Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) recommendations are online consumer-generated recommendations posted on the service providers' or the third-party websites, which are expected to affect consumers’ perceptions of adopting experience services. In recognition of the increasing significance of eWOM recommendations, this study delves further into this topic by proposing a research model that explains the contingency factors affecting the effectiveness of eWOM recommendations on consumers’ perceptions of adopting experience services. We contend that the effectiveness of eWOM recommendations is contingent on the task complexity of evaluating the experience services and consumers’ degree of cognitive and sensory innovativeness. We draw on the elaboration likelihood model, cognitive load theory, service adoption process theory, and the two dimensions of consumer’s innovativeness (i.e., cognitive innovativeness and sensory innovativeness), as the theoretical underpinnings, to propose nine hypotheses. These hypotheses are empirically tested based on data collected from 263 subjects. To that end, we used a controlled longitudinal laboratory experiment, based on a mixed methods (quantitative – qualitative) research methodology. The results of statistical tests of quantitative data and the content analysis of the qualitative data illustrate that the effectiveness of eWOM recommendations on consumers’ perceptions of adopting experience services is contingent on the consumers’ prior knowledge of the service context, consumers’ level of cognitive and sensory innovativeness, and the consumers’ level of experience with the service, which is determined by the stage of the service adoption process (i.e., pre-usage, initial use, and repeated use). Our findings show that the confluence of these factors creates different settings that determine the effectiveness of eWOM recommendations. These findings provide valuable contributions to the theory and practice by ameliorating important gaps in the eWOM literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Innovate or die" is one of the mantras of today’s economy. In order to survive, companies are forced to innovate. It is extremely essential to develop innovative ability to constantly cope with rapid changes in different industries such as Telecom, IT and Media. The research aim is to design an innovation framework which helps to assess the innovativeness of a department and thereafter, derive management implications for improving the innovativeness. A single descriptive case study of a high-tech department has been chosen. The triangular research design consisted of literature study, qualitative interviews and online surveys. In the first step, various factors that influence the innovativeness of departments are identified. Consequently, key learnings from other departments within the same corporation will be discussed. The results of survey, propositions and interviews will be compared to identify parameters of the innovation framework. The framework helps to structure valuable insights that link to management implications. The novelty of this paper can be claimed since it is the first research which combines assessing innovativeness via triangulation method and deriving management implication from the results in the field of innovation research. The outcome is an innovation framework with 17 different dimensions that have an influence on innovativeness at the department level. The study demonstrates a deep understanding of the current innovativeness of the investigated department and draws most relevant managerial implications based on other departments’ best practice.

In the recent years, substantial shifts of advanced technologies have enabled more and more companies to adopt and implement innovation strategies within their products and operations. Industries tend to behave more flexible in order to stay updated to new significant technological shifts. On the other hand, the need to remain productively stable, makes strategies towards innovation necessary for numerous corporations in order to adapt to an ever changing commercial, social and technological environment. Innovation represents one of the main factors that allow followers to achieve success and depending on the radical content, innovation leads companies to beneficial results. An innovative approach based on technological, business and market development, drives companies towards the exploitation of the full potential of innovative methods, while striving to achieve high flexibility and productivity. In this thesis an industrial case at Ericsson assembly lines is studied, current hurdles are defined and potential innovative strategies are analyzed. The study aims at providing a theory on a methodology that can support a business project at Ericsson Corporation in defining innovative applications and seizing the full potential of new conceptual frameworks which increase innovativeness and create new more productive and flexible logics.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to find what the drivers of prosumer innovativeness are and how prosumer innovativeness impacts value co-creation. To achieve this purpose, the study aimed to answer the following two research questions: “How does prosumer innovativeness impact value co-creation?” and “What drives prosumer innovativeness?” Method – Through the assessment of already existing literature, a conceptual model was created. The model consists of three different dimensions: intrinsic needs and motivations; individual innovativeness; and value co-creation. Intrinsic needs and motivations consist of the need for achievement, affiliation, power, and autonomy. Individual innovativeness is a unidimensional construct in the model. Value co-creation consists of six different dimensions: knowledge; equity; interaction; experience; personalization; and relationship. Hypotheses were developed to gauge the relationship between each construct in the model. Data was collected through a questionnaire which aimed to measure each construct in the model. A final sample size of 141 respondents was realized. The data was then screened and cleaned in Excel and IBM SPSS before being analyzed in SmartPLS. Results – The results showed that achievement, affiliation, and power are drivers of prosumer innovativeness. Furthermore, it was found that prosumer innovativeness positively affects value co-creation as there was a positive relationship between innovativeness and knowledge, interaction, experience, and relationship. Theoretical contribution – While previous literature has identified different motivations to prosumption, this study went a step further to gauge what the needs behind these motivations are. Hence, it can now be stated that prosumers’ motivations to innovative stems from their needs for achievement, affiliation, and power, as well as that prosumer innovativeness positively affects the co-creation of value. Managerial implications – Organizations should utilize prosumers who have a high need for achievement, affiliation, and power, and who have a personal interest in their product, organization, and industry when conducting innovation co-creation to best promote involvement in co-creation activities. If organizations make participation in innovation co-creation easily accessible, they may find that innovative prosumers who are actively looking for solutions to their problems may get involved without any direct incentive apart from the improved product or service and the personal satisfaction derived from the prosumption itself.

