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Organizations that rely on salespeople to be the company interface or "receptors" to important figures in the external environment (i.e., customers, competitors, suppliers), have a great opportunity to generate creative new ideas or solutions to company and customer needs (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). This new knowledge, when shared or "sold" by a salesperson to "higher ups" can then be adopted and innovated to valuable company and customer solutions. Employing salespeople to perform boundary-spanning activity is not enough to stimulate creative behaviors; sales managers need to be open- minded, attentive and interested in salesperson creativity. The purpose of this research is to extend the understanding of individual salesperson job creativity by proposing a moderating influence of sales management openness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite various efforts to examine the relationship between market orientation and performance (e.g., Han, Kim, and Srivastava 1998; Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990), the potential impact of market orientation on strategic alliances has been largely overlooked. With this in mind, the primary objective of this study is to develop a model to explain the potential structure of relationships that influence new product alliance performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison of the effectiveness of advertising on the web versus using traditional media such as television or print has been the subject of much discussion in both academic and trade press literature (Coffey and Stipp 1997; Gilder 1994; Negroponte 1995). We believe projections of replacement of one media by another are not justified. First, the web offers a battery of advertising communication options such as a company website, banher ads, interstitials, and e-mail while traditional media include television, radio, and print. Thus all encompassing judgments about the two media without looking at the specific types of each would be short sighted. Second, each of the types of communication for both the web and traditional media operate differently and serve different objectives. For example, a company web site is capable of providing a large amount of information that brings about changes in knowledge or attitude while banner ads and television ads are effective in grabbing attention and creating awareness. In order to compare and contrast the two forms of media and their subcomponents, we used a hierarchy response model as a framework (Bearden, Ingram, and LaForge 2001; Etzel, Walker, and Stanton 2001; Semenik 2001; Belch and Belch 2001; Strong 1925; Lavidge and Steiner 1961; Rogers 1962; McGuire 1978; Smith and Swineyard 1982). This family of models bears an underlying similarity in that they have a cognitive, affective, and behavioral stage. Each stage represents advertiser objectives. The cognitive stage may be further divided into awareness (which refers to the salience or relative prominence of a brand in the consumer's mind) and knowledge (which refers to information and ideas about the product). Based on a review of the literature we developed propositions on the media, which would be most effective at each stage. The multimedia capabilities of television and radio along with the reach of television, radio, and print make them superior to the web in... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]