Business Strategy Issues Research Articles

The Analysis of Innovation in FCC M&A Transactions from 1997 to 2015: Complete Version

As a term, “innovation” has a variety of contextual meanings within media and telecommunications industries policy debates. This work first reviews how innovation impacted the 2011 Comcast NBCU merger, how economics researchers analyze innovation, how innovation lies at the center of the network neutrality debate, and how the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s treatment of innovation in their transaction reviews can alter the antitrust approval process for mergers and acquisitions. Next, a legal document content coding method is developed from the various economic and legal issues of innovation reviewed in prior sections and applied to all 509 instances of the term appearing throughout all 82 of the FCC’s major transaction orders between the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the end of 2015. After categorizing each transaction as a merger, acquisition, joint venture, or licensing transaction, and by the general markets involved, coding results are used to analyze the term’s usage patterns in connection to these transactional characteristics, bundling, business mavericks, business innovation, innovation markets, technological innovation, and several other tagged factors. The usage histories of four legal definitions of innovation are explored through legal analysis. After reviewing strategic considerations of merger and acquisition choices, policy and business strategy issues are considered from a social welfare perspective. This work identifies that certain aspects of technological innovation are not explicitly considered in any transaction review framework and ultimately challenges antitrust law’s discrete market definitions and reliance on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. Open access considerations across a range of indirect competitors play a unique role unmatched by other forms of competition regulation, supporting claims that when narrowly tailored, network neutrality rules and other policies using broader market definitions may protect unspecifiable future innovations.

Verbeke, A., International Business Strategy: Rethinking the Foundations of Global Corporate Success, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2013

Verbeke, A., International Business Strategy: Rethinking the Foundations of Global Corporate Success, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2013 1 A Capsule Summary of the Book International business strategy issues have a long tradition in the academic literature and have been intensively discussed by practitioners and academic scholars. This book edited by Alain Verbeke presents a critical reassessment of different conceptual models in the literature related to international business strategy and multinational enterprises (MNEs). Based on a simple framework that provides a synthesis of different practitioner-oriented models in international business literature (especially articles from Harvard Business Review), the book picks up the essence of international business strategies and global corporate success and examines how MNEs cope with international opportunities and challenges. In this case the book describes MNE managers' possible strategies and provides suggestions, which strategies can be used effectively and how they can improve the performance of MNEs. This book is not limited to a general view of best practices; it also tries to raise awareness of MNE managers and scholars for preconditions related to successful international business strategies. The second edition of this book expands the previous edition by considering MNEs from emerging economies. Furthermore case studies were updated and learning objectives as well as managerial takeaways were added. In a nutshell, the comprehensive and strong practical approach taken in the book is highly relevant for students and practitioners in the field of international business strategy. 2 Objective and Target Audience The objective of the book is to contribute to the discussion on international business strategy. By providing a comprehensive framework including different models from international business strategy literature the book strengthens knowledge about concepts that can be applied by MNEs to improve firms' performance. Due to the practical perspective the book appears to be a well written and insightful source for practitioners who want to respond to opportunities and challenges of managing international operations. Furthermore, the book addresses Ph.D. students, researchers and other scholars who want to gain a basic, but comprehensive overview of well-known international business strategy concepts. 3 Structures and Contents The book is divided into three main parts with a total of 16 chapters. 3.1 Part I Within the first part (chapter 1-5), chapter 1 describes the unifying framework used throughout the book. The framework consists of seven main concepts, which integrate the "best" practitioner-oriented work from international business literature (including sub-themes of multinational strategic management as theory, analysis, location, environmental regulations and public policy). The seven concepts used in the framework are: (1) internationally transferable (or non-location-bound) firm-specific advantages, (2) non-transferable (or location-bound) firm-specific advantages, (3) location advantages, (4) investment in--and value creation through--recombination, (5) complementary resources of external actors, (6) bounded rationality, (7) bounded reliability. In sum, chapter 1 develops an understanding of the seven concepts of the unifying framework to lay-out the conceptual foundations of international business strategy. Chapter 2 addresses the crucial role of firm-specific advantages. Based on Prahalad and Hamel's (1990) work that core competencies are a critical source of MNE's success, chapter 2 describes the essence of core competencies and explains how companies can identify, build or acquire core competencies. Furthermore this chapter states challenges associated with the transferability of firm-specific advantages across borders and reflects requirements for expanding internationally without a sole focus on core competencies. …

