicted to be of ever-increasing importance to businesses of all sizes because of changes in markets, in technology, in ...networks, and in the competences of Businesses. The growth in new products’ share of businesses’ total turnover and earnings were increasing at an unprecedented speed. The entrepreneurial innovations and technological improvements had resulted in the increasingly fast development of new products and services. Businesses and industries in different countries became increasingly more linked and interdependent in networks with respect to materials, business operations and particularly product development to match the wants and needs of the global market environment to high speed product development. Businesses were therefore encountering increasingly dynamic market fragmentation, shrinking time in market, increasing product variety, demands of production to customer specifications, reduced product lifetimes, and globalization of production.Networks were vital because the competition is not business against business, but network against network. Networks are vital because an increasing part of product development was carried out in all types of networks containing physical, ICT, dynamic, and virtual networks. Speed and pressure on time in product development seemed to continue to increase because customer demands for new products seemed to continue to increase. However, a Business seldom possessed all needed competences, and managers saw product development based on networks as an important solution to meet the strong competition of the future global markets and the strong demand for innovation and innovativeness. The evolution of market demands and focus (required) on competencies of businesses could be characterized as a development from a focus on efficiency, to a focus on quality and flexibility, to a focus on speed and innovativeness.This was why it was interesting and important to research and discuss product development and especially to understand high speed product development of individualized products in fragile market segments. Consequently, findings and learning on aspects like enablers, management tools, technological tools, product development models, product development processes and network tools to speed new product development are presented in this book.
•Congruence has traditionally been associated with positive brand outcomes.•Low brand congruence may also have positive outcomes for brands.•Specifically, low brand congruence drives consumers’ brand ...engagement.•Curiosity mediates this relationship.•A brand’s traditional background moderates this effect.
When new products are announced, stakeholders often expect them to be congruent with the brand. Nevertheless, brands often go against stakeholders’ expectations and announce less congruent new products. However, the effects of brand congruence on consumers’ brand engagement (i.e., the sharing and commenting of posts) are not well understood. Drawing on schema-congruity theory, we show that (1) consumers are more curious about less congruent new products announced on social media, (2) this curiosity drives their intention to engage with the posted announcement, and (3) brand background operates as a boundary condition of this effect. While prior work shows that high congruence drives positive evaluations of brand extensions, we find that this positive effect only holds for brands with a traditional (vs. non-traditional) background. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings across three experiments using real and fictitious brands.
We develop and test an attention-based theory of search by top management teams and the influence on firm innovativeness. Using an in-depth field study of 61 publicly traded high-technology firms and ...their top executives, we find that the location selection and intensity of search independently and jointly influence new product introductions. We have three important findings. First, in contrast to the portrait of local managerial search, we find teams that select locations that contain novel, vivid, and salient information introduce more new products. Next, unlike informationgathering approaches that merely "satisfice," persistent search intensity may lead to increases in new product introductions. Finally, level of search intensity must fit the selected location of search to maximize new product introductions.
Despite the consensus on the negative country-level implications of corruption, its consequences for firms are less understood. This study examines the effect of bribery on the innovative performance ...of firms in emerging markets as reflected by new product introductions. I argue that bribery may help innovators in these markets to introduce new products by overcoming bureaucratic obstacles, compensating for the lack of kinship or political affiliations, and hedging against political risk. I also propose that the relationship between firm bribery and new product introduction will be negatively moderated (i.e., weakened) by the quality of the formal and informal institutions in place. Employing data from over 6,000 firms in 30 emerging markets and a wide range of empirical tests, my results support these hypotheses. These findings extend transaction costs economics by showing that bureaucratic obstacles and uncertainty can drive firms into illegal cost minimization strategies. Moreover, they augment institutional theory by expounding upon the ways that norms and informal practices moderate the efficiency of firm strategies in emerging markets.
Development of new products often relies on the discovery of novel molecules. While conventional molecular design involves using human expertise to propose, synthesize, and test new molecules, this ...process can be cost and time intensive, limiting the number of molecules that can be reasonably tested. Generative modeling provides an alternative approach to molecular discovery by reformulating molecular design as an inverse design problem. Here, we review the recent advances in the state‐of‐the‐art of generative molecular design and discusses the considerations for integrating these models into real molecular discovery campaigns. We first review the model design choices required to develop and train a generative model including common 1D, 2D, and 3D representations of molecules and typical generative modeling neural network architectures. We then describe different problem statements for molecular discovery applications and explore the benchmarks used to evaluate models based on those problem statements. Finally, we discuss the important factors that play a role in integrating generative models into experimental workflows. Our aim is that this review will equip the reader with the information and context necessary to utilize generative modeling within their domain.