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Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2016-12-20T16:23:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Feng Du_.pdf: 2029574 bytes, checksum: 4eb36acb7cf2e7ff3ef83c72262105ac (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-20T16:23:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Feng Du_.pdf: 2029574 bytes, checksum: 4eb36acb7cf2e7ff3ef83c72262105ac (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-09-16 / Nenhuma / The globally growth of smartphone sales seems inevitable, and it opens new challenges and opportunities for businesses. Understanding consumer behavior in smartphone purchase in a cross cultural context is important for both marketers and consumers. For the development of this research, a theoretical model was proposed and tested in order to understand the impact of consumer’s innovativeness and frugal behavior on smartphone purchase intention in a cross-cultural context. To this end, it was conducted a survey that covers analyzing the antecedents of innovativeness and frugal behavior, as well as understanding the cultural difference among consumer’s smartphone purchase intention. In detail, the survey was developed in Qualtrics and distributed to participants from three countries (Brazil, China and India). The valid sample size was 349 participants in total. We used structural equation modeling to verify the proposed model and analyze the collected data. After adjustment of theoretical model, the study results indicated satisfactory indexes. The final model showed that opinion leadership, product involvement and symbolic value are factors that positively lead to domain specific innovativeness; as well as intrinsic religiosity is positive antecedent of frugal behavior; materialism also positively related to frugal behavior under economic pressure background; both consumer’s domain specific innovativeness and frugal behavior are positively lead to smartphone purchase behavioral intention; the cultural orientation value such as collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and power distance have moderate effects on relations among consumer’s Innovativeness, frugal and behavioral intention; other moderators such as status consumption and economic strain also showed significant moderate effects in the final model.

Innovative people seize the opportunity to make lives better and more comfortable, which contribute to economy growth and financial gain. Stakeholders study innovativeness of business students, in depth, to understand gender differences, and the factors affecting students' innovativeness. Literature explains how males and females differ in their proneness to guilt and shame. However, a model that explains the dynamic of guilt, shame, and gender on innovativeness will help make policies to improve students' innovativeness. This study describes factor analysis approach to examine the TOSCA-3 subscales guilt, shame, and the DNA instrument of innovativeness. It also describes the measurement invariance across gender for each construct, and for the full measurement model to identify the differences between genders. Moreover, this study examines the total effect of gender on innovativeness, which includes the direct effect, and indirect effect via guilt and shame. The results indicated that guilt is positively associated with innovativeness, and shame and gender are negatively associated with innovativeness. This dissertation can be freely accessed and downloaded from (http://etd.byu.edu/).

The main purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of entrepreneurial team demographics, environmental scanning and networking on innovativeness. For this purpose, small and medium enterprises in Bursa region were chosen. A total of 74 general managers/owners filled out the questionnaire. Information about company, team members and firms&rsquo / environmental scanning, innovativeness and networking activities was collected. As hypothesized, findings supported the view that entrepreneurial team demographics (age heterogeneity and average educational level), environmental scanning and networking (networking with customers, competitors and particularly with public agencies) play a significant role in innovativeness of SMEs after controlling the significant effect of team size. The results were discussed together with the implications of the findings for managers and on the policies of government, public organizations and educational institutions, strengths and limitations of the study. Some suggestions for future research were made.

