L'anisotropie de comportement mécanique du superalliage à solidification dirigée DS200+Hf et les mécanismes d'endommagement ont été étudiés entre 650°C et 1100°C. Des échantillons monogranulaires du même alliage ont été employés afin de mieux comprendre l'anisotropie de propriétés mécaniques et de durabilité. Des essais de traction, fluage, fatigue oligocylique, fatigue-fluage et de fissuration ont été réalisés, suivis d'observations au MEB afin d'analyser les modes d1endommagement.A 650°C, une forte anisotropie de durée de vie en fluage (et en fatigue) est observée alors que l'anisotropie est quasi inexistante à 1100°C en fluage. Ceci résulte de la mise en radeaux de la phase γ à haute température qui homogénéise la déformation, dégradation qui conduit à une augmentation de la vitesse de déformation en fatigue avec temps de maintien. Un amorçage intergranulaire a été observé pour tous les essais mécaniques en sens travers, notamment de par la présence de nombreux carbures aux joints des grains. Ces carbures sont les principaux sites d'amorçage de fissure de fatigue à 650°C et 900°C. A haute température (900°C), l'oxydation affecte non seulement l'amorçage en favorisant la fissuration des carbures de surface, mais elle affecte également la phase de propagation, via un processus combiné d'appauvrissement de la phase γ et d'émoussement de la pointe de fissure, le tout conduisant à un seuil de fissuration plus élevé. Sous vide, un tel processus n'est pas observé et les carbures ne sont plus les sites d'amorçage privilégiés. Lors de sollicitation de fluage en sens travers à basse température (750°C), les joints de grains fortement désorientés, avec un grain dans leur voisinage favorablement orienté pour le glissement simple et apte à la rotation cristalline, sont les plus critiques. / The anisotropy in mechanical behavior of the directionally solidified DS200+Hf alloy and the damage mechanisms have been investigated between 650°C and1100°C. Single-crystalline specimens of the same alloy have also been used to get a better understanding of the anisotropy in mechanical properties and durability. Tension, creep, low-cycle fatigue (LCF), dwell-fatigue and crack propagation tests have been performed and analyzed by SEM observations to better understand the damage modes in this alloy. At 650°C, a considerable creep (and LCF) life anisotropy is observed while almost no anisotropy remains at 1100°C in creep. The γ rafting is mainly responsible for this decrease in creep anisotropy and for theincrease in creep rate in dwell-fatigue. An intergranular fracture mode has been observed for ail kind of solicitation along transverse direction, mainly due to the presence of grain boundary particles such as carbides. These carbides are also the main crack initiation sites in LCF at 650°C and at 900°C. At high temperature (900°C), oxidation not only controls the crack initiation mechanisms by inducing surface carbides cracking, but it also affects the crack propagation through a combined localized γ depletion and crack tip blunting, leading ove ra li to a higher crack propagation threshold. Such a behavior is not observed in high vacuum and surface carbides are no more the main crack initiation sites. lt is shown that at low temperature during transverse creep testing (750°C), highly misoriented grain boundaries, having one grain favorably oriented for single slip and lattice rotation, are the most critical ones.

