Suchergebnisse

1. Entrepreneurship perspectives: an introduction / Satish Nambisan -- pt. I. ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURSHIP -- 2. Engineering entrepreneurship: developing an entrepreneurial mindset / Doug Melton -- 3. Challenges in faculty entrepreneurship in the sciences: becoming an entrepreneur but staying at the university / Robert W. Brown -- 4. Physics entrepreneurship: an evolution from technology push to market pull / Orville R. Butler and R. Joseph Anderson -- pt. II. HEALTHCARE AND BIOSCIENCE ENTREPRENEURSHIP -- 5. Bioentrepreneurship: opportunities and challenges / Arlen Meyers -- 6. Healthcare entrepreneurship: the changing landscape / Cam Patterson and Andrew Kant -- pt. III. ARTS, MUSIC, AND DESIGN ENTREPRENEURSHIP -- 7. The entrepreneurial musician: the Tao of DIY / Angela Myles Beeching -- 8. Educating arts entrepreneurs: does, can or should one size fit all? / Gary D. Beckman and James D. Hart -- 9. The value of creativity: implications for industrial design and design entrepreneurship / Joyce Thomas and Lisa Canning -- pt. IV. BRIDGING THE DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES -- 10. Towards a cross-disciplinary understanding of entrepreneurship / Satish Nambisan

In recent years, many companies have established virtual customer environments (VCEs) that offer facilities ranging from online discussion forums to virtual product design centers to partner with their customers in product development and product support activities. In this study, we focus on one form of VCE, online customer forums, and propose that the relevance of four distinct theoretical perspectives—social capital theory, social exchange theory, involvement, and social identity theory—to explaining customer participation will be contingent on the nature of the customer contribution context, that is, whether the contributions are to the customer community (through product support) or to the company (through product ideation). We propose a model suggesting that customers' prosocial behavior and expectations of private rewards will shape contributions to the community, whereas their perceived innovation partnership with the company and expectations of private rewards will shape a contribution to the company. We also contend that these effects will be moderated by customers' identification with the community and with the company. Our empirical findings offer support for the model and indicate that online customer forums (and more broadly VCEs) should be tailored to fit the nature of customer contribution sought. Implications for research and practice in customer co-innovation, online peer-to-peer communities, and customer relationship management are discussed.

Machine-age technologies, including automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, are profoundly expanding the variety of service interfaces and therefore the possible ways that customers and firms can interact across customer journeys. This expansion challenges service firms' capabilities to deliver coherent streams of interactions for effective customer engagement. This article develops a conceptual framework of firm capabilities that enable firms to operate with "one voice" to deliver seamless, harmonious, and reliable interactions across diverse interfaces in a customer journey. The proposed framework integrates three themes: (1) service interaction space to capture the interrelationship among devices, interfaces, interactions, and journeys; (2) learning and coordination as core capabilities for generating and using intelligence, respectively, to enhance customer engagement in subsequent interactions; and (3) one-voice strategy to configure learning and coordination capabilities in combinations that meet conditions of fitness and equifinality for effective customer engagement. We provide several research questions and priorities to guide research and practice.