Browsing by Subject "Strategy"
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Item A case for strategic change in the new space age(2010-12) Bostad, Mathew Curtis; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; Herder, James F.Since the Space Race of the 1960s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been the face of the U.S. space industry, responsible for driving aeronautics research, exploring our solar system through human and robotic missions, and inspiring the nation through scientific achievement. NASA and its core group of large aerospace contractors have worked to successfully carry out U.S. space exploration goals and have been responsible for some of the most significant engineering successes in history. Over the past decade or so, however, it has increasingly been the private space sector advancing new markets, capturing the public imagination, and working to reduce the timeline and cost of access to space. As the Obama administration’s new space policy begins to put increased emphasis on developing the U.S. commercial space sector, legacy NASA contractors are starting to see what may be the beginnings of a new competitive environment in the human spaceflight market. With the end of the Space Shuttle Program looming, and the restructuring of its successor the Constellation Program in progress, NASA continues to look for a way forward for its human spaceflight program. At the same time the agency’s contractors are dealing with a loss of significant work statement, a lack of new development programs, and an increase in the number of competitors entering the commercial space market. As Boeing Space Exploration attempts to traverse this turbulent period it must also look ahead to the competitive conditions which may result from these changes. It is critical that companies such as Boeing analyze the current structural trends in the industry and attempt to develop a robust strategy to position the company going forward. This paper aims to present analysis of the current market challenges faced by Boeing Space Exploration and the emerging competitive environment in the human spaceflight industry. General competitive strategies are discussed along with recommendations on which strategic pursuits might best allow the division to maintain its leadership in the industry and successfully compete in a new, more commercial space market.Item Decision making in the grey zone : lessons from Truman, Eisenhower, and the development of nuclear strategy(2017-05) Leland, Stephen Bailey; Suri, JeremiThe character of modern conflict is changing. The foundations of the international system are shifting as near peer adversaries, regionally destabilizing revisionists, and global networks of terror and crime mix in an environment awash in new technology. Unfortunately, the strategic paradigms that have defined U.S. policy since 1945 are inadequate in the face of this new reality. The focus of this study is not the creation of a new paradigm; instead, it seeks to define the contours of strategic decision-making that best serve the modern moment. Seeking such a model, I analyze the assumptions and processes at play in the creation of nuclear strategy during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Their approaches to the new strategic reality that nuclear weapons introduced were quite different, and the lessons those differences provide are instructive for today.Item Early-stage strategies in two-sided marketplaces(2016-05) Kyprianou, Christina; Graebner, Melissa E.; Bermiss, Y. Sekou; Harrison, David A; Ranganathan, Ram; Tripsas, MaryThis study explores the early-stage strategies that support the creation and growth of peer-to-peer marketplaces, a particular type of two-sided marketplace. Prior research on two-sided marketplaces has studied well-established firms and has not produced systematic evidence of the origins of two-sided marketplaces when a critical mass of participants has not yet been recruited. Moreover, its focus on formal economic models and price structures provides only a limited understanding of the early stage strategies that create value, recruit initial participants, and induce their interactions. I address limitations of prior research through an inductive multi-case study of ten peer-to-peer marketplaces. Findings suggest host firms create value and recruit initial participants by promoting and monitoring marketplace participants’ conformity with appropriate behaviors. In doing so, they exercise different levels of control (low, average, or high) on two dimensions: a) supply-side heterogeneity and b) cross-side interactions. Considering the interactions of these two dimensions, I propose a typology of nine value-creating activities. Patterns in the sequence in which host firms pursue these activities over time reveal two alternative and “equifinal” paths to promoting participant conformity and ultimately to generating growth. Emergent theory extends literature on resource orchestration to entrepreneurial firms and contributes to research on new forms of organizing.Item Entrepreneurial regulatory foci and startup firm strategies(2012-08) Dai, Ye; Rindova, Violina; Butler, John; Lewis, Kyle; Burris, Ethan; Lee, Peggy; Crossland, CraigRegulatory foci, a personality variable, differentially