Supply chains (SCs) are an important part of today’s world. Many businesses operate in the global marketplace where individual companies are no longer treated as separate entities, but as a vital part of an end-to-end supply chain (E2E-SC) system. Key challenges and issues in managing E2E-SCs are duly attributed to their extended, complex and systemic nature. In the era of uncertainty, risks and market volatility, decision makers are searching for modelling techniques to be able to understand, to control, design or evaluate their E2E-SC. This research aims to support academics and decision makers by defining a generic simulation modelling approach that can be used for any E2E-SC. This study considers the challenges and issues associated with modelling complex E2E-SC systems using simulation and underlines the key requirements for modelling an E2E-SC. The systematic literature review approach is applied to provide a twofold theoretical contribution [a] an insightful review of various contributions to knowledge surrounding simulation methods within the literature on end-to-end supply chains and [b] to propose a conceptual framework that suggests generic elements required for modelling such systems using simulation. The research adopts a simulation methodology and develops a generic guide to an E2E-SC simulation model creation process. It is a mindful inquiry into the implications relative to a simulation model development process in presence of generic elements from the proposed conceptual framework. The conceptual framework is validated with industry experts and insightful remarks are drawn. In conclusion, it is acknowledged that modelling an E2E-SC system using simulation is a challenge, and this area is not fully exploited by the business. A guide to an E2E-SC simulation model development is a theoretical and practical contribution of this research, immensely sought by businesses, which are continuously tackling day to day issues and challenges, hence often lacking resources and time to focus on modelling. The conceptual framework captures generic elements of the E2E-SC system; however, it also highlights multiple challenges around simulation model development process such as technical constraints and almost impracticability of a true reflection of an E2E-SC system simulation model. The significant contribution of this thesis is the evaluation of the proposed generic guide to E2E-SC simulate model development, which provides the architecture for better strategic supply and demand balancing as new products, price fluctuations, and options for physical network changes can be dynamically incorporated into the model. The research provides an insightful journey through key challenges and issues when modelling E2E-SC systems and contributes with key recommendations for mindful inquiries into E2E-SC simulation models.

In marketing, value is linked to products and services, and studied in known contexts from the perspective of customers and companies. This thesis draws attention to value creation through new fleeting offerings that are yet to be studied in marketing. These objects are presented here as 'branded installations'. These installations are unforeseen and offer experiences to people if they choose to interact with them. This study urges for the recognition of fleeting, interactive experiences offered to people and the impact they have on value for brands. This study, therefore, examines the value generated by branded installations. It offers an understanding of new experiences that lack context for consumers. Qualitative analysis establishes the need for curiosity in brand value creation. This thesis benefits from the theories of conceptual art and examines consumer experiences in unexplored contexts. The experiences led by branded installations are presented as highly-individualised escape: as ' secret' escape, 'accidental' escape from marketing, and opportunities of play and escape offered by branded installations. The marketers' perspective along with consumers' response have together led this thesis to present 'Unrequited Value' for brands as their attempts to shine through the clutter of marketing largely fails as consumers personalise their escape.

This thesis aims for understanding how the ‘private-collective’ model of innovation works in permissive open source software. This model encourages the private investments in the collective software as well as the sharing of those investments with the collective community. By following this model in permissive open source software, this thesis suggested that private actors would experience a collective action problem referred to as a ‘business dilemma’. This dilemma is the difficult situation experienced by private actors who would be reaping rewards by sharing their private investments but also losing their competitive advantage because of free riders. Theoretically, private actors would be discouraged from sharing their private investments with the collective due to the business dilemma. However, in some real cases, we do not observe this constraint; private actors are not trapped by the business dilemma. Instead, they end up innovating and contributing to permissive open source software. As a result, this thesis would investigate and answer the research questions: ‘How can the private actors invest and share in permissive open source software without experiencing a business dilemma?’ and ‘Why private actors choose to invest and share rather than to free ride in permissive open source software?’ Ostrom’s theory of collective action is used as a lens for investigating the patterns of the private contributions and answering the research questions consequently. This theory suggests that people, even with the absence of formal regulations, can talk and share their local knowledge and experiences in order to collectively arrange the pattern of their actions and to extract themselves from collective action problems accordingly. OpenNebula open source software was the case study analysed. Findings are based upon an in-depth qualitative analysis of a substantial dataset involving 7,017 emails, 3,482 development requests, 4 technical OpenNebula official documentations and thousands of source code commits. Findings revealed that private actors are voluntary entering in an ‘active communications’ with other participants. Findings proposed that an ‘active communications’ act as a prerequisite for the active private contributions done by private actors. Those private contributions are locked within the collective software in the form of ‘collective complementarities’ through a ‘transformation process’. Several evidences proposed that this process worked to align the private interests of private actors with the collective interests of the software. Moreover, findings revealed that a set of ‘rules’ are emerged by the private actors and other participants in order to structure the ‘active communications’ and the ‘transformation process’. Several evidences proposed that these ‘rules’ worked to support the alignment between the private and the collective interests. Accordingly, it is proposed that the alignment between the private and the collective interests (which is done through the ‘active communications’, ‘transformation process’ and is supported through a set of ‘rules) encourages private actors to share and to link their private software with the collective. Without sharing, their private software would not be part of the ‘collective’ complementarities’ that are used in the different industries. This thesis makes novel contributions to the literature of open source. In particular, it extends the ‘private-collective’ model of innovation by introducing the ‘collective complementarities’ as a theoretical concept for locking the private benefit alongside with the collective one. It extends the open source literature by providing a better understanding of the collective software as a type of ‘commons’ that is exposed to private appropriation. In this way, it provides a set of arrangements that can bring the best of open source software that are sponsored by private actors. This thesis also encourages firms to: (1) share an ongoing control over the development of the software with the vibrant community members in order to develop software that can be used across industries and (2) harness information technology practices in their organizations to better serve the private and the collective interests.

