Search

International audience; As a research field, entrepreneurship emerged from an increasing interest in fostering new business ventures. Over the past decade, interest in entrepreneurial phenomena also triggered several studies in the IMP research stream. We examine connections between these two research streams in terms of the phenomena in focus, key concepts, and approaches to identify research areas fruitful for advancing our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. In pursuit of this aim, we analyzed 48 IMP-based entrepreneurship studies and the abstracts of the 227 most cited papers in eight main entrepreneurship journals; among the latter, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 30 articles, in which we found connections with IMP studies. Based on our analysis, we identify four directions for future research, where confronting and bridging the key concepts has the potential to contribute to conceptualizing entrepreneurial phenomena and related theory development. The four areas are: variety in the context of new ventures; multiplicity of networks embedding new ventures; connecting the new venture to its context; and the new venture's learning and management.

The supply context of companies has changed substantially during the past two decades because of outsourcing, globalisation and digitalisation, and through growing concern for sustainability and public procurement. These changes, combined with recognition of the potential benefits to be derived from more extensive involvement with suppliers, have made the task of purchasing and supply management broader and more complex. This paper's aim is to examine how the evolving supply context affects the scope of purchasing and supply management and what the consequences for management are. We argue that effective use of supplier relationships involves three main issues – interacting in supplier relationships, dealing with supply network interdependences and handling dynamic changes in the supply context. Coping with these matters requires: (i) conceptual tools that support monitoring and sense-making of what is on-going at the supply side of the firm; (ii) the individual and organisational skills and capabilities required to develop workable solutions; and (iii) organisational arrangements to support the development of these solutions.

International audience; New business ventures have rather limited resources, generally suffer from liabilities of smallness and newness and rely on external business relationships, typically with suppliers, for developing and acquiring necessary resources. Yet, to date, research on how new ventures develop initial relationships with suppliers and how these affect the nascent business has been limited. Taking the business network perspective and relating it to studies of supply chain and supplier involvement in product development, our study contributes to the rather limited body of knowledge on new ventures' supplier relationships. Empirically, we draw on a longitudinal, in-depth single-case study of the first two years of operation of a start-up. Our study shows that the development of the key initial supplier relationships starts from open-ended expectations of mutual future relational benefits and involves a stepwise ‘inter-definition’ of solutions in interaction between the parties. We observe that interdependences arise between the new venture and its key suppliers and these enable but also limit, the development paths of both partners. We argue that the key initial supplier relationships extend a new venture's resource and capability base and are an integral part of a new venture's business model.

Purpose The expanding body of research on business models generally assumes that firms operate in a “transactional” context. Several recent studies suggest that the concept of business models in contexts where relationships matter, such as business markets, involves issues that the transactional microeconomic perspective is ill suited to capture. In the expanding literature on business models, the role of context in how business models emerge and evolve is a topic that appears under researched. The purpose of this paper is to review the findings of these studies and explore how “relational context” affects the emergence and evolution of business models. Design/methodology/approach The authors review the literature on business models in business markets where high-involvement relationships with customers and suppliers are common, and report a case to illustrate the critical issues involved. Findings The authors find that context where high-involvement relationships are common implies that business models are relationship specific and tend to be different across key relationships of a business; the involvement of others limits the autonomy of a single business in developing its business model; business models are continuously emergent and transient. Originality/value This study is among the few that examine the emergence and evolution of business model in business network in a longitudinal perspective. The value of the study also lies in the implications of the relationship-centric business model for management practice and research.

Simulation games have become widespread in business courses, yet the understanding of their learning effects remains limited. The effectiveness of using simulation in marketing classes is not uniform, and not all students welcome it to the same extent. Drawing on a survey among 173 students engaged in a simulation game as part of a course in a 2-year business graduate program, we employ “expectation–confirmation theory” and the “unified theory of acceptance and use of technology” to develop a model to investigate the relation between Learner Satisfaction and Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy with a marketing simulation game. In addition, we examine the influence of Age, Gender, Course Type, Course Stage, and Recalled Performance. We report that Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy drive Learner Satisfaction. We also find Recalled Performance of students to be related to Learner Satisfaction. We discuss the implications of our results for the use of marketing simulation games in business programs in relation to experiential learning theory linking Learner Satisfaction to learning outcomes. In light of our results, instructors can affect the learning experience from simulation games by acting on Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy as antecedents of Learner Satisfaction.

