Siemens' Value-Driver Tree in Digitalization

This chapter is a descriptive and explicative case study about value creation at Siemens in an uncertain and in a certain environment. Siemens has implemented economic value-added-based management since 1998. The empirical data analysis highlights value creation at Siemens at the beginning of the innovation lifecycle, when the environment is uncertain, and at the end of the innovation lifecycle, when contracts are signed, and the environment becomes predictable. Innovation is first placed in open networks, in which start-ups are essential, to which venture capital is allocated using business models. This is the ideation stage of the product lifecycle, when competitive advantage, the essence of value creation in both theory and the Siemens example, is created. Innovation matures, and Siemens closes contracts with customers about existing customer offerings. These contracts are managed as projects and funded with equity and debt. This is the stage when sufficient data exists to plan economic value added, the focus of Siemens' corporate governance.

How to Ensure an Ideal Omnichannel Client Experience With Key Performance Indicators

By 2025, electronic sales (e-sales) of luxury goods are expected to triple, reaching about €74 billion and standing for one-fifth of total luxury sales. This mix of online and offline client journeys increases the number of digital points and touchpoints. Thus, the journey of the omnichannel client is worth a deep focus. The omnichannel client experience (CX) requires key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess and understand disruption, enhance the experience, and present the “wow” factor. To get fresh insights on CX in luxury/digital retail, a qualitative study (with focus groups) on the omnichannel luxury client journey was conducted to identify specific pain points and KPIs. Results from an online survey quantitative study on poorly or uncovered omnichannel KPIs are disclosed. Ultimately, an overall list of relevant KPIs for CX in the luxury omnichannel retail industry is provided as a guideline for managers.

From Systematic to Mimetic Behavior in the International Market Selection

Traditionally, the international market selection is a systematic process, based on predefined criteria. This process is, however, very time- and cost-consuming, and only a small number of firms have sufficient resources to do it. So, according to the Uppsala Model, firms tend to internationalize to the closest markets (psychic distance), managing uncertainty in a very gradual process based on experiential knowledge. The second-hand knowledge that flows in the firm's network could help firms select the market, helping them to expand gradually. Independently from the source (experiential or second hand), knowledge seems to be a mandatory resource to internationalize. However, a lot of firms imitate other firms' behavior, selecting the international market according to others' selections, believing that they must have superior information. In this situation, firms could imitate the leader (a successful firm) or the herd (a big number of firms). This international market selection is not based on knowledge; it is a mimetic process.

Trust in E-Commerce

E-commerce is a reality of the 21st century. This type of business is nothing more than the conversion of any offline business in its online version. Understanding the online consumer has been a challenge for managers around the world. In this sense, the authors intend to verify how consumer experience with e-commerce and social media usage influences consumer trust in this new type of sales system. Another objective of this research is to understand if anxiety caused by the consumer perceived risk about the information sharing on the internet affects the trust in e-commerce. The data are collected through an online structured questionnaire and a quantitative methodology of structural equation modeling is used. The results obtained show that consumption experience with e-commerce and social media usage has a positive effect on trust in internet shopping. However, consumption experience has a stronger effect on trust in internet shopping than social media usage. But it can conclude that anxiety does not have a moderate effect on consumer trust in e-commerce and social media usage.

The Consequences of Market Orientation on Performance, New Product Success, and Customer Satisfaction in Traditional Sectors

The market orientation concept used has been used as a way to measure the implementation of marketing strategies and tactics. Although it is still widely accepted and used as a framework for various researches, it is still open for debate as there is not yet a consensus on its consequences on business performance and in other consequences such has new product development and customer satisfaction. This chapter discusses the application of market orientation in a traditional sector (the Portuguese wine sector) using a market orientation model that integrates both the cultural and the behavioural streams. The results of the research lead us to conclude that market orientation favours in a moderate ways new product success and customer satisfaction and that it is not directly related with business profitability.

Marketing-Mix Metamorphosis and New Trusted Business Practices

This chapter discusses the impact on the marketing-mix due to the confluence of the internet of things and the internet of value which seems to be made possible by the blockchain technology. This “perfect storm” induces a vortex of reliability and business trust between people (“peer-to-peer”) and machines (“bot-to-bot”), without the traditional need of third parties to ensure confidence in a negotiation. This implies innovative business practices and self-executing contracts that will take place in a more decentralized and trustworthy environment, speeding up the metamorphosis of the four marketing-mix elements in such a way that marketers will have to deal with a “product” that is always in a “beta-version”; a dynamic “price” that initially has to be free; an atomized “promotion” of reliable messages found by costumers (not the opposite); and a new virtual secure “place,” which is made possible due to augmented reality and blockchain.

Business Model Design

Business model design refers to the design of transactions operated by an organization represented by the content, structure, and governance of all transactions that occur in an organization in order to create value through exploration of a business opportunity. This study has as objective to analyze the impact of one or more business model design has on the performance. Through the conduct of surveys, a sample of 30 companies was collected between Europe and Brazil. The results showed that it was not possible to obtain correlations to validate the hypotheses, due to the great difficulty of obtaining the data by the companies, thus leading to a reduced number of respondents. This study contributes significantly to the theory of innovation and entrepreneurship, as a response to a latent need on the part of the literature to consistently homogenize the understanding about the theme and clear recommendations and practices for management.

Strategic Leadership for New Competitive Environments

The subject of leadership has been addressed by many authors in numerous publications. Nevertheless, the focus has been more on the relationship of middle leaders with their employees than on the role of the strategic leader for the performance of organizations. In this chapter, the authors focus on the importance of top leadership, trying to demonstrate its crucial contribution to organizations. They give special importance to the role of the leader in a changing context characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – The VUCA environment. They define strategic leadership and highlight its impact on organizational results at the individual, team, and organizational levels. They end by addressing the ethical implications of strategic leadership, which has been given relatively little attention by researchers.

A Review of Optimization Techniques for Supplier Selection and Order Allocation

Supply chain is an integrated process in which a group of several organizations, such as suppliers, producers, distributors, and retailers, work together, and where activities such as procurement, production, distribution and demand planning must be addressed. The selection of suppliers is one of the most crucial activities in supply chain management and is conditioned to factors such as lead time, responsiveness, and capacity. This chapter presents an overview of the state of art techniques regarding optimization of supply chain management focussed on the selection of suppliers and order allocation as well as optimization objectives and includes some practical applications. Apart from presenting some of the most common problem categories and optimization techniques, a comparison is provided suggesting the growing importance of heuristic and metaheuristic-based artificial intelligence techniques, given the increased complexity of supply chains and its non-deterministic nature.

The Impact of ICTs and Business Strategy on Innovation Activities

This research explores factors of innovation and clarifies the effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on innovation process. Analysis is based on a mail survey conducted in February 2012 to March 2012 on 3,959 Japanese SMEs. The number of valid responses was 647 (16.3%) and is used as a sample for the analysis. Based on the data, logit analysis is employed for product and process innovation to answer the following three research questions: (1) What are factors promoting innovation? (2) How ICTs affect innovation? and (3) Which affect SMEs with higher ICT use to realize innovation? As a result, (1) the factors such as R&D expenditures, leadership of top management, motivation of employees, ICT index, effects of ICTs are extracted. (2) Sharing information and shortening the R&D process are the effects which ICTs perform to innovation. (3) These effects are greater to SMEs with higher ICT index. The new finding of this chapter lies in results such that ICTs affect innovation through sharing information and shortening the R&D period.