Methodological Advances in Strategic Management Research

Despite the increased attention that has been directed at methodological issues in business strategy during the past 15 years, a number of challenges still exist. One challenge is how to correctly test for mediated effects, given that many of the models in the strategy area violate assumptions regarding the independence of error terms in regression equations. Violating these assumptions leads to biased parameter estimates, and impedes the ability of researchers to make correct inferences about the mechanisms that explain substantive relationships. Another related challenge is the issue of endogeneity. Endogeneity occurs when an independent variable is correlated with the error term in an OLS regression model. Although this issue has been a topic of discussion for a number of decades in other fields, it has only recently begun to attract attention among strategy researchers. A third challenge relates to the appropriate way to test non-linear relationships using polynomial variables. Despite the fact that s...

Environmental reporting in a developing country: a case study on status and implementation in Malaysia

With the increase in awareness of environmental issues, the level of environmental disclosure and stakeholder demands for environmental information is increasing. New developments in the ISO 14000 standards also make it more evident that a company's environmental performance as well as its environmental reporting should be considered as strategic issues in business strategy. Especially for a developing country like Malaysia, many companies are under external pressures to improve their environmental performance. In this study, a review on the image and environmental disclosure, together with the challenges in environmental information management and a short case study are presented. Subsequently, the paper explores some of the strategic implications of environmental reporting as an important tool for improved environmental management.

Matching the demand for and supply of IT professionals: towards a learning organization

This article presents a study among information technology (IT) companies and young IT professionals, which demonstrates the central role of career development and strategic training policies in improving the match between demand for and supply of IT professionals. These policies seem to be able to support both the changing demands for qualifications of IT professionals and the growth needs of these specialists. The changing demands concern, amongst others, the ability to deal with information technology, business processes and business strategy issues in an integral way. Actually, however, most IT companies mainly focus on solving, in the short term, their demand for human resources in a quantitative sense. It is argued that addressing the qualitative problem by means of a strategic training policy, will, in the long term, also solve the quantitative side of the match. This training policy, which stresses the learning processes of young IT professionals and “learning from each other”, is related to the concept of the “learning organization”.

Information systems strategy: long overdue—and still not here

Information systems (IS) professionals feel pressure to think strategically about their role in their organizations, but often have a minimal concept of strategy and the role IS might play in contributing to the organization's distinctiveness and competitive success. Nevertheless, new technologies are making information an increasingly pervasive resource, and global competitiveness demands improved market responsiveness and innovative use of all resources. This article describes general strategy concepts, offering templates to assess the organization both internally, within its functions, and externally, within the industry and society. In each of these models, information is critical. Examples are used to demonstrate how IS has been used to strengthen an organization's strategic position. The IS professional role is to integrate with functional management, applying systems thinking to position the organization for a more effective future. The article develops a summary ‘framework for IS strategy’ to describe the dimensions on which the IS manager can be a valuable resource on business strategy issues and generally improve management processes to enable effective customer focus, total quality management and decreased cycle time.

Marketing and strategy fit together (in spite of what some management educators seem to think!)

Throws down a challenge to management educators and trainers, as well as to managers themselves, to reconsider how they relate the critical issues in marketing to the equally critical issues in business strategy and vice versa. Management education is accused of repeatedly failing to respond to changes in the business world, and of artificially separating marketing from strategy for reasons of administrative neatness, which have nothing to do with the real problems that managers have to solve. A structure is provided, which reflects practices in real organizations, as a way of clarifying this question. This structure has important implications for educators and practitioners, and self‐audit questions are provided for both types of reader.

Changing Role of the Corporate Information Systems Officer

This article examines the evolving role of the chief information officer. It reviews current thinking on this role and then tests three hypotheses described by Rockart et al., through a survey conducted with 25 large organizations. The results indicate that IS responsibility is rapidly being distributed, and that the senior IS executive is emphasizing staff responsibilities and is becoming proactive in business strategy issues.