The aims of the thesis are to investigate tourism led non-oil growth (TLNOG), for Libya, and to identify the factors that will help to increase this growth through creating and implementing a Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS). These are three research questions: (1) Is there any relationship between tourism expenditure and non-oil GDP in Libya? (2) Is there any causality between these two variables? (3) How to resolve and recover the particular case of Libyan tourism growth through the BOS? Firstly, the research estimated the potential of tourism by using the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) co-integration model proposed by Turner (2006) to ascertain the long-run relationship between tourism expenditure and non-oil growth. Then, semi-structures interview questions based on the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Creative grid (ERRC) (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005b) were dismissed to five kinds of stakeholders (consultants, public promoters, hoteliers, tour operators and tour guides). This study indicates that the long-run relationship is verified between the variables and there is one long run causality. The findings show the BOS through: (a) value innovation by offering special services and packages in hotels (e.g. planning healthy food for special events); (b) technology innovation linked to museums considering people with special needs; (c) cost-off by reducing the prices of the tourist restaurant and internal flights; (d) new segment market by creating the North and South Mediterranean tourism. Finally, the BOS as a recovery strategy by adopting tourism culture and choosing the desert as the main theme for Libyan tourism. The study concludes that TLNOG is not verified, and the growth in the Libyan tourism market could be achieved through the application of thoughtful and appropriate Blue Ocean Strategy.

The aim of this thesis is to explore how the productization of services is organised as a way of facilitating collaboration and arranging innovation. To achieve this the study is situated within the Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing discipline and draws on the theoretical perspectives of Market Studies. The central theoretical focus of the thesis unfolds against three distinct but interrelated research questions: How is productization mobilised and exchanged by market actors? What effect does marketization have on market shaping practices? How does a firm’s business model facilitate its ability to organise and capture value? The case firm selected as the context of enquiry was a large Scottish public utility firm that delivered two key utility services to consumers and operates within a unique and complex regulatory framework. Adopting a pragmatic research philosophy based on abductive reasoning, a multi-method qualitative study was undertaken, and empirical data collected using a single case study approach. The study theoretically contributes to Marketing Studies by unpacking the performativity of the marketing object, which is found to be purposefully, consistently and temporarily destabilised and re-stabilised by actors, as they undertake agentic calculations during the productization processes. Further, the findings advance business model theory by illustrating the plurality of co-existing business models within a single firm, which dynamically span boundaries. The findings show that co-existing business models were wrapped in a collaborative spatio-temporal nature, and that this is framed through the six-year regulatory investment periods enforced upon the large public utility firm by regulators. The findings further contribute that the use of market devices are fundamental in the ability to shape market practice, demonstrated as case actors struggle to singularize the device due to lack of sound calculative abilities, resulting in attempts of qualification, which adds to the theoretical view that market devices need to be refined and calibrated. The main contribution of the thesis to practice demonstrates that organisations seeking to productize should fundamentally consider the context of the market, and industry that they exchange within. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a productized service offering will augment the knowledge and expertise required by the business to deliver value to its consumers and require restabilising of market practices.