regulate the way in which individuals pursue goals based on different levels of pain avoidance and pleasure pursuit tendency. This variable is particularly relevant to entrepreneurial processes. This is because entrepreneurs, similar to other individuals, tend to frame many sub-tasks in the processes as either gain vs. non-gain or loss vs. non-loss games. Thus, the mechanism with which regulatory foci influence individuals’ decision making and choices similarly applies to those of entrepreneurs and their startup firms. Despite this high relevance, this variable has received inadequate attention from entrepreneurship scholars. This study tries to fill in this research gap by examining how an entrepreneur’s regulatory foci influence various aspects of strategy processes and strategy content of new venture development.Item Essays on marketing's impact on financial performance(2015-12) Jindal, Niket Kumar; McAlister, Leigh; DeKinder, Jade; Duan, Jason; Henderson, Andrew; Rao, Raghunath SMy dissertation builds upon research at the intersection of marketing and finance by providing managerial insight on three specific aspects of marketing’s impact on financial performance. My first essay shows how marketing reduces a firm’s bankruptcy risk. Prior research has shown that two key marketing assets, advertising assets and R&D assets, increase a firm’s shareholder value. While one might conclude that the impacts of these marketing assets on bankruptcy risk are merely the inverse of their impacts on shareholder value, I argue otherwise and show that market turbulence moderates the impacts of advertising assets and R&D assets on bankruptcy risk but not shareholder value. My second essay shows how firm strategy moderates the impact of advertising on a firm’s financial performance. I hypothesize that advertising should influence shareholder value for a firm with a differentiation strategy because advertising can elaborate the firm’s point of difference into brand equity, thereby building shareholder value. In contrast, advertising cannot build brand equity for a firm with a cost leadership strategy because such a firm has no point of difference on which to build. Identifying differentiators and cost leaders by firms’ reactions to a change in accounting regulations, I confirm my hypotheses: Advertising increases sales for all firms but increases shareholder value more for differentiators than for cost leaders. My third essay shows the financial value of offering trade credit to business customers. The “finance perspective” argues that, since cash flows from a trade credit sale are delayed and vulnerable, trade credit sales should be less valuable than cash sales. I show, however, that this is not the case because the value of a sale is not solely driven by the cash flows from a single transaction – it is driven by the expected future cash flows from all future sales to the customer. Consistent with the “marketing perspective”, which recognizes that offering trade credit also builds relational assets with key business customers, I show that trade credit sales are actually more valuable than cash sales.Item Essays on the industrial organization and regulation of recreational cannabis markets(2021-05-06) Larsen, Ivan; Ackerberg, Daniel A.; Balat, Jorge; Miravete, Eugenio; Hollenbeck, BrettThis dissertation addresses open questions in economics surrounding the industrial organization and regulation of recreational cannabis markets. The first chapter empirically studies how the impact of location restrictions on strategic cannabis retailers affects market outcomes and resident welfare. The second chapter provides a different method to measure the externality that cannabis retailers impose on heterogeneous residents and how it varies with different land-use policies. The third chapter investigates the presence of consumer demand response and inertia in vertical relationships among buyers and sellers in a new market. The first chapter studies the welfare impact of land-use regulations, such as location restrictions for businesses, which generally involves a trade-off between market growth and the harm on affected parties and is ultimately an empirical question. I study how location restrictions near sensitive-use areas affect recreational cannabis retailers' decisions in Washington State and their effects on residents, consumers, and taxation. Using property sales data, I first show reduced-form evidence that cannabis retailers act as a disamenity when close to homes and to their assigned schools. Then, I develop a structural model of consumer demand and firm entry and location and estimate it on a comprehensive dataset of retail sales and inventory transfers. The model incorporates the various market regulations as constraints on the firms’ strategic decisions. I use the estimated model to conduct counterfactual land-use policies. Relaxing buffers around sensitive-use areas, like schools, from 1000 ft down to 100 ft benefits consumers and harms residents but, on net, results in welfare and tax revenue improvements. The second chapter is a more in-depth study of the other side of the coin, resident disamenities of cannabis retailers, where I develop a discrete-choice, static model of housing demand and supply, and estimate it