Interactivity is a dimension that describes a certain condition in business networks – a propensity to use interaction in business as a major means in development processes. Expectations formed as a collective attitude and knowledge about existing economic conditions and the importance of joint solutions formed through interactions to handle them are an expression of interactivity in the network. This collective condition is important because there are some obstacles confronting the development of substantive interaction. Businesses engage in interaction only when they acknowledge and accept that mutuality is something positive and a necessary condition to achieve some positive outcomes that cannot be achieved in isolation, and that interdependencies can be used in a constructive way. Finally, there must be managers prepared to use resources to build up relationships and to develop joint solutions that will pay in the long run. All relationships require investments. These attitude and knowledge factors, which are aspects of interactivity, are a condition for handling resources and activities to create efficiency and innovativeness.

The issue dealt with in this chapter is the role of management in developing and maintaining business relationships among companies. Interdependent business network structures result from interactions in dyads between single actors and interactions among all involved actors collectively. Managers as ‘architects and constructors’ of business relationships, involved directly in developing the relationships between customers and suppliers, are mostly middle-management positions rather than top management. Purchasing managers, sales managers and technical managers are fundamental for the development of business relationships as they create value in business relationships. Relationships between companies cannot be developed unilaterally; they have to be developed jointly. Since value creation requires involvement of others, motivating other actors and mediating are fundamental in developing relationships and creating value. The effective development of business relationships of value hinges on the capability and skills of management to work with and through others, to relate to others and to cope with interdependencies that arise in relationships. However, the capability of a company to interact and create value in business relationships is not simply a sum of individual managerial skills; it is an issue of organising the interfaces in relationships to other business.

The first and most basic issue is the position and role of Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) research in relation to contemporary economic research, where the authors raise the issue of phenomenon-driven theory development. The discussion hinges on the methodological implications of phenomenon-driven research and emphasizes the interplay of phenomena in focus, theory development and methodological approaches. Two approaches identified in a natural science field, depicted as image- and logic-based research, are used to examine research on business relationships, networks and interactions. The authors argue that the bulk of IMP studies has taken the image-based approach which, in the natural sciences, is considered to produce as hard facts as logic-based (theory testing) research. The detailed images (pictures) of the business landscape that IMP research has produced must be taken as seriously as any quantitative study of the same landscape. Greater awareness and more discussion of the ontological and methodological issues in researching the business world are needed.

Various empirical studies have evidenced that interaction is a critical process in the development of buyer–seller relationships in business-to-business markets. Research examining the different aspects of interaction processes and the consequences of interaction in business relationships for the development of the businesses involved has tended to black-box the interaction process. Limited attention has been given to how interaction behaviors of individuals arise and the interplay between cognition and behaviors in interaction. At the same time, recent research offers some insights into the use and role of heuristics in contexts analogous to those individual actors face when they interact in business relationships. In this paper we review current research on interaction processes in business relationships as well as on heuristics in the management context and argue that focusing on heuristics used in interaction in business relationships offers valuable insights on how interaction behaviors emerge. In particular, we discuss the notion of heuristics as an “adaptive toolbox,” and how it relates to adaptations in business relationships. We also discuss implications for management and outline a future research agenda.