Le développement des TIC et les innovations numériques qui en découlent ont radicalement changé le comportement des consommateurs. Les organisations s’adaptent à ces changements en transformant leurs pratiques. L’objet de cette recherche est l’innovativité Web comprise comme la capacité des organisations à adopter les innovations Web. La recherche interroge les pratiques d’adaptation des organisations en faveur du numérique : Comment piloter le changement numérique dans les organisations ? Le champ de recherche porte sur les Organismes de Gestion de Destination Touristique (OGD) qui ont la responsabilité du management du tourisme sur leur territoire de compétence. Cette thèse s’articule en deux parties. La première partie se focalise sur la mesure de l’innovativité des sites Web des OGD. Une grille d’analyse de l’innovativité est proposée et les méthodes de l’Aide Multi-Critères à la Décision (AMCD) sont employées afin d’évaluer la performance relative des sites Web de 30 OGD français. La logique du benchmarking est adoptée. Les résultats hétérogènes de cette approche quantitative nous poussent à chercher dans un second temps les facteurs explicatifs de l’innovativité. Pourquoi certains OGD sont-ils plus innovants que d’autres ? Quels sont les facteurs qui facilitent l’adoption des innovations Web par les OGD ? A cet égard, notre seconde partie traite des facteurs d’adoption des innovations Web dans les organisations. Une analogie entre PME et OGD est proposé afin d’identifier théoriquement les facteurs d’adoption des innovations Web. La méthodologie de recherche retenue pour cette seconde partie est de nature exploratoire et qualitative et correspond à un positionnement épistémologique de type interprétativiste. Des entretiens semi-directifs sont menés auprès d’experts en Management du Tourisme et l’étude du cas d’un OGD particulier permet de comprendre en profondeur le pilotage du changement numérique dans les organisations. Cette thèse en sciences de gestion s’inscrit en Management du Tourisme et présente des apports théoriques, méthodologiques et managériaux. Nous proposons un cadre théorique d’analyse de l’innovation Web et nous proposons une méthodologie robuste pour l’opérationnaliser. Cette méthodologie utilise les nombres flous, encore peu employés dans les sciences de gestion et pourtant porteurs de sens lors d’évaluations utilisant des échelles linguistiques. Les résultats de cette approche quantitative sont autant de perspectives d’amélioration des pratiques par les responsables d’OGD. Enfin, nous étudions le pilotage du changement dans les OGD en identifiant les facteurs d’adoption des innovations Web. / The development of ICT has radically changed the customer behaviour and their decision making process. Therefore, the organisations/companies should adapt themselves to these changes by transforming their practices. This thesis has two parts. In the first part, we explore the website-service innovativeness of 30 French DMO websites. An empirical approach is used to establish a structured framework of six evaluation criteria for website’s innovativeness. Fuzzy logic is employed in order to objectively evaluate the service-innovativeness and overall e-service quality of the DMO websites by using the linguistic variables. The TOPSIS method enables a comparison of the relative rankings of DMO websites, and also facilitates an objective metric as a benchmark to compare innovativeness overtime. The heterogeneous results oblige us to conduct an exploratory study in order to understand the reason behind this ranking. In this regard, in the 2nd part, we have focused on the factors of ICT adoption. Semi-structured interviews have been done with the tourism experts in order to understand the factors that facilitate the ICT adoption by the French DMO. Finally, we present the case of one of our benchmarks (Bordeaux Tourist Office) in order to illustrate the ICT adoption process.

Malgré de nombreuses recherches portant sur l’innovativité interculturelle du consommateur, l’impact de la culture sur la valeur perçue d’un attribut innovant ne fait pas l’objet de publication. Cette thèse cherche à répondre à ce besoin en étudiant l’impact de la culture nationale sur la valeur perçue de l’attribut innovant des produits technologiques dans deux pays européens majeurs (France et Allemagne), membres de la zone euro. Cette thèse s’appuie sur le modèle interculturel GLOBE pour étudier les différences culturelles entre ces deux pays. Les résultats sont fondés sur une étude de consommateurs quantitative (N=793) utilisant la méthode de l’analyse conjointe basée sur le choix et l’échelle d’attitude « sensibilité au prix ». Les résultats confirment l’impact de la culture nationale sur trois concepts liés à l’attitude du consommateur face au prix de lancement d’une innovation technologique : la valeur perçue par un consommateur de l’attribut innovant d’un produit, l’importance qu’un consommateur accorde à la présence d’un attribut innovant lors du choix d’un produit et la sensibilité du consommateur au prix d’une innovation. Le rôle modérateur du revenu sur ces relations constitue également un résultat majeur. / Despite extensive research on intercultural consumer innovativeness, existing literature does not cover the topic of impacts of national culture on the perceived value of innovative product attributes. This study attempts to fill this gap, by studying the perceived value of innovative attributes, with regards to high-tech products across two major European countries (Euro zone members: France and Germany) using the GLOBE intercultural model as a framework. The results are based on quantitative consumer research (N=793) using Choice Based Conjoint Analysis and the Price Sensitivity Scale.The author’s findings highlight that national culture significantly impacts three aspects of consumer attitude with regards to the launching price of high tech innovations. These three variables are: the perceived value of innovative product attributes, the importance of innovative product attributes for consumers and the price sensitivity towards innovative products. In addition, the research identifies the moderator effects of consumer income on these relations.