with property sales and mortgage applicants data from King County, Washington. By allowing for heterogeneous households, I can incorporate the role of cannabis retailers as a potential (dis)amenity to households. I then compute the welfare impact of various alternative location configurations for retailers that arise from the counterfactual land use policies studied in \cite{Larsen2020a}. I find that resident surplus decreases on average but that the valuation for cannabis retailers is heterogeneous, with residents with children being the main demographic negatively affected. Lastly, the third chapter studies the supply chain of the market to understand the factors that make-or-break vertical relationships and how a market matures. The third paper uses a rich dataset of inventory transfers for the Washington State recreational cannabis industry to assemble a novel dataset of vertical relationships between producers and retailers starting from the market’s inception. In the early stages of the market, I find substantial structural state dependence within vertical relationships, suggesting firms are reluctant to sever their existing business links due to poorly performing products and serves as a cautionary tale against making assumptions about firms when not in equilibrium. As the market reaches an equilibrium, product performance becomes the leading factor for producer-retailer matching. A theoretical model of consumer demand and link formation is provided to rationalize these findings.Item IBM mainframe : a study in business strategy(2009-12) Slanda, Arkadiusz Marcin; Ambler, Tony; Peterson, Bill, M.B.A.On April 7, 2009, IBM celebrated the mainframe’s 45th year. Drawing on its roots in punch-card tabulators, the machine has come a long way to become many customers’ preferred e-business solution. Throughout its lifetime, IBM’s strategy adapted the machine to the changing market. During the late 1960s, the introduction of the System/360 provided customers with compatibility and scalability across various computer lines. Popularity of the system began to suffer during the client/server era of the 1990s but it quickly recovered as the z Series server line was developed to support e-business solutions. IBM’s strategy made the mainframe successful but continued improvements are still necessary to ensure its future success.Item Interactive engagement with an open source community : a study of the relationships between organizations and an open source software community(2013-05) Sims, Jonathan Paul; Crossland, Craig; Henderson, Andrew DuaneThis dissertation theoretically develops and empirically tests a model of interactive firm engagement with an open source software community. An inductive pilot study and subsequent interview analysis suggest that the nature of the relationship between a firm and an open source community varies in the degree by which a firm both "takes from" and "gives to" the community. I propose that a firm will experience direct effects from both giving to and taking from the community, and further propose that the interaction of these two behaviors, which I call interactive engagement, will lead to three firm-level consequences: an increase in the number of new products, higher levels of incremental (as opposed to radical) innovation, and shortened development and debug time. I test these hypotheses using regression analysis of questionnaire responses collected from 250 organizations that work with a popular open source software community.Item Mediators’ strategies for a successful mediation : a literature review of conflict mediation(2019-05-01) Li, Jing, M.A.; Maxwell, Madeline M.In a conflict mediation, a mediator works as a third party to help disputants negotiate their problems and facilitate them to reach a consensus. The goal of a conflict mediations is more than solving problems. From a mediator’s point of view, the key issue in a conflict mediation is to produce results that can benefit each party in the conflict. Previous research examined mediators’ practice in conflict mediations theoretically and empirically. However, there is a lack of specific exploration on mediation strategies that mediators can apply in practice for a successful mediation. The aim of this report is to find feasible strategies that can be used by mediators through reviewing past literature on conflict mediation and rethinking a three-month mediation training the author experienced. Findings indicate that strategies such as creating a comfortable environment, active listening, being aware of disputants’ nonverbal behaviors, and showing empathy are useful and can lead to successful mediation. In addition, in conflict mediations, mediators should be selective to these strategies depending on context. The mediators’ strategies that are summarized in this report are general and possible for a successful mediation; in other words, if mediator use these strategies it will lead to more satisfied parties, so that they can ensure a smoother mediation rather than guarantee an outcomeItem Neuromarketing : an essential tool in the future of advertising and brand development(2016-05) Hilderbrand, Miranda L; Eastin, Matthew S; Cicchirillo, Vincent JThis research is designed to explore the future role of neuromarketing in advertising