Drawing on the author's recent and ongoing research this book explores how to build the organizational capability to realise the strategic potential of information technology. It tackles the gap between theory and practice and how to gain wider adoption of successful socio-technical and benefits-driven approaches to investments in IT.

Emerging from the authors' work with companies such as Coca-Cola, Motorola, 3M, General Motors and Unilever, The Delta Project provides a unique model through which to develop strategy in the new economy. Hax and Wilde examine how globalization, deregulation and the emergence of the internet infrastructure have changed the rules for success and identify three distinct strategic positions that can be used to realign the direction of your business. Introducing new models of 'bonding', 'complementors' and 'customer lock-in' this book provides a fundamental shift in the way we think about competitive positioning.

For many business owners, navigating a path to success can be compared to walking through a minefield. New business owners - as well as those operating mature businesses - often face unexpected problems at every bend in the road. Confronting these challenges need not be as fraught with worry and confusion as it may appear. Ken Boyar, a business consultant and CPA with more than 25 years of experience will guide you through some of the more common problems entrepreneurs face. Through his examples, you will learn not only how to avoid common mistakes but how to gain the tools you need to fix problems that may have already occurred. This primer on the "do's and don'ts" of business operations will help set you on the path to mastering your own small business.

This book investigates the EU's regional growth dynamics and, in particular, the reasons why peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged areas have persistently failed to catch up with the rest of the Union. It shows that the capability of the knowledge-based growth model to deliver its expected benefits to these areas crucially depends on tackling a specific set of socio-institutional factors which prevents innovation from being effectively translated into economic growth. The book takes an eclectic approach to the territorial genesis of innovation and regional growth by combining different theoretical strands into one model of empirical analysis covering the whole EU-25. An in-depth comparative analysis with the United States is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of the European process of innovation and its territorial determinants. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of EU development policies.

Now celebrating over ten years of How to Win at the Sport of Business, Mark Cuban, one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen, collects his greatest lessons on what it takes to become a thriving entrepreneur.

Drawing upon his profound insider knowledge, Cuban offers unconventional business tips and tells his stunning rags-to-riches tale from selling powdered milk and sleeping on friends’ couches to owning his own company and becoming a multibillion-dollar success story.

Mark shows how he puts his own advice into practice and how entrepreneurs at any stage of their careers can outmaneuver their competitors.

Towards 2020, a rapid changing landscape will emerge in Asia where the opportunities for Asian companies to benefit from international branding efforts will be larger than ever before. The growing emphasis on shareholder value and brand strategy to drive value will move up the boardroom agenda and become one of the most prominent drivers of value in Asia Pacific.
Asian Brand Strategy offers insights, knowledge and perspectives on Asian brands and branding as a strategic tool and provides a comprehensive framework for understanding Asian branding strategies and Asian brands, including success stories and challenges for future growth and strengths. The book includes theoretical frameworks and models and up-to-date case studies on Asian brands, and it a must-read for Asian and Western business leaders as well as anyone interested in the most exciting region of the world.
The book presents the Asian Brand Leadership model illustrating the paradigm shift Asian brands need to undertake to unleash their potential.
First, mindsets and practices need to change in the Asian boardroom. The book invites a complete shift in the way Asian boardrooms think of branding: from a tactical view to a long-term, strategic perspective, from fragmented marketing activities to totally aligned branding activities, from a vision of branding as the sole responsibility of marketing managers to branding as the most essential function of the firm led by the boardroom.
Second, this new perspective must be steeped into a more acute perspective on the consumer behaviour patterns. Asia is not a homogenous entity. Even more importantly, Asian countries are more and more traversed by cultural flows permeatingthe region: cinema, music and fashion trends that are present extend beyond national borders to capture the imagination of millions. Branding and brands do not operate in vacuum, but are closely linked to developments in society, to people and to cultures.
Third, managers wanting to succeed in Asia need to abandon the idea of an oriental Asia of the past. Asian consumers are all vying for an Asian type of modernity that has nothing to do with colonial imagery.
Fourth, to create iconic brands, Asian managers will have to become trendsetters. The perspective developed in this book is that, in order to be successful, Asian brands need to capture the spirit of the region, but they also need to lead the way by creating that spirit.
Finally, this shift can be achieved only if everybody in the company is convinced by the power of branding and if all strategies and actions are aligned around the brand. This must be led by the Asian boardroom.

This book brings together original research on the role of networks in regional economic development and innovation. It presents a comprehensive framework synthesizing extant theories, a palette of real-world cases in the aerospace, automotive, life science, biotechnology and health care industries, and fundamental agent-based computer models elucidating the relation between regional development and network dynamics. The book is primarily intended for researchers in the fields of innovation economics and evolutionary economic geography, and particularly those interested in using agent-based models and empirical case studies. However, it also targets (regional) innovation policy makers who are not only interested in policy recommendations, but also want to understand the state-of-the-art agent-based modeling methods used to experimentally arrive at said recommendations.