Purpose – Online communication technologies have profoundly affected consumption and buying behaviours, and put pressure on businesses to find ways of dealing with these developments. Businesses are increasingly experimenting with new approaches and tools to keep up, and netnography – ethnography applied to the web – has become popular. However, exploiting the potential of netnography requires companies to cope with new problems and acquire new capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to examine the organizational and managerial implications of using the netnographic approach in market research. Design/methodology/approach – After a literature review on netnography in marketing research, the authors present a case study of best practice of netnography for market research: the research project of Dash-Procter & Gamble on Motherhood Support. Findings – The authors found four issues as critical for exploiting the potential of netnography as a tool of market research: first, immersive involvement; second, mediated participation; third, the use of multiple techniques and distributed specialized capabilities; and fourth, the need for orchestrating the emergent network organization of the project. The quality of the research outcomes is related to the resources available and the integration of different roles and competences in the project. Research limitations/implications – Since netnographic studies involve collaborative research, further studies of experiences in organizing netnography projects are needed. These studies are bound to yield valuable insights. Practical implications – Exploiting the potential of netnography implies experimenting with novel approaches and solutions in marketing research practices to orient management decisions and calls for developing skills to orchestrate research project networks. Originality/value – The value of this work lies in zooming in on the methodological principles of netnography and zooming out on the networking managerial processes that make it possible to implement the networking required to exploit the potential of netnography.

Few studies have looked at the innovation process in the early stages of new business ventures in the context of business networks. Reporting on eight years of development of a new venture, we examine how the development of initial business relationships in an ever-changing business network affects technological innovation. We conclude that technological innovation is contingent on the development of business relationships that are a critical mechanism permitting a new venture not only to access but also to produce knowledge essential for innovating. For management this implies the need to strike a judicious balance between internal focus and closure to produce novel solutions and external focus and openness to experiment in business relationships.

Purpose – Growing awareness that value for the customer is created in relationship between the supplier and the customer has consequences for sales and marketing functions, and businesses are increasingly experimenting with new organisational approaches and solutions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate organisational issues involved in implementing value programs in B2B firms and examine implications for managerial action. Design/methodology/approach – After a literature review on value creation in business relationships, the authors illustrate the case of a large industrial business experimenting with organisational solutions to support value-creation processes in customer relationships. Findings – The authors identify three issues management has to address in organising the customer interface: involvement of a variety of actors to access elements of effective customer-value solutions; supporting and orchestrating the interaction processes among those involved; and differentiation of the customer interface and sales approach to match the substantial differences in customer relationships. Research limitations/implications – There is a need for further, more systematic empirical studies of value-creation practices and solutions in how businesses organise the customer interface for value creation. Practical implications – Coping effectively with creating value in customer relationships implies experimenting with novel approaches and solutions in organising the sales and marketing activities as open networked sales organization and requires specific managerial capabilities. Originality/value – While creating customer value is generally believed to be positively related to the firm's performance and development, the organisational implications of focusing on creating value have been less explored. The original contribution of this work lies in zooming in on the organisational solutions to support the customer value-creation processes.

The odds that a start-up succeeds are low. The risk of failure during the first three years is estimated at 85 %; statistics show that only a few newly started businesses survive more than a handful of years (Short, McKelvie, Ketchen, & Chandler, 2009). Despite these odds, the number of entrepreneurs who want to start their own business continues to grow, and the interest among policy makers and investors remains. Since such unfavourable statistics persist, despite research on entrepreneurship and the support which start-ups receive, our understanding and knowledge about the process of establishing and developing a new business venture is apparently rather limited or not fully relevant. Following a certain tradition in new venturing studies (Gartner, 1985), in this chapter we use the notion of ‘start-up’ when we refer to the pre-organizational stage, and that of ‘new business venture’ when the enterprise acquires the features of an organized activity system (drawing a clear line is of course arbitrary but this is not really central to our purpose in this chapter).

Various beneficial consequences can accrue when a customer is perceived to be an attractive customer, particularly in a business-to-business context. Opinions differ as to what makes for customer attractiveness and a number of different features have been suggested as contributing to it. Currently there exists no comprehensive view of what factors constitute customer attractiveness and how this may be valued, measured and evaluated. Drawing on various facets of customer attractiveness suggested in the literature, this paper seeks to delineate the customer attractiveness construct and develop an instrument to measure it. The paper concludes by discussing how the scale developed can be used as a tool to address some critical issues in assessing customer attractiveness.