and brand development. To understand its necessity, the research will begin with an in-depth review on what is meant by advertising and branding. Once there is an understanding of these industries, the research will look at the field of neuromarketing – a history of the industry, an explanation of the common research methods that it employs, and an understanding of how neuromarketing can assist in advertising research and brand development. To gain knowledge on the potential future of neuromarketing, a qualitative study was done through a series of in-depth interviews with professionals who have practical uses for neuromarketing in their respective fields. This research is concluded with a summary the current state of neuromarketing, and a discussion on what needs to be done as the industry moves forward.Item Nonprofitable Nonprofits: Seeking High Impact in a Low-Cost World(2019-12) Tunnell, Isabelle MarieWith the countless nonprofit organizations in America, many people are moved to donate to the ones making the most impact. Further, many people avoid donating to charities with high costs because high costs imply that less money is going to the cause than would be otherwise. This thesis will explore the operations and costs of nonprofits in order to isolate best practices for nonprofits seeking to make demonstrable, positive impact on the causes that they were designed to support. In this thesis I will explore the measurement of a nonprofit’s impact and dissect how nonprofits operate internally and externally. I will first define impact as it relates to my research. Then I will look at the external costs that nonprofits incur through marketing, fundraising, events, exposure, and changes in economic policy. The goal is to understand the costs, benefits, and impact of nonprofits’ strategies towards increasing impact. It will explore different forms of fundraising money and how large events impact costs, awareness, effectiveness, and longevity of nonprofits. Then I will explore the internal costs of running a nonprofit with a focus on employee salary and retention. Ultimately, the following question will be answered: how can nonprofits balance revenues and costs in order to create the largest positive impact on the causes they support? This thesis will explore the amounts and types of costs that nonprofits incur along with their relative impact or success, with the goal of concluding opportunities for decreasing costs and increasing revenues for future nonprofits to consider in order to best prepare themselves for success.Item Optimizing Foreign Direct Investment: Attracting High-Technology Multinational Corporations in the Arab Republic of Egypt(2020) Karamali, Iann; Jensen, NathanThe purpose of this thesis is to provide policy recommendations for the Arab Republic of Egypt. To justify these policy recommendations, this work surveys theoretical literature, examines data about the contemporary Egyptian economy, and analyzes empirical cases. The main findings of this work relate to Egypt’s mega-projects, which provide a unique opportunity for Egypt to maximize benefits from high-technology Foreign Direct Investment; policies outlined in this work are intended to aid Egypt attract, retain, and optimize Foreign Direct Investment of this type.Item R+D — a rhythms-based design approach for a modern and technological world(2022-05-11) Sokol, Christoph; Glass, TamieOver the last century, technology’s impact and, most prominently, the increasing influence of digital technology cannot be overlooked anymore. For all the positives that came with these inventions, many behavioral and social changes left their mark on overall human well-being and health. With the widespread use of artificial light and digital screens, for example, the natural rhythms of humans have suffered. The rhythms-based design approach that is being explored and laid out in the following report addresses the issues of this extensive disruption by considering the environmental, bodily, social and technological rhythms as spaces of design opportunities. This rhythms-based design approach argues for a shift in mindset when designing products, systems and experiences that encourages a systems view of rhythms. It tries to help the designer address disruption and misalignment of environmental, bodily, social and technological rhythms by focusing on the behavioral level of routines, rituals and habits. By focusing on these elements, the designer can take rhythms from an abstract into an observable and actionable realm. The goal for Rhythms+Design (R+D) is to start the conversation within the design community about the importance of rhythms and, consequently, time on the process of design and its impact on the designed artifacts most designers produce. As a discipline, design has had a helpful hand in shaping the last century and most notably the last decades through the advent of digital technologies. R+D as a design approach requires more from the participating designer than it gives. It builds on the ideas of co-creation and the widely established practices of design thinking in its many variations. The rhythms-based approach is used to highlight opportunities and to question assumptions, as well reframe contemporary approaches to design problems.Item Selecting