Search results for "strategy"

An Information Systems Design Product Theory for Integrated Requirements, Test and Defect Management Systems

2012

Software companies need to develop high-quality products fast and with low cost. Development activities are typically distributed in different places and involve multiple stakeholders in different countries. Testing is an important way to ensure product quality but it is costly and takes ample time and resources. Sourcing testing services from specialized service providers is often the most viable option for software businesses. Flexible and effective test process management is especially vital to support the testing life-cycle when external testing service providers are involved. Yet, the extant literature provides little theoretical guidance for managing the testing life-cycle, including …

Software Renting in the Era of Cloud Computing

2012

In the new era of computing, software can be sold and delivered as a cloud service, and software renting has become as a strategic tool to compete in the market. Software renting has several advantages from the customer's point of view. However, for software providers it is challenging to ensure a profitable revenue stream when a license fee is replaced by a periodic rental fee. In this study, software renting was found to help the case firms to differentiate themselves from competitors; it also increased their competitive advantage by making the software available for a larger customer group. However, the negotiating power of larger customers impacted on software pricing, rental agreements…

Accelerating the Americanization of Management Education

2015

The Journal of Management Inquiry astutely predicted in 2004 that the Americanization of business education would not just continue but increase. Ten years later, it is arguable that the acceleration of the Americanization of management education has exceeded all expectations. To theoretically build toward understanding how and why the American business education model has been adopted to different extents, this comparative study builds on the institutional logics perspective, arguing that different institutional logics can potentially explain the various forms and patterns of Americanization and how they are manifested in the world’s business schools.

Enterprising Culture : Discourses on Entrepreneurship in Nordic Cultural Policy

2017

ABSTRACTThe sphere of arts and culture has been going through a process of economic reevaluation during the last few decades. Parallel to the rise of a creative economy discourse, which both in its political and scientific forms has highlighted the economic significance of culture and arts, entrepreneurship has become a feature in the cultural policy of many countries. In this article, we compare how entrepreneurship is established and used as a concept in cultural policy discourses in two Nordic countries, Norway and Finland. Through analyzing policy plans and documents, we discuss what is seen as positive cultural or artistic activity in the framework of entrepreneurship, and we identify …

Review of “Performing Nordic Heritage : Everyday Practices and Institutional Culture,” edited by Peter Aronsson and Lizette Gradén

2015

Strategic choices of Finnish universities in the light of general strategy frameworks

2016

This study examines university strategies from the content perspective. Since the early 1980s, the pressure to adopt strategic management in universities and other higher education institutions has increased because of issues including reduced public funding, pressures and possibilities for internationalization, developments in teaching technologies, and demands for increased accountability to stakeholders. The study employs content analysis and multivariate statistical techniques to examine the written strategies of 13 Finnish universities formulated after the University Act 2010 that aimed at enhancing their competitiveness in the global arena. The studied organizations cover practically …

Distributed leadership in practice in Finnish schools

2017

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study is to explore what aspects the principals and the members of the management teams in the primary and upper secondary education schools in Vantaa support distributed leadership in their school and how necessary they see that distributed leadership is extended to the students in matters concerning the curriculum and the development of teaching practices. The research method was a survey based on a questionnaire of 48 questions, where the respondents evaluated the preconditions of distributed leadership in their school. The principals and members of the management teams in the primary and upper secondary schools in Vantaa see distributed leadership mostly as deleg…

Corporate business model transformation and inter-organizational cognition: the case of Nokia

2013

This article distinguishes between a firm’s corporate business model and business models of its various business units. Our aim is to provide new insights into how executives’ cognitive processes can influence corporate business model transformation decisions. We focus especially on top managers’ recognition of inter-organizational cognitions, that is, such cognitions about the firm and its businesses that are shared by the top managers and stakeholders of the firm in the industries and communities where it operates. We support our theoretical work with an historical case study of Nokia’s corporate business model transformation between 1990 and 1996, which proved highly successful. We find …

Family Firm Heterogeneity and Tax Aggressiveness: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis of the Impact of Different Family Generations

2021

This paper analyses tax aggressiveness in family firm generations. Moreover, taking into account the heterogeneity in family firms, we check whether the successive generations in control show different tax avoidance behaviour. The empirical evidence, based on the quasi-experiment of the 2012 Spanish thin capitalization rule, reveals that there is a positive relationship between tax aggressiveness and successive generations. Moreover, the founder and second generations follow a similar conservative tax avoidance approach, whereas the third and fourth generations are found to be more tax aggressive.

Are quality management practices enough to improve process innovation?

2015

The popularity of quality management as a system for continuous improvement has not been accompanied by deep theoretical understanding of its effects on process innovation. In this work, the resource-based view serves as the basis for the construction of a model designed to explain the effects of quality management practices (QMP) on process innovation performance and the mediating role of dynamic capabilities in this relationship. The empirical data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique by examining 6 competing models that represent full, partial mediation and non-mediation relationships on a sample of 550 Spanish industrial companies. The findings indicate that t…