Our research deals with the role of actors in change in business relationships and networks. In this study, we explore how cognitive elaboration of experience of a relationship affects the relationship development. The link between behaviors and cognitive elaborations has been the object of recent research in marketing, but little attention has been given to the issue of cognition and behaviors when actors interact in business relationships. Given the role of relationships and their dynamics for the development of business networks, we believe that the issue deserves more attention. Also, compared to the interest in the space dimension of business networks, i.e., network pictures, perceptions of time have been under-investigated. We report findings from 84 bilateral interviews with managers involved as customers or suppliers in 21 relationships with ICT Security at two points in time. We collected their interpretations and reinterpretations of past developments, outcomes, and desired outcomes of the relationships in which they were involved. Our data suggest that the link between managers' cognitive elaborations and relationship dynamics is less direct than commonly assumed. We argue that evolution of a relationship cannot be explained by individual interpretations of the parties involved in the relationship; a preliminary finding is that actors' intentions appear more to shape the interpretations, rather than the contrary.

Every business builds on a specific set of resources. New businesses in particular have to assemble external resources that are mostly new to them. This resource assembly requires developing business relationships with other actors that control and can provide the needed resources. Adopting a resource interaction perspective, this paper examines a case of a new business venture in the automobile industry. The case study shows that when forming a new business the actors possess only partial knowledge of how to assemble the resources. Consequently, the actors must engage in extensive adaptation and interaction with others to enact workable resource interfaces and combinations. This necessity makes the new business formation process nonlinear and onerous. Further, the case demonstrates that new business formation is a collective process involving not only the emergence of a formal business organization but also reorganizing the applicable resource market. Since third parties involved in developing the necessary resource combinations can be considered part of the new business venture, setting the boundaries of the new venture becomes arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of such boundary setting has implications in entrepreneurship studies with regard to the unit of analysis and the concept of opportunity.

Combining resources to develop complex solutions (e.g., products or services) involves a varied set of business actors. Research tends to assume that actors are more or less autonomous in combining the resources they use. Presenting findings from a study of the construction of the first two pre-discharge homes for patients with cognitive and motor disabilities, we show that the autonomy of the single actor in combining resources is limited and that resource combinations are collectively enacted. Consequently, the features of the emergent resource combinations depend on the set of actors involved. We also argue that each actor takes part in resource combination both as provider and as user of resources; the two roles imply different perspectives that lead to different focal points which, in turn, impact how resources interface. The two roles orient the conduct of parties and, as confronted in business relationships, they shape the development of business relationships and resource combinations.

‘Alignment’ and ‘misalignment’ are terms commonly used both in strategy and in marketing. In B-to-B marketing, in particular, researchers investigated alignment/misalignment between customers and suppliers and recently discussed the effects of misalignment. Research in this field remains however fragmented. There is ambiguity about the objects to be aligned, the processes that characterize their change, the effects on the relationship development and the methods used to assess them. In general, the empirical research that has examined the two concepts in business relationships is limited. In this study we will develop a theoretical framework to assess alignments/misalignments in parties' interpretations of a problem and its solution for the customer, in order to address the following questions: How and why do alignment and misalignment change over time? When can misalignment be positive for the relationship development? We use data from a longitudinal study involving 84 customers and suppliers in the ICT Security Industry. The first finding is that there are no patterns in how alignment changes, but there is a slight tendency toward misalignment over time. Second, change in the alignment is mostly linked to parties' perceptions of the available resources and how these resources are combined, along with parties' interpretations of critical events. Finally, the research suggests that when parties are aware of misalignment, when misalignment is perceptual and when there are no external constraints to action, the effort to align practices produces positive effects, even when misalignment persists.

The commentary discusses the analysis of the content of business marketing textbooks by Backhaus, Mell and Sabel and in particular the dichotomy managerial used to classify the approaches adopted. It is argued that such a dichotomy tends to veil different and changing assumptions regarding the task of marketing management in business markets, and the claim is made that the interplay between the different approaches is beneficial for the development of the body of knowledge of the discipline of business marketing.

