Data is now the fuel that drives business – identifying potential markets, shaping new products and targeting consumers. This year, Significance has partnered with Impact, the magazine of the Market ...Research Society, to jointly publish a series exploring the past, present and future of the data economy. In this fourth and final part, Timandra Harkness considers what the coming years have in store for the data‐driven industries
In this fourth and final part of our “History of the Data Economy” series, Timandra Harkness considers what the coming years have in store for the data‐driven industries.
Data is now the fuel that drives business – identifying potential markets, shaping new products and targeting consumers. To understand where we may be heading next, Significance has partnered with ...Impact, the magazine of the Market Research Society, to jointly publish a series exploring the past, present and future of the data economy. This third part tells the story of the evolution of social media, which created rich and detailed data sources and positioned tech giants as data economies in their own right. By Timandra Harkness
This third part of our “History of the Data Economy” series tells the story of the evolution of social media, which created rich and detailed data sources and positioned tech giants as data economies in their own right. By Timandra Harkness
The world has changed dramatically over the past 200 years. Data is now the fuel that drives business – identifying potential markets, shaping new products and targeting consumers. To understand ...where we may be heading next, Significance has partnered with Impact, the magazine of the Market Research Society, to jointly publish a series exploring the past, present and future of the data economy. This second part tells the story of the arrival of analytics and efforts to better understand consumer behaviour using new data sources. By Timandra Harkness
This second part of our “History of the Data Economy” series tells the story of the arrival of analytics and efforts to better understand consumer behaviour using new data sources. By Timandra Harkness.
CERN has been providing central Windows remote desktops via the Windows Terminal Infrastructure service for several years and aims to provide a similar experience for Linux graphical environments. ...Different communities and experiments offer a series of tools to their users with this goal in mind, but the solutions are far from ideal and generate a support overhead for their respective providers. The Linux Applications Gateway project (LAG) was born to provide this functionality centrally from the IT department. After an extensive market research, the tool FastX was identified as an enabler, and to set up a closed, internal pilot for evaluation. These efforts led to the creation of the Remote Operations Gateway (ROG) service with a high approval rate. We aim to further extend the usage of FastX at CERN, reaching out to other communities and experiments, and to provide a better support coverage for them all.
Service Robots Rising Mende, Martin; Scott, Maura L.; van Doorn, Jenny ...
Journal of marketing research,
08/2019, Volume:
56, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Interactions between consumers and humanoid service robots (HSRs; i.e., robots with a human-like morphology such as a face, arms, and legs) will soon be part of routine marketplace experiences. It is ...unclear, however, whether these humanoid robots (compared with human employees) will trigger positive or negative consequences for consumers and companies. Seven experimental studies reveal that consumers display compensatory responses when they interact with an HSR rather than a human employee (e.g., they favor purchasing status goods, seek social affiliation, and order and eat more food). The authors investigate the underlying process driving these effects, and they find that HSRs elicit greater consumer discomfort (i.e., eeriness and a threat to human identity), which in turn results in the enhancement of compensatory consumption. Moreover, this research identifies boundary conditions of the effects such that the compensatory responses that HSRs elicit are (1) mitigated when consumer-perceived social belongingness is high, (2) attenuated when food is perceived as more healthful, and (3) buffered when the robot is machinized (rather than anthropomorphized).
In the field of lithium-based batteries, there is often a substantial divide between academic research and industrial market needs. This is in part driven by a lack of peer-reviewed publications from ...industry. Here we present a non-academic view on applied research in lithium-based batteries to sharpen the focus and help bridge the gap between academic and industrial research. We focus our discussion on key metrics and challenges to be considered when developing new technologies in this industry. We also explore the need to consider various performance aspects in unison when developing a new material/technology. Moreover, we also investigate the suitability of supply chains, sustainability of materials and the impact on system-level cost as factors that need to be accounted for when working on new technologies. With these considerations in mind, we then assess the latest developments in the lithium-based battery industry, providing our views on the challenges and prospects of various technologies.
In today's market environment, corporate social responsibility (CSR) represents a high-profile notion that has strategic importance to many companies. By dedicating ever-increasing amounts to cash ...donations, in-kind contributions, cause marketing, and employee volunteerism programs, companies are acting on the premise that CSR is not merely the "right thing to do" but also "the smart thing to do." This research investigates the linkage between CSR and firm market value with a longitudinal, archival data set. Given that firms are not the same in their execution, support, and exploitation of CSR initiatives in the marketplace, the authors predict that companies may generate different (i.e., positive, nonsignificant, and negative) market returns from CSR under different conditions. Specifically, this article asks the following questions: (1) Under what conditions do CSR initiatives result in positive financial performance? and (2) Does customer satisfaction matter in the relationship between CSR and firm performance? The authors develop and test a conceptual model that proposes that CSR initiatives enable firms to build a base of satisfied customers, which in turn contributes positively to market value. Based on multiple secondary data sets (e.g., Fortune's "America's Most Admired Companies," the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Compustat) that include ratings of large companies and structural equation modeling methodologies, the results show support for the CSR customer satisfaction firm market value causal linkages. Specifically, the authors find that customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between CSR and market value. Furthermore, they establish the boundary conditions under which firms may derive positive or negative market value from CSR. Firms that have better inside-out corporate abilities (i.e., product quality and innovativeness) to begin with tend to generate more market value from outside-in strategic initiatives (i.e., CSR programs). Conversely, firms that exhibit poorer corporate abilities may find that CSR actually harms customer satisfaction and, because of the lowered satisfaction, decreases their stock performance. The finding that CSR contributes positively to market value suggests that managers can obtain competitive advantages and reap more financial benefits from investing in CSR. However, the data also reveal a previously neglected "dark side" of CSR. That is, CSR actually reduces customer satisfaction levels in firms with low innovativeness capability and, through this negative impact, harms firm market value. Thus, firms need to ensure that they are perceived as innovative and as makers of high-quality products before they undertake major CSR initiatives. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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