green strategies for new stadiums : a case study of Austin FC(2021-01-26) Leon Marquez, Sergio; Novoselac, Atila; O'Connor, James ThomasStadiums acting on climate change mitigation must develop strategies that contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the commercial building sector. Energy-related measures have a prominent weight on the rating system for green building certification programs that determine the level of sustainability for new construction. Project location and energy end-use requirements of the design are important to determine alternatives to minimize their carbon footprint. A baseline carbon footprint was established due to emissions associated with future end-use consumption of electricity and natural gas to compare reduction alternatives for the case study. Building energy modeling simulation of lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems was performed using eQUEST based on geometry observations of enclosed spaces and the canopy roof to generate hourly demand data for Austin FC’s new outdoor stadium. Reduction alternatives were identified and analyzed for different system configurations. The alternatives that were considered for the analysis are: (1) installing low wattage floodlighting, (2) a proposed solar photovoltaic (PV) carport system, and (3) replacing furnace heating fueled by natural gas with an electric heat pump. The evaluation of alternatives was carried out in terms of abatement cost estimates (ACE) normalized by the amount of emissions that can be reduced from the baseline, considering periods of 20, 30, and 50 years starting in 2021. The stadium’s floodlighting system can avoid costly demand charges and reduce a relatively small fraction of the carbon footprint. Emissions reduction budget allocation between PV and HVAC systems favors PV. Heat pumps have a higher operational expenditure relative to natural gas charges although they can continue to reduce emissions after Austin Energy’s electricity generation system becomes carbon neutral as expected by 2035.Item Standardization and firms’ innovative activities within ecosystems : two essays on the Formula One industry(2022-08-18) Pyun, Eugene; Toh, Puay Khoon; Polidoro, Francisco; Ranganathan, Ramkumar; Wen, WenThis dissertation studies how standardization can affect ecosystem member organizations’ innovations and performances both in organizational and individual levels. Standardization is an effective coordination tool to help ecosystems overcome coordination challenges by providing compatibility and interoperability within ecosystems. However, to achieve compatibility, standardization needs to fix and limit core technologies and components only to standardized cores and must enforce guidelines to its member organizations. In other words, the coordinating effect of standardization may require hefty prices from its ecosystem. To address the tension between standardization’s positive role as a coordination tool and necessary organizational costs to adopt standards, the current dissertation examines how standardization can influence various aspects of organizational functions. The dissertation is organized as the following. The first section a general introduction and overview of the dissertation. Then the dissertation proceeds to a literature review of relevant prior research on ecosystems and standardization that analyze the theoretical tension between standardization as a coordination tool and required costs to accommodate standards. The chapter will then proceed to identification of research opportunities based on the existing literature. Chapter I then demonstrates the constraining effect of standardization on firms’ innovation through the theoretical lens of knowledge recombination. In addition, using the perspectives of knowledge-based view and organizational change, Chapter II will analyze the disrupting effect of standardization on human capital performances within ecosystem member organizations. Lastly, the dissertation will then provide a conclusion and message of the dissertation. Using data on Formula One motorsports industry regarding standardization which consist of F1 teams’ innovations and drivers’ performances in 1970 - 2020, the dissertation empirically tests the proposed theories. The dissertation utilized machine learning based LDA topic modelling techniques to capture impacts of standardization on components of F1 race cars and track standardization activities among the components. The findings from the empirical analyses of this dissertation demonstrate that standardization can negatively affect various activities of ecosystems’ member organizations.Item Strategy implementation for middle management(2011-12) Jha, Zinni Shulin; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; Duvic, RobertThe focus of this master’s thesis is to understand the challenges that middle managers face in highly turbulent internal and external environments of an organization. Middle Managers have to often perform several roles in an organization such as Entrepreneur, Translator, Team Leader, and Motivator. This research provides tools and techniques for the Middle Managers to implement strategy and to help them become an integral part of strategic renewal process, while performing these roles. The research