Publication records

This paper analyzes organizations’ attempts to entice external contributors to submit suggestions for future organizational action. While earlier work has elaborated on the advantages of leveraging the knowledge of external contributors, our findings show that organizational attempts to attract such involvement are more likely to wither or die. We develop arguments about what increases the likelihood of getting suggestions from externals in the future, namely through (1) proactive attention (submitting internally developed suggestions to externals to stimulate debate); and (2) reactive attention (paying attention to suggestions from externals to signal they are being listened to), particularly when those suggestions are submitted by newcomers. Findings from an analysis of about 24,000 initiatives by organizations to involve external contributors suggest these actions are crucial for receiving suggestions from external contributors. Our results are contingent upon the stage of the initiative because organizations’ actions exert more influence in initiatives that lack a history of prior suggestions. Our work has implications for scholars of open innovation because it highlights the importance of considering failures as well successes: focusing exclusively on initiatives that reach a certain stage can lead to partial or erroneous conclusions about why some organizations engage external contributors while others fail.

With permission of Elsevier

In luxury brand management, experiences are essential. However, most of what we know about designing customer experiences originates from work developed with and/or for mass brands. Luxury brands are conceptually different and require a specific approach to brand management. Using a grounded theory approach, we present a framework consisting of seven principles to design luxury experience. Our research suggests that to create a true luxury experience brands should go beyond traditional frameworks of brand management. By compiling best practices and the commonalities amongst the interviewed companies’ most successful efforts to create a luxury experience, the framework can help brands to implement a “trading-up” strategy: Luxury brands can enhance their desirability by offering a true luxury experience and non-luxury brands can adopt principles of luxury experience and become life-style brands.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

The teaching objectives for this four-part case series lie at two distinct levels. Ostensibly the main teaching objectives relate to understanding Danica Purg's own entrepreneurial leadership style and its appropriateness for her own as well as other small and large organizations. But never far from the surface are underlying questions and related teaching objectives about the type of managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs that the world (and particularly her part of the European world) will need in the future, and how the needed capacities can best be developed- a subject on which she has strong and provocative opinions.

The teaching objectives for this four-part case series lie at two distinct levels. Ostensibly the main teaching objectives relate to understanding Danica Purg's own entrepreneurial leadership style and its appropriateness for her own as well as other small and large organizations. But never far from the surface are underlying questions and related teaching objectives about the type of managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs that the world (and particularly her part of the European world) will need in the future, and how the needed capacities can best be developed- a subject on which she has strong and provocative opinions.

The teaching objectives for this four-part case series lie at two distinct levels. Ostensibly the main teaching objectives relate to understanding Danica Purg's own entrepreneurial leadership style and its appropriateness for her own as well as other small and large organizations. But never far from the surface are underlying questions and related teaching objectives about the type of managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs that the world (and particularly her part of the European world) will need in the future, and how the needed capacities can best be developed- a subject on which she has strong and provocative opinions.

The teaching objectives for this four-part case series lie at two distinct levels. Ostensibly the main teaching objectives relate to understanding Danica Purg's own entrepreneurial leadership style and its appropriateness for her own as well as other small and large organizations. But never far from the surface are underlying questions and related teaching objectives about the type of managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs that the world (and particularly her part of the European world) will need in the future, and how the needed capacities can best be developed- a subject on which she has strong and provocative opinions.

This paper studies the interplay between the operational and financial facets of capacity investment. We consider the capacity choice problem of a firm with limited liquidity and whose access to external capital markets is hampered by moral hazard. The firm must therefore not only calibrate its capacity investment and the corresponding funding needs, but also optimize its sourcing of funds. Importantly, the set of available sources of funds is derived endogenously and includes standard financial claims (debt, equity, etc.). We find that when higher demand realizations are more indicative of high effort, debt financing is optimal for any given capacity level. In this case, the optimal capacity is never below the efficient capacity level but sometimes strictly above that level. Further, the optimal capacity level increases with the moral hazard problem's severity and decreases with the firm's internal funds. This runs counter to the newsvendor logic and to the common intuition that by raising the cost of external capital and hence the unit capacity cost, financial market frictions should lower the optimal capacity level. We trace the value of increasing capacity beyond the efficient level to a bonus effect and a demand elicitation effect. Both stem from the risk of unmet demand, which is characteristic of capacity decisions under uncertainty.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).