Over the past three decades, the concept of social enterprise has gained prominence as an academic field, as researchers and academics attempt to understand its nature and character. This thesis focuses on the conceptualisation and development of social enterprise in Africa. Specifically, this investigation seeks to explore the reciprocal interaction between social enterprises and their local environment in rural regions of Copperbelt Province in Zambia. This comes at a time when research into potential of social enterprise to ameliorate deprivation is emerging in Africa, some parts of which face acute socio-economic challenges. Moreover, prior research on social enterprise development has focused on developed countries. While such scholarship offers valuable insights, the institutional arrangements in developed countries may be different to those of developing countries. Further literature portrays social enterprise as focusing on either influence of agents or context on development of social enterprise with spatial context portraying less information. Therefore, the aim of the study is to conceptualise social enterprise and explore the reciprocal interaction between social enterprises and their local environment in rural regions of Copperbelt Province in Zambia. To achieve this aim, the study utilised a qualitative approach to collecting data, involving: semi-structured interviews of organisations described as social enterprises. Scrutiny of document data analysis and participant observations triangulated and complemented semi-structured interview data. The study employed components of Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory to provide more insight into the agential and the structural perspective of social enterprise. Major findings show different types of organisations in this study, and cooperatives being most practiced. As social enterprise is understudied, most respondents referred to their organisations as ‘community enterprises’ and are heavily reliant on their trading revenue and membership subscription for sustenance. This thesis underlines the importance of spatial context for social entrepreneurial resource practices and multiple value creating. Furthermore, the findings revealed some form of co-evolution of social enterprise like organisations with their local environment. The study makes theoretical, empirical, and contextual contributions to knowledge and has social, economic, practice, and policy implications.

Increasingly, customer co-creation is advocated as a means to generate valuable knowledge in the innovation process and enhance new product development (NPD) success. In particular, customer co-creation activities are considered to minimize the “fuzziness” of the front end of NPD. However, there is a dearth of research regarding how firms effectively utilize customer co-creation activities in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of NPD. The thesis applies a novel framing using effectuation theory, referring to a logic of entrepreneurial expertise – a dynamic and interactive process of creating new artefacts in the world – to investigate co-creation in the FFE of NPD. This thesis, firstly, seeks to assess how co-creation activities, in comparison to traditional market research activities, relate to the creativity of the product concept. Secondly, it examines the way effectuation logic strengthens the co-creation-early performance (i.e. FFE) relationship. The inquiry develops a conceptual framework together with hypothesized relationships, around focal constructs. These are as follows; customer co-creation activities, traditional customer facing activities, effectuation, creativity of the product concept, and early performance. The hypotheses are tested vis-à-vis the direct relationship between customer co-creation activities and the creativity of the product concept, and between creativity of the product concept and early performance. The study also compares the effect of customer co-creation activities with traditional customer facing activities. Furthermore, a mediation role of creativity of the product concept is tested, followed by the testing of a moderation and a moderated mediation role of effectuation. A large scale cross-sectional survey was conducted using UK and US medium and large sized firms with experience of customer co-creation in the FFE of NPD. 205 usable responses were finally prepared for data analysis. The measurement model was carefully assessed by using the PLS-SEM approach, since the conceptual model included both formative and reflective measures. In testing the hypotheses, PLS-SEM and PROCESS Macro approaches were rigorously applied. The results, firstly, highlight that the use of customer co-creation activities is positively related to the development of highly creative concepts at the FFE of NPD. Secondly, they demonstrate that effectuation plays an important role when firms use customer co-creation activities by enhancing the creativity of product concept. Its impact also increases early performance when firms develop highly creative product concepts. Additionally, results show that an effectuation approach is particularly beneficial for medium sized firms working on incremental innovation projects. Based on these empirical results, the thesis theoretically strengthens the customer co-creation paradigm by conceptualizing customer co-creation activities, as well as examining their impact on the creativity of the product concept. Moreover, the thesis contributes to the advancement of knowledge of effectuation by applying it to the FFE of NPD context. Not only enhancing generalizability of effectuation, but the results also highlight the linkage between effectuation and customer co-creation activities. In practice, this research provides NPD professionals with valuable insights. Specifically, these include: (1) on when to use specific type of customer co-creation activities in the FFE of NPD, (2) the importance on focusing on measuring creativity of the product concept at the FFE of NPD, and (3) the advantages of adopting effectuation logic for firms in developing highly creative concepts during the FFE of NPD. Finally, the thesis discusses opportunities for future research and the limitations of this study.