Embrace the Human Side of Organisational Digital Transformation Digital Humans: Thriving in an Online World is an insightful, engaging and interdisciplinary discussion of how best to transform your organisation into a nimble, digital enterprise with human beings firmly established at the centre of it. The authors draw on complexity theory, anthropology, history, organisational transformation and behavioural science to demonstrate the characteristics that define successful digital organisations. You'll discover the importance of focusing on human beings even as you make the shift to digital and learn to understand the importance of our new digital ecosystems. Illuminating case studies and examples of organisations that have successfully made the jump to digital are explored and the book presents new and effective ways to make strategic decisions about your company's future based on our new physical-digital hybrid reality. A can't-miss blueprint to a market environment and world that's increasingly fast-moving, complex and rewarding, Digital Humans will find a place in the libraries of managers, executives, and business leaders looking for an engaging roadmap to digital transformation that wouldn't have us leave our humanity behind.

This textbook provides students with comprehensive insights on the classical and contemporary marketing theories and their practical implications. A fourth, revised edition of Marketing Management, the text features new classical and contemporary cases, new interdisciplinary and cross-functional implications of business management theories, contemporary marketing management principles and. futuristic application of marketing management theories and concepts. The core and complex issues are presented in a simplified manner providing students with a stimulating learning experience that enables critical thinking, understanding and future application. Each chapter features a chapter summary, key terms, review and discussion questions and a practice quiz. Throughout the text there are also specific teaching features to provide students and instructors with an enhanced pedagogical experience. These features include: The Manager's Corner: These sections provide real-world examples that instructors may highlight to exemplify theory or as mini-cases for discussion. Marketing in Action: These sections ask students to apply concepts and theories to actual business situations. Web Exercises: These mini sections provide students with real world issues and suggest websites for more information. In addition, the authors provide ancillary lecture notes and Solution/Instructors manual online to aid instructors in their teaching activities.

This book is based upon the operating system of the company, Added Value, founded by the author, and now one of the world's largest marketing and branding consultancies. With the use of many examples and case studies the author shows how the five I's process--Insight, Ideas, Innovation, Impact, and Investment Return--can be used to create top-line demand-led growth and the tools and techniques available to achieve this. This is a unique approach with proven success.

In the changing geography of innovation, multinational corporations play a key role as creators of knowledge. Innovation and the Multinational Firm investigates how innovation is managed within these firms by focusing particularly on subsidiaries and host-locations.

The aim of this book is to analyze the quality of entrepreneurial management and economic development in the Latin American region from a microeconomic point of view. It seeks to explain the Latin American way of business management as well as envision ways in which Latin American businesses can increase productivity and innovation in order to successfully compete in the global market.

Latin America comprises nearly 8.5% of the global population and represents over 8% of the global GDP, yet it is home to only 12 (or less than 2.5%) of the world s 500 largest companies. In this volume, the author analyzes the unique dynamics of Latin American corporate culture to consider the particular obstacles to more successful performance. Drawing evidence from dozens of companies across the eight largest Latin American economies, he notes that Latin American companies have evolved in the context of a highly aristocratic and oligarchic society, dominated by patriarchal families from the upper classes. Corporate structure, especially in family-owned companies, is based largely on patronage and privilege and often characterized by unnecessary hierarchy, redundant responsibilities and poor communication and information management systems.Operating in relative isolation, with little incentive to invest in innovation to compete against foreign products has reinforced this conservative culture.

Taking a fresh perspective that focuses at the firm level, with an emphasis on corporate administration, the author presents a compelling explanation for Latin America s delay in economic development and offers insights for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, identifying promising industrial sectors and improving productivity and competitiveness on the global stage."

This book provides a general overview of the challenges of economic development for the five billion people living in developing countries. While they constitute over 80 percent of the world's population, they account for only 40% of the world's output, and are home to 2.6 billion people living on less than $2.00 per day. Thinking on economic development has shifted over time. Early theories that stressed capital formation and a heavy reliance on the public sector proved inadequate. Gradually, economists began to see that development was a complex, multifaceted problem that combined economic issues with problems of poverty and income distribution, insititution building and governance. While there have been many failures, there have also been many successes. Countries such as China, Chile, Ghana, and Korea demonstrate that good policies and strong institutions can result in remarkable progress. However, many poor countries, particularly those in Africa continue to lag behind. Closing this gap remains a major challenge for the world, particularly as the growing population and output of developing countries accelerate tensions in such areas as trade, immigration and financial flows.