identifies techniques that could help address the challenge of maintaining a balance between concurrent existence of stability and creative chaos within their organizations. The output of the research is a guideline that Middle Managers can use to facilitate successful execution of strategy at middle levels and in-turn build middle management excellence.Item The ludic and the strategic : games, war, and the conduct of character in the literature of British imperialism(2015-08) Ortiz y Prentice, Chris S.; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; MacDuffie, Allen, 1975-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Baker, Samuel; Carter, Mia EThis dissertation examines the language of games in the literature of British imperialism, paying special attention to turn-of-the-century and Edwardian works of Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Where critics have called attention to the centrality of terms and concepts derived from games in this literature, it has been to show a conformance with the ideological intrusion of ludic play into rationales for British imperialism. By likening the British Empire to a “Great Game,” popular adventure literature aimed at male British readers not only made imperialism seem a form a play, it also helped to install a shame-inducing agonal mindset, which was itself in conformance with the aggressive expansionist policies of Disraeli and the New Imperialists. As this dissertation shows, Kipling, Wells, and Conrad drew their interests in games both from British Edwardian political discourse and the bearing of strategy on war, geopolitics, and human sociality. Studying such texts as Stalky & Co. (1899-1927) and Kim (1901), The War of the Worlds (1897) and Little Wars (1913), and Nostromo (1904) and Chance (1913) reveals that attentiveness to strategic dynamics tends to undercut the racialist and classist logics subtending British imperialist discourse. Preachers of the “games ethos” argued that Britain’s imperial supremacy testified to the quality of English character. For Kipling, Wells, and Conrad, by contrast, individual persons are moral agents that are also caught up in overlapping contests occurring on scales as large as international finance and as local as particular mental processes. These texts associate moral authority with strategic insightfulness. While Kipling restricts his interest in strategy to the criticism of British political discourse, Wells and Conrad explore the strategic bases of laws and morality. Supplying the significance of game-strategy to these and other works by Kipling, Wells, and Conrad, adds to their legibility and contributes to critical conversance with the meaning of games in the literature of British imperialism.Item The relationship between strategy and fundraising in higher education : toward a new theoretical model(2017-05) Sedlár, Jaromír; Reddick, Richard, 1972-; Sharpe, Edwin Reese; Sáenz, Victor; Suri, Jeremi; Safady, RandaFundraising is a multi-billion phenomenon in American higher education. However, despite its crucial importance, it remains one of the least studied aspects of higher education. When it is studied, the studies focus heavily on donor motivation and similar tactical issues – as opposed to studying fundraising as a strategic phenomenon, a phenomenon that impacts the academic enterprise as a whole. Considering the gap between the importance of fundraising on one hand and the stagnating discussion about it in the academic literature on the other hand, there is a clear need to contribute fresh insights and generate new debates in academic research on the subject. This study seeks to do so in two ways. First, it proposes a theory-driven answer to the question of why do universities need fundraising. The proposed answer is the conceptual framework of dynamic capabilities. By introducing this new framework that treats fundraising as a strategic phenomenon, the study strengthens the foundations of the research and extends it beyond its traditional focus on donor motivation and related issues. Moreover, it connects the research to voluminous literature in the discipline of strategic management, opening up more opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Second, the study presents the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of a potential relationship between fundraising and strategy in higher education. The probe investigated three cases of major gifts to three academic institutions: a research university, an emerging research university, and a health institution. The empirical findings and the contributions resulting from them could serve as a launching pad for more empirical research in the area. Following the maxim that nothing is as useful as good theory, the study also aims to inform and inspire fundraising practitioners to consider the study’s theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings in their strategic decisions and actions. Finally, the significance of this study may go beyond fundraising. At its basic level, this is a study of the character of strategy in higher education, and of how (if at all) do academic institutions turn strategy into action. The conceptual framework and empirical findings reported in this paper may inform future research in this area.