Content assisted web co-link analysis for competitive intelligence

Building on a previous study that succeeded in mapping business competition positions at an industry level using Web co-link analysis, the current study attempted to improve Web co-link analysis by adding Web page content to obtain the mapping at a particular market segment level. This method combines the ideas of Web content mining with Web structure mining. The method was tested in the WiMAX sector of the telecommunication industry. Specifically, the keyword WiMAX was incorporated into queries that searched for co-links to pairs of company Websites. Two sets of data were collected: one with the proposed method and one with co-link search alone. The resulting two data matrices were analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to generate maps of business competition. The comparison between the two maps shows that the proposed method produced a map focusing on the WiMAX sector. The study also proposed the measure of reduction of co-link count that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of focusing the analysis on a particular sector. The reduction of co-link count could also be an easy and pragmatic measure for an analysis of a company’s competitiveness in a particular market segment.     

Exploring Web keyword analysis as an alternative to link analysis: a multi-industry case

The study explored the feasibility of using Web keyword analysis as an alternative to link analysis and tested the feasibility in a multi-industry environment. The keyword is the organization??s name, in this case the company name. American companies from five industries were included in the study. The study found that the Web visibility of a company as measured by the number of Webpages on which the company name appears correlates with the company??s business measures (revenue, profits, and assets). The correlation coefficients are similar to that between the inlink counts and the business measures. This suggests that the keyword count (searched by the company name) could replace inlink count as an alternative indicator of some commonly used business measures. The co-word (the co-occurrence of the names of two companies on Webpages) count was used as a measure of the relatedness of the two companies. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis was applied to the co-word matrices and generated MDS maps that showed relationships among companies in a multi-industry context. Keyword data were collected from three different types of Websites (general Websites, blog sites, and Web news sites) and results were compared. The study found blog sites to be the better source to collect data for this type of study. The comparison of MDS maps generated from co-link data and the blog co-word data showed that the co-word analysis is as effective as co-link analysis in mapping business relationships. The value of the study is not limited to the business sector as the co-word method could be applied to analysing relationships among other types of organizations.     

Why are Websites co-linked? The case of Canadian universities

This study examined why Websites were co-linked using Canadian university Websites as the test set. Pages that co-linked to these university Websites were located using Yahool. A random sample of 859 co-linking pages (the page that initiated the co-link) was retrieved and the contents of the page, as well as the context of the link, were manually examined to record the following variables: language, country, type of Website, and the reasons for co-linking. The study found that in over 94% of cases, the two co-linked universities were related academically; many of these cases (38%) showed a relationship specifically in teaching or research. This confirms results, from previous quantitative studies, that Web co-links can be a measure of the similarity or relatedness of sites being co-linked and that Web co-link analysis can thus be used to study relationships among linked Websites.     

Why are hyperlinks to business Websites created? A content analysis

Summary  Motivations for the creation of hyperlinks to business sites were analyzed through a content analysis approach. Links to 280 North American IT companies (71 Canadian companies and 209 U.S. companies) were searched through Yahoo!. Then a random sample of 808 links was taken from the links retrieved. The content as well as the context of each link was manually examined to determine why the link was created. The country location and the type of the site where the link came from were also identified. The study found that most links were created for business purposes confirming findings from early quantitative studies that links contain useful business information. Links to competitors were extremely rare but competitors were often co-linked, suggesting that co-link analysis is the direction to pursue for information on competitive intelligence.     

Links to commercial websites as a source of business information

Websites of China's top 100 information technology (IT) companies were examined. Link count to a company's website was found to correlate with the company's revenue, profit, and research and development expenses. This suggests that Web hyperlinks to commercial sites can be a business performance indicator and thus a source of business information. This information is useful for Web business intelligence and Web data mining. As a comparison to IT companies, China's top 100 privately owned companies were also studied. No relationship between link count and the business performance measure was found for these companies due probably to the heterogeneous nature of this group. Data collection issues for webometrics research were also explored in the study. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An econometric analysis of product variety impact on competitive market conduct in consumer goods markets

Decisions on product variety are a central part of the (strategic) marketing planning process of many consumer goods manufacturers. However, we have only limited information about the effects of product variety on competitive market conduct and profitability. In this paper, we introduce a simple econometric methodology for studying market conduct in prices and variety between rival brands of consumer goods markets. Our study follows the recent trend in empirical industrial organization, it is fully structural and starts from the specification of demand and supply functions. We introduce a number of different game theoretic regimes and characterize the equilibrium of each of these games. The equilibrium of each game is considered to be unique. On the basis of non-nested model selection, we can identify the form of competitive market conduct that is most suitable for the underlying data. Our empirical study identifies Nash behavior in pricing and collusive behavior in variety among the two leading brands in the market. The estimated parameters offer theoretically founded insight into the competitive rules in the market and the impact of prices and variety on profits.     