There is a considerable body of research on ongoing customer-supplier relationships in business markets, but empirical research on the development of new business relationships and early stages of business relationships is more limited (Edvardsson et al., 2008). The initial phase of development of a business relationship appears to pose specific problems with important consequences for marketing and management of business relationships (Aaboen et al., 2011; Gadde et al., 2012). The relationship marketing literature in general implies that development of new customer-supplier relationships tends to be intentional and results from the identification of exchange opportunities and the development of an economically convenient offering (Gummesson, 1996; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). In contrast research dealing with business relationships has shown that the initial phases of a business relationship are often “chaotic” for the managers involved on both sides and the development often takes unexpected directions. This aspect of the customer-supplier relationship development is rather neglected in the general relationship marketing literature. Since business relationships develop as a sequence of interactions that take place between two counterparts (Holmlund, 2004), an investigation of interaction processes is required to understand how new relationships start. In this paper we report a case study describing the interaction processes when business relationships are initiated and illustrates how contextual factors affect the process. Exploring the development of a business relationship between previously unconnected businesses we focus on the role played in relationship development by exogenous factors.

Contemporary textbooks on sales management acknowledge that the content and task of the sales function varies according to the circumstances, from a simple order taker to the creative selling of intangibles. However, the role of sales in the literature tends to be about the content of the formal sales function in established businesses where the product or service is given and ready to be sold. The role of sales is described as a function that contributes to conceiving, producing, and delivering customer value by understanding customers’ and/or sellers’ needs and fulfilling them with the bundle of goods and services fitting those needs (Weitz & Bradford, 1999). When new products/services are developed, the role of sales is said to be to identify customers’ needs and wants, often in collaboration with the marketing function (Ernst, Hoyer, & Rubsaamen, 2010). At its broadest the scope of the sales function is defined as developing and managing customer relationships (Anderson, 1996; Jackson et al., 1994; Wotruba, 1996).

Partnerships with suppliers have proven a valuable ingredient in many companies’ supply strategy. That does not mean that partnering with suppliers is always a superior mode of supply management. What partnership with a supplier entails and means in practice remains ambiguous. Meaning of supplier partnership and their effectiveness for the buying company under different circumstances are discussed in this paper.

The supply side is on top of the management agenda in most companies, reflecting an increasing strategic attention to benefits that can be gained from cooperation with suppliers. In particular, partnering has been suggested to be the superior solution for making the most of supplier relationships. It is argued in this paper that this recommendation oversimplifies the issues involved and, if followed blindly, may be bad for practice. Developing partnerships with suppliers is resource-intensive and can be justified only when the costs of extended involvement are exceeded by relationship benefits. The article examines the economic consequences following from different degrees of involvement with suppliers. Our conclusion is that a company can be highly involved with only a limited number of suppliers and needs a variety of relationships—each providing its different benefits. Furthermore, it is discussed how the extent of involvement relates to the economic importance of the supplier, the continuity of the relationship and the sourcing strategy of the buying firm. The core of our argument is that the capacity to cope with a variety of relationships in differentiated ways has a profound impact on performance. When the approach of the buying firm shifts from purchasing to making the most of supplier relationships, a richer analytical framework is required to deal with the complexity of the new task.

The purpose of this article is to explore the contributions that could be made to the conceptual frame of reference for business strategy management by one of the research programmes which focuses on the organization-environment interface, and to which a network approach has been applied. We start by examining some of the assumptions underlying the current “strategy management doctrine”. The network model of the organization-environment interface is then reviewed and three central issues of the strategy management doctrine are discussed from the viewpoint of the network model: (1) organizational boundaries, (2) determinants of organizational effectiveness, and (3) the process of managing business strategy. The conclusion reached is that in all three areas changes are required in the assumptions of the business strategy model. Our arguments stem from a basic proposition about the situations described by the network model: continuous interaction with other parties constituting the context with which the organization interacts endows the organization with meaning and a role. When this proposition applies, any attempt to manage the behaviour of the organization will require a shift in focus away from the way the organization allocates and structures its internal resources and towards the way it relates its own activities and resources to those of the other parties constituting its context. Such a shift in focus entails a somewhat different view of the meaning of organizational effectiveness: what does it depend on and how can it be managed?