Understanding of what constitutes a tourism experience has been the focus of increasing attention in academic literature in recent years, For tourism businesses operating in an ever more competitive marketplace, identifying and responding to the needs and wants of their customers, and understanding how the product or consumer experience is created is arguably essential.

This dissertation contains three essays that examine the relationship between Chinese acquiring firms’ financial reporting quality, payment methods, auditor’s industry specialisation and their domestic merger and acquisitions (M&As) short-term performance (measured by CARs) and long-term performance (measured by ROA/ROE). As the result of its remarkable economic growth rate and admission to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), China has witnessed a dramatic increase of M&A activities over the past two decades. However, despite the vast amount of research on M&As, little has been produced about the area of China. Considering the impact of China’s economy as the second biggest in the world as well as the unique nature of Chinese institutions, more research should be done and it is the aim of this paper to enrich the literature in this area. It is hoped that the conclusions drawn from this research will be of interest to both market regulators and participants. The first essay examines the relationship of the acquiring firm’s financial reporting quality, payment method and their M&A performance in a sample of domestic M&As between unrelated parties. The results show that there is a significantly positive market reaction to acquisitions with high financial reporting quality, and acquirers with high financial reporting quality tend to choose stock involved payment. The research also shows that lower financial reporting quality acquiring firms tend to pay a higher premium to the target, which might be for compensating them for accepting stock payment. The second essay examines the relationship of the acquiring firm’s financial reporting quality, payment method and their M&A performance in a sample of domestic M&As between related parties. Since China still adopts two accounting approaches (purchase and pooling of interests) for business combination, there would be concern that acquiring firms would like to try to manipulate to adopt a certain approach. The research does not show that significant discretionary accruals difference between the firms for two approaches. However, it shows that when transactions are among related parties, because of less information asymmetry, there would be less likely of accrual manipulation. Furthermore, the distinction of the common control and uncommon control (as the criteria for applying accounting methods) imply the possibility that under common control there would be concern of tunnelling and M&As in cash payment would have more concern on this. The market response to the cash payments confirms this. The third essay examines the relationship acquiring firms’ financial reporting quality, auditor industry specialisation and their unrelated-party M&A performance. Since financial reporting quality is very important for investment decisions, financial reporting auditors also plays an important role. Also, when the involved parties are unrelated, the auditors are getting more important. Hence, the choice of due diligence auditor is very important to the acquiring firms. China allows listed companies to use same auditor to provide due diligence services. The research shows that when financial reporting auditors are industrial experienced, the acquiring firms are less likely to appoint a new auditor for due diligence. Also, when acquiring firms appoint a new auditor for due diligence, the market would not have significant response; however, when they appoint a new auditor with good industry experience, the market response positively. In summary, the three essays try to show in a developing market with transparency problem, there are some information asymmetry mediators, like financial reporting quality, payment methods choices and auditor/due diligence services; and also try to show how they work together and how they work to the M&As short-term and long-term performance. The following chapter explains the background and motivation of the research and introduces the contribution of the work to the existing body of knowledge.