This study investigates the influence of Marketing Intelligence on Business Competitive Advantage: A study of Diamond Bank Plc, Nigeria. Five objectives were identified and translated into five ...research questions which aptly answered by subjecting them to a test of hypotheses. A Descriptive research was used to survey 292 members of the staff of Diamond Bank in Lagos, Central Regional branches and head office. Out of which 285 responses were obtained, while 6 responses were destroyed because they were not properly filled. Also, data was collected through a self-administered questionnaire, as Pearson correlation, T-test and Regression were used to test the hypotheses statements. However, the result of the findings revealed that marketing intelligence sub-constructs such as internal records, competitor’s sales data, marketplace opportunity, competitors’ threats and competitors’ risks have significant and positive influence on business competitive advantage. Thus, it can be concluded that marketing intelligence as sensitive information has enabled the bank to successfully acquire more profit, expand the branch network all over the country, perform better than its rivals in the market and increase its business competitive advantage.
The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work ...and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows.
Abstract
Anthropologists, like neoliberal economists, have often assumed that competition (re)orders society in broadly predictable ways. By contrast, we contend that competition always facilitates ...changes beyond its anticipated outcomes and disciplinary effects. We argue that the outcomes of competition are contingent on the varied and co-existing interpretations of audiences, arbiters, and competitors about the nature of competition, what is worth competing for, and how to go about it. Hence, although it is often instituted with the intention of authoritatively determining value, generating order, or engineering predefined changes, competition inherently affords alternative and unexpected possibilities for sociality. In doing so, competition mediates divergent social orders and modes of relating, rather than instituting one order or another.
Coopetition (collaboration between competitors) can facilitate product innovation, but there is still debate about how it is suited to radical or incremental innovation. This paper argues that the ...early and later phases of coopetitive new product development (NPD) pose different benefits and risks for the innovation types. Building on the tensions approach to value creation and appropriation, we develop a series of hypotheses on the role of coopetition in NPD alliances and focal firm's innovation output. The hypotheses are tested on a quantitative data set of 1049 NPD alliances in the German medical and machinery sectors. The results show that, while coopetition is advantageous for incremental innovation in both pre‐launch and launch phases, radical innovation benefits from coopetition in the launch phase only.
Research Summary: This study draws on the performance feedback theory to advance a behavioral perspective on the dynamics of cooperation among competitors in venture capital (VC) syndicates. ...Analyzing VC syndicates over a 33‐year period, I find that firms’ performance relative to historical and social aspirations acts as a switch in firms’ behavior with respect to dual goals of cooperation and competition in syndicates with competitors. Competition among firms in a syndicate negatively affects the probability of an IPO, but syndicates composed of firms underperforming their aspirations have a better chance of an IPO than syndicates of firms outperforming their aspirations, ceteris paribus. This effect is stronger when firms’ goals in a syndicate are symmetrical or when firms’ motivations based on both historical and social aspirations are aligned.
Managerial Summary: Competition among VC syndicate members negatively affects a syndicate’s prospects of achieving an IPO because syndicate members hold back resources for fear of their appropriation by competing partners. However, firms underperforming their track record or peer firms shift their priorities toward syndicate success and allocate more resources to their syndicates, thereby reducing the negative effect of competition. These results suggest that start‐up companies seeking VC investors, VC firms seeking co‐investors, and limited partners providing funds to VC firms all need to look beyond the capabilities of VC firms in a syndicate or their complementarity and also consider firms’ relative performance. VC syndicates comprised of firms striving to correct temporary underperformance are likely to show superior results due to those firms’ added motivation.
Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are emerging contaminants in water and soil. Electrospun membranes with open structure could treat PFAS in a gravity-driven mode with ultralow ...pressure needs. The electrospun ultrathin fibers (67 ± 27 nm) was prepared for the enhanced specific surface area; where polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) backbones and the grafted quaternary ammonium moieties (QA; PVDF-g-QA membranes) provided both hydrophobicity and anion-exchange ability (electrostatic interaction). High affinity towards the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)/perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) molecules (denoted as PFOX collectively) was observed, and >95% PFOX was removed from synthetic groundwater with a flux of 32.3 Lm−2h−1 at ΔPo = 313 Pa. With a higher octanol/water partitioning coefficient (Log Kow = 6.3) and close dispersion interaction parameter to the membrane backbones (16.6% difference in δd), the effective PFOS removal remained under alkaline and high conductivity conditions due to the intensive hydrophobic interaction compared to that of PFOA. Long-term studies exhibited >90% PFOX removal in an 8 h test with a capacity of 258 L/m2. Under mild regeneration conditions, PFOA and PFOS were concentrated by 35-fold and 39-fold, respectively. Overall, the gravity-driven electrospun PVDF-g-QA membranes, with adsorptive effectiveness and ease of regeneration, showed great potential in PFAS remediation.
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•Ultrathin fibers (67 ± 27 nm) with introduced anion-exchange ability.•95% PFOX was removed with flux of 32.3 Lm−2h−1 at ultralow ΔPo (313 Pa).•PFOX removal was attributed to electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions.•Consistent removal (>90%) during an 8 h test of 258 L per m2 of membrane.•PFOX was concentrated >35.4-fold after regeneration (mild conditions).
To mitigate the issue of minimal intrinsic features for pure data-driven methods, in this article, we propose a novel model-driven deep network for infrared small target detection, which combines ...discriminative networks and conventional model-driven methods to make use of both labeled data and the domain knowledge. By designing a feature map cyclic shift scheme, we modularize a conventional local contrast measure method as a depthwise parameterless nonlinear feature refinement layer in an end-to-end network, which encodes relatively long-range contextual interactions with clear physical interpretability. To highlight and preserve the small target features, we also exploit a bottom-up attentional modulation integrating the smaller scale subtle details of low-level features into high-level features of deeper layers. We conduct detailed ablation studies with varying network depths to empirically verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the design of each component in our network architecture. We also compare the performance of our network against other model-driven methods and deep networks on the open SIRST data set as well. The results suggest that our network yields a performance boost over its competitors.
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