This article is categorized under:
Data Science > Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Generative modeling approaches can be used to discover novel and diverse compounds.
This article suggests that dynamic capabilities can give the firm competitive advantage, but this effect is contingent on the level of dynamism of the firm's external environment. A nonlinear, ...inverse U-shaped moderation is proposed, implying that the relationship between dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage is strongest under intermediate levels of dynamism but comparatively weaker when dynamism is low or high. This proposition is tested using data on alliance management capability and new product development capability, two specific dynamic capabilities widely recognized in prior research. Results based on longitudinal key informant data from 279 firms support the account that these dynamic capabilities are more strongly associated with competitive advantage in moderately dynamic than in stable or highly dynamic environments.
Ocean salinity records the hydrological cycle and its changes, but data scarcity and the large changes in sampling make the reconstructions of long-term salinity changes challenging. Here, we present ...a new observational estimate of changes in ocean salinity since 1960 from the surface to 2000 m. We overcome some of the inconsistencies present in existing salinity reconstructions by using an interpolation technique that uses information on the spatiotemporal covariability of salinity taken from model simulations. The interpolation technique is comprehensively evaluated using recent Argo-dominated observations through subsample tests. The new product strengthens previous findings that ocean surface and subsurface salinity contrasts have increased (i.e., the existing salinity pattern has amplified). We quantify this contrast by assessing the difference between the salinity in regions of high and low salinity averaged over the top 2000 m, a metric we refer to as SC2000. The increase in SC2000 is highly distinguishable from the sampling error and less affected by interannual variability and sampling error than if this metric was computed just for the surface. SC2000 increased by 1.9% ± 0.6% from 1960 to 1990 and by 3.3% ± 0.4% from 1991 to 2017 (5.2% ± 0.4% for 1960–2017), indicating an acceleration of the pattern amplification in recent decades. Combining this estimate with model simulations, we show that the change in SC2000 since 1960 emerges clearly as an anthropogenic signal from the natural variability. Based on the salinity-contrast metrics and model simulations, we find a water cycle amplification of 2.6% ± 4.4% K−1 since 1960, with the larger error than salinity metric mainly being due to model uncertainty.
A central question for firms releasing successive generations of a product is whether they should pursue a market-driven approach and align own product releases to existing industry-level patterns. ...While an alignment with industry patterns enables firms to capitalize on general market receptivity, it may also entail dilution and competitive interference effects. Using data on the consumer electronics and automotive industries, we show that the effectiveness of such alignment depends on two additional timing-related decisions: the firm’s release regularity for successive product generations and its preannouncement timing. Firms benefit from alignment to the industry only if they release successive generations in a regular manner (to create anticipation) and refrain from early preannouncements (to avoid competitive counteraction). For all other combinations of release regularity and preannouncement timing, not aligning to the industry rhythm leads to higher levels of firm performance. Taken together, our findings enable a nuanced view of the interplay of timing-related launch decisions that provides actionable guidance for managers.
Retail forecasting: Research and practice Fildes, Robert; Ma, Shaohui; Kolassa, Stephan
International journal of forecasting,
10/2022, Letnik:
38, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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This paper reviews the research literature on forecasting retail demand. We begin by introducing the forecasting problems that retailers face, from the strategic to the operational, as sales are ...aggregated over products to stores and to the company overall. Aggregated forecasting supports strategic decisions on location. Product-level forecasts usually relate to operational decisions at the store level. The factors that influence demand, and in particular promotional information, add considerable complexity, so that forecasters potentially face the dimensionality problem of too many variables and too little data. The paper goes on to evaluate evidence on comparative forecasting accuracy. Although causal models outperform simple benchmarks, adequate evidence on machine learning methods has not yet accumulated. Methods for forecasting new products are examined separately, with little evidence being found on the effectiveness of the various approaches. The paper concludes by describing company forecasting practices, offering conclusions as to both research gaps and barriers to improved practice.
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