Aligning marketing and manufacturing strategies with the market

In strategic marketing decisions substantial emphasis is placed on market segmentation and product/service differentiation. This follows from separate, intensive analyses of customers and competitors. Based on these analyses, the resultant segmentation and differentiation schema, and an intensive review of the firm's own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, the firm makes one of its most important and critical decisions: which customers to serve and which products to emphasize, referred to as positioning. On the other side of the same corporate coin, manufacturing makes decisions on process and infrastructure investments based upon the technologies required, and its perception of what it needs to do well in order to fulfil its role. In the same way as with marketing decisions, the firm now makes another of its most critical decisions by committing itself to major investments in manufacturing that are characterized by high value and long time scales to change. On the one hand, these positioning decisions by marketing invariably include little emphasis in determining the customer requirements that must be supported by manufacturing, and fail to investigate the ability of manufacturing to support these requirements. On the other hand, manufacturing decisions do not reflect key insights on the needs of current and future markets. As a consequence, many businesses fail to achieve their strategic business objectives, due, in part, to the inability of marketing and manufacturing to jointly develop consistent strategies. We call this a lack of alignment. The methodology outlined in this paper concerns how to align marketing and manufacturing strategies by using markets as the center piece of both developments. Doing this highlights the recognition that markets need to form the common denominator of both marketing and manufacturing strategy development. This methodology is illustrated by using an actual example drawn from plant-based research. Several key questions are addressed in this methodology. How does marketing view customers and markets? What is manufacturing's view of the same customers and markets? To what extent is manufacturing actually able to support the demands that these customers and markets are placing on a firm's capabilities? It is important to check with the use of data, the actual operating performance against the required capabilities. In cases where substantial differences exist between customer and market requirements and manufacturing capabilities, strategic options (both in marketing and manufacturing) to resolve these differences need to be addressed in making strategic business decisions.     

Dynamic price forecast in a competitive electricity market

Price forecast is a key issue in competitive electricity markets. It provides useful information for the market players and the regulators, in both short and long run. Different approaches have been proposed and implemented. A new dynamic approach for forecasting the market price of electricity in the short term is proposed. The price dates are first clustered according to different types of daily profiles and then, given a proper function representing the trend in price, the set of unknown parameters are identified based on the zeroing of a Lyapunov function. The forecast can be dynamically updated with the latest data available. Higher weight can be attributed to this data in determining the future prices. The proposed approach is validated with reference to real systems in the form of the Italian, New England and New York electricity markets. In addition, an extensive price forecast is provided for the Italian market, an example of a young market that is rather difficult to predict patterns for.     

Venturing Early or Following Late?

• The concept of the establishment chain has been subject to extensive research during the last decades and has received support as well as criticism. We test this concept for market entries in Central and Eastern European countries. We also evaluate both the impact of following this pattern and the impact of the timing of market entry on the performance in the foreign market.
• We test our hypotheses with empirical data collected in a survey among German manufacturing companies that have entered markets in Central and Eastern Europe. The data covers 524 cases of internationalization from 204 companies.
• We find that most companies start with low-intensity market entry modes and increase their commitment over time. Yet, only a small fraction actually follows the path of internationalization described by the establishment chain. It seems that this pattern is more relevant for companies entering these markets early and loses relevance as foreign competition in the foreign market increases. Levels of performance tend to be higher for companies entering CEE markets early in comparison to later entries. However, we do not discover any performance impact of market entry according to the establishment chain.

     

Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space: a webometric and content analysis

It is known that there are significant correlations between linking and geographical patterns. Although interlinking patterns have been studied in various contexts, co-inlinking patterns on the Web have only been studied as indicator of business competitive positions. This research studies the use of co-inlinks to local government Web sites, assesses whether co-inlinking follows geographic patterns and investigates reasons for creating the co-inlinks. Strong evidence was found that co-inlinking is more frequent to municipalