Market Orientation and Entrepreneurial Proclivity as Antecedents of Innovative Behaviour: Implications for Cocoa Farmers in Ghana

Despite the increasing importance of innovation in literature, there is no agreement about its antecedents. This clearly makes it difficult and risky for cocoa farmers to choose suitable strategies to adopt, develop and promote successful innovations to fit their farm situations. The research questions were aimed at assessing the level of the entrepreneurial proclivity of cocoa farmers, their level of market orientation, their level of innovative behavior, and the influence of entrepreneurial proclivity and market orientation on innovative behavior. Cocoa farmers were sampled from all the six Cocoa Regions in Ghana. In total, 370 cocoa farmers, who participated in the Farmer Business School, were sampled using the multi-stage sampling procedure. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistics (multiple linear regression). The study showed evidence that market orientation and entrepreneurial proclivity can be considered as antecedents of innovation with the key factors being, customer emphasis, intelligence dissemination, and market responsiveness. The study recommends improved flexibility in the cocoa marketing system of Ghana giving attention to the systems of customer/export options available to cocoa farmers.

APAKAH AGRESIVITAS PAJAK MENURUNKAN TINGKAT KEINFORMATIFAN LABA PERUSAHAAN?

Abstract— This research aims to examine the association between tax aggressiveness and the level of earnings informativeness. This study examines whether tax aggressiveness is being responded to by the market. This study's methodology is a quantitative approach with multiple linear regression models and panel data. The sample employed in this study is trading sector companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX). The type of data used in this study is secondary data sourced from financial statements, stock price information, and annual reports from 2017 to 2019. The sample selection using a purposive sampling method with the number of samples amounted to 48 firm-year. This study suggests that tax aggressiveness is negatively associated with the level of earnings informativeness. The complexity of the company's tax aggressiveness activities makes it more difficult for investors to understand the quality of earnings reported by the company. Keywords: Tax Aggressiveness; Tax Avoidance; Earnings Informativeness; ERC; Market Responsiveness

The role of marketing and innovation in services

Big data technologies and analytics enable new digital services and are often associated with superior performance. However, firms investing in big data often fail to attain those advantages. To answer the questions of how and when big data pay off, marketing scholars need new theoretical approaches and empirical tools that account for the digitized world. Building on affordance theory, the authors develop a novel, conceptually rigorous, and practice-oriented framework of the impact of big data investments on service innovation and performance. Affordances represent action possibilities, namely what individuals or organizations with certain goals and capabilities can do with a technology. The authors conceptualize and operationalize three important big data marketing affordances: customer behavior pattern spotting, real-time market responsiveness, and data-driven market ambidexterity. The empirical analysis establishes construct validity and offers a preliminary nomological test of direct, indirect, and conditional effects of big data marketing affordances on perceived big data performance.

Supply chain management and market responsiveness: a simulation study

Purpose This study aims to provide a practical solution to the relationship between supply chain (SC) integration and market responsiveness (MR). A method is proposed to integrate SC and MR parameters, namely, product supply and demand in the context of low-value commodities (e.g. cement). Design/methodology/approach Simulation and forecasting approaches are adopted to develop a potential procedure for addressing demand during lead time. To establish inventory measurements (safety stock and reorder level) and increase MR and the satisfaction of customer’s needs, this study considers a downstream SC including manufacturers, depots and central distribution centers that satisfies an unbounded number of customers, which, in turn, transport the cement from the industrialist. Findings The demand during lead time is shown to follow a gamma distribution, a rare probability distribution that has not been considered in previous studies. Moreover, inventory measurements, such as the safety stock, depending on the safety factor under a certain service level (SL), which enables the SC to handle different responsiveness levels in accordance with customer requests. In addition, the quantities of the safety stock and reorder point represent an optimal value at each position to avoid over- or understocking. The role of SC characteristics in MR has largely been ignored in existing research. Originality/value This study applies SC flexibility analyzes to overcome the obstacles of analytical methods, especially when the production process involves probabilistic variables such as product availability and demand. The use of an efficient method for analyzing the forecasting results is an unprecedented idea that is proven efficacious in investigating non-dominated solutions. This approach provides near-optimal solutions to the trade-off between different levels of demand and the SC responsiveness (SLs) with minimal experimentation times.

Achieving Responsiveness through Supply Chain Integration: A Moderating Effect of Industry-4.0

This article is aiming to investigate the emerging impact of industry-4.0 on supply chain integration and responsiveness in the electronics industry in China. Specifically, it is to investigate the moderating effect of industry-4.0 as a strategic factor on the causal relationship from operational integration to supply chain responsiveness. This study develops hypotheses based the on selected literature reviews in the relevant research areas, and tests the hypotheses in the empirical sample data set collected from 76 electronics firms by using hierarchical multiple regression method. The results of this study shows that industry-4.0 as an emerging strategic factor has not only directly helped the level of market responsiveness of the firms, but also has significantly strengthens the already proven positive causal relationship from operational integration within the supply chain to the overall market responsiveness as part of supply chain performance. To improve the supply chain responsiveness in the electronics industry, managers can now make more confident and informed decisions to channel their resources towards the initiatives of industry-4.0 by up-grading perhaps their current information systems and business processes, knowing full well the dual benefits offered by the Industry 4.0 initiatives. The study extends the concurrent literature by conceptualising the moderating effect of industry-4.0 on the causal relationship between supply chain integration and business responsiveness.