243 Posts found for Source: INSEAD Knowledge

Understanding the drivers of market development and evolution is the key to marketing decision-making. Often the focus for this is restricted to price, promotion and distribution. Professor Douglas Bowman and Hubert Gatignon present some other often-ignored innovation drivers, assessing their contribution to the market and category development.

Content: Article | Authors: Douglas Bowman, Hubert Gatignon | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

It is common for projects to miss budgets, schedules and opportunities, in spite of the heroic efforts of the project manager to keep things on track. There is a need for the project management tool-kit to expand beyond task management. Professors Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph Loch and Michael Pich classify the associated and often-neglected uncertainty, and they suggest alternative techniques for project management, depending on … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph Loch, Michael Pich | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Project Management

Organisations can be examined within an evolutionary framework of reproduction, selection, and variation. Professors John Weeks and Charles Galunic propagate a memetic theory of the firm to conclude that organisations are fundamentally cultures that provide a natural balance between the needs of retaining the information set that constitutes the organisation and recombining them to meet new challenges.

Content: Article | Authors: Charles Galunic, John Weeks | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Consider the ethical debate of cyber responsibility – who carries the weight in an unaccountable environment? A French court asked the question in 2000, when Nazi memorabilia was being auctioned on Yahoo!’s Internet site. Professor Marc Le Menstrel, Mark Hunter and Professor Henri-Claude de Bettignies delineate the legal, technical, philosophical, and managerial perspectives as they examine how firms handle the sometimes difficult social consequences of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Henri-Claude de Bettignies, Marc Le Menestrel, Mark Hunter | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Ethics, International

Your firm has long dominated in your particular industry, but suddenly sales are slipping and you’re losing market shares. Your rival must be offering better, new technology, right? Not necessarily, says Professor Ron Adner. In fact, sometimes the inferior products edge out the incumbent ones. Find out why in this recent working paper on disruptive technologies and competition dynamics.

Content: Article | Author: Ron Adner | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

Why do people help one another at work? Is it a form of egoism or of altruism? In this working paper, Professors Leslie Perlow and John R. Weeks investigate helping in Indian and American software firms, considering both the motivations behind the action as well as the contexts in which it occurs. Their results may surprise you.

Content: Article | Author: John Weeks | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Sales promotions encourage consumers to stockpile. But what happens next? Do consumers accelerate their consumption of these products or simply wait longer before repurchasing? To address these questions, Professors Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink develop a framework of postpurchase consumption decisions which looks at how we decide when and how much to consume.

Content: Article | Authors: Brian Wansink, Pierre Chandon | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Trends / Analysis

Identifying, adopting, and exploiting new technologies is a critical part of any firm’s organisational learning, and ultimately, its survival. In today’s fast-paced world, this is a difficult process that raises numerous questions: When should a firm abandon familiar technologies for ones unknown? How does limited information or others’ opinions affect the decision? And what difference do network structures make on innovation adaptation? Andrea Masini and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior

With limited resources of money, goods, and time, we all have to make tough consumption choices. Big decisions such as buying a house or taking a holiday, usually have clear-cut constraints. But what about smaller scale decisions? When it comes to the little things, how do we know when to say when? Professor Klaus Wertenbroch explains.

Content: Article | Author: Klaus Wertenbroch | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Trends / Analysis

Outsourcing has long been the subject of management studies. Though the issue has been analysed from multiple perspectives, a unified, coherent view of outsourcing is still lacking. In this Working Paper, Professors Dalsace and Cool, along with Nicola Dragonetti, identify the major rationales for outsourcing and test these against data for French small and medium-sized enterprises. Their results are surprising and have … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Frédéric Dalsace, Karel Cool, Nicola C. Dragonetti | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Outsourcing / BPO

Why is status so important to us? Do we consider it a tool to obtain power or a goal in and of itself? To answer these questions, Bernardo A. Huberman and Professors Christoph Loch and Ayse Onculer ran a human experiment, using a rent-seeking game to examine status and behavior in the US, Hong Kong, Turkey and Germany. Their results may surprise you.

Content: Article | Authors: Ayse Öncüler, Bernardo A. Huberman, Christoph H. Loch | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Every day people have to stick out their necks and make decisions dealing with uncertainty. Manufacturing firms decide if they want to take a chance on developing a new product. In the financial field, business people look for investments that will bring in the most money. In her working paper, Professor Ayse Öncüler creates a model that analyzes how people decide to place their bets. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ayse Öncüler | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Inter-organisational alliances, flatter organisational structures and globalisation are all forcing businesses to adapt to manage activities that span geographical and organisational boundaries. It’s the age of a new kind of ‘virtual’ knowledge worker. The authors of this article ask what factors contribute to effective leadership in virtual team environments. They assembled thirteen culturally diverse global teams from locations in Europe, Mexico and the US, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dorothy Leidner, Manuel Mora-Tavarez, Timothy Kayworth | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Economics predict that people will act selfishly, yet experiments and real-life experience show that altruism and cooperation towards a public good are always possible. Professors Rafael Rob and Peter Zemsky study how social capital (the cooperativeness of the workforce) can be increased by balancing incentives with the experience of prior cooperation in the workforce.

Content: Article | Authors: Peter Zemsky, Rafael Rob | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

20 years pass and one becomes two: that is, over time, the once-unified financial services industry split into two broad sectors. One is wholesale finance, where clients who have direct access to capital markets may receive financial services. The second is retail and regional finance, where clients do not have direct access but still receive services. Professors Ingo Walter and Roy Smith compare and contrast … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Ingo Walter, Roy Smith | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Finance, Industry Specific | Industry: Finance / Banking

Global expansion is normally a business tool used to perpetuate growth. However, in some cases, it can also cause problems for the economy. INSEAD Professor Daniel Traça reveals how the expansion of global trade may increase job insecurity and diminish wages. And that’s just one of his surprising findings.

Content: Article | Author: Daniel Traça | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Economics, International

Today, in the second era of global capitalism, there is a sharper focus on the social and environmental consequences of the operations of large corporations. Unlike the first era when the backlash against big corporations ushered in the development of governmental regulatory bodies, now a kind of ragtag group is springing up to influence corporate behaviour. But despite the positive successes of some crusades, Professor … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ethan Kapstein | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Ethics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Remanufacturing is a production strategy whose goal is to recover the residual value of used products. Laurens Debo and Professors Beril Toktay and Luk Van Wassenhove consider whether producing a remanufactured product is profitable. They focus on the roles of the market, production technology, and cost, developing insights for managers who might consider using what’s been used and putting out a remanufactured product.

Content: Article | Authors: L. Beril Toktay, Laurens G. Debo, Luk N. Van Wassenhove | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Operations

What makes a value leader, and how much do industry dynamics determine value creation for different types of firms? Professor Gabriel Hawawini, Professor Paul Verdin and PhD candidate Venkat Subramanian re-examine the question to reveal new findings. Using 55 industries, they categorise firms within each industry into 3 main groups – the leading value creators, the value destroyers (the losers) and the rest that lie … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Gabriel Hawawini, Paul Verdin, Venkat Subramanian | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: General, Trends / Analysis

The old adage that “money makes the world go round” may never be more apt than it is on January 1, 2002. The introduction of Euro bank notes and coins on this date will be an operation of unprecedented enormity, affecting the currency regimes of 12 European countries. But unless the parties involved in the Euro cash supply chain, and especially consumers, are well prepared … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ludo Van der Heyden | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Economics, International – Europe