The diversity of the workforce and the implications for management continue to be the focus of a great deal of interest. This is partly because of the importance and urgency of the issues that diversity entails and also because of a growing recognition that many of the dilemmas of diversity management are not proving amenable to easy solutions. Indeed, recent research demonstrates that Britain and the US are, in many ways, becoming more, rather than less unequal societies. This book suggests that metaphor and dialectic play a powerful role in shaping our understandings of ourselves and each other. It draws on original research in organizations and in management education to explore how we can become more aware of these processes within ourselves and challenge those assumptions and stereotypes that contribute to maintaining people in disadvantaged positions.

ICT-D refers to the trend in development thinking and practice that considers deployment of new technologies like computers, mobile phones and Internet, which are important for spurring economic growth, enabling good governance and facilitating human development. In this context, telecentres have emerged as an immensely popular strategy for providing shared and mediated access to ICTs. The rapid proliferation of telecentres in rural India during the last decade was driven by multiple agencies, each with their own purpose, priorities and pre-designed set of services. This volume juxtaposes the global discourse on ICT-D and telecentres with in-depth empirical case studies on the pattern of access and use of telecenters in rural India to draw implications for policy and practice.
It suggest that access and use of telecentres and their services are mediated by the multiple contexts in which they are embedded. While they provide opportunities for people to interact with new technologies, their impact has been mainly in terms of convenience provided by some of the services vis-a-vis existing alternate channels. Particular telecentre models have brought about some change, but this is only when there was a match between the services provided and the local demand for particular information and services. The delivery structure services in terms of user fee, need for reading and computing skills, and linkages with existing institutional context have further shaped access and use.
The efficacy of telecentres in generating new jobs in rural areas, increasing efficiency and reach of e-Governance and other basic services, enhancing livelihoods and the well-being of the people, and overcoming the rural-urban divide has been limited.

This book focuses on the application of revenue management in the manufacturing industry. Though previous books have extensively studied the application of revenue management in the service industry, little attention has been paid to its application in manufacturing, despite the fact that applying it in this context can be highly profitable and instrumental to corporate success. With this work, the author demonstrates that the manufacturing industry also fulfills the prerequisites for the application of revenue management. The book includes a summary of empirical studies that effectively illustrate how revenue management is currently being applied across Europe and North America, and what the profit potential is.

Reflecting the challenges and opportunities of achieving improvement in healthcare systems, the contributions of this innovative new text lend depth and nuance to an increasing area of academic debate. Encompassing context, processes and agency, Managing Improvements in Healthcare addresses the task of attaining, embedding and sustaining improvement in the industry. The book begins by offering insight into the different valued aspects of quality, providing specific examples of national and organizational interventions in pursuit of improvement. The second part focuses on strategies for embedding good practice and ensuring the spread of high quality through knowledge mobilization, and the final part draws attention to the different groups of change agents involved in delivering, co-creating and benefitting from quality improvement. This inventive text will be insightful to those researchers interested in healthcare and organization, looking to transform theory into policy and practice.

This book offers strategic leaders with essential information for their most important role: the change management function of positioning the organization for success into the future. To do so, leaders need to sort through a myriad of forecasts, predictions and weak indicators of change to make timely decisions. This volume addresses the most critical factor for future success: people and, specifically, harnessing the potential the current youth cohort will bring when they join the full-time workforce. Drawing on multi-disciplinary analyses by 37 researchers, the book presents an integrative assessment of the characteristics that those in the current youth cohort are likely to bring to the workplace. The focus is on those born after 2005 with an examination of the implications of this cohort being raised from birth immersed in an increasingly omnipresent digital environment which extends far beyond social media. The authors see the coming 'digital tsunami' as creating disruptive effects across major elements of our economy and even society however optimistically conclude that the digital environment and the development of 21st Century skills in schools will equip the next generation with essential competencies, attitudes, social skills and work goals. The key to harnessing the potential of this generation will be to modify current human resources and workplace practices which will mean sweeping away much of the 'boomer' legacy that this cohort has imprinted on organizations. To assist leaders, the book goes beyond presenting a rich portrait of who these youth may become by providing practical recommendations for the changes that need to start now in order to position the organization to benefit from what they will bring. As the astute strategic leader knows: objects in the future can be closer than they appear.

Innovation is critical for securing competitive advantage and achieving business success. Yet, for many organizations it remains elusive. This book shows how to build innovative teams who will deliver innovations capable of transforming performance. It includes the strategy of building innovative teams and the practical tools that will form part of this process.

This book addresses the multi-facet competitiveness of firms in China from an angle of strategic management of technology and innovation. The Chinese vanguard companies have been excellent in identifying strategic position and appropriately making strategic decisions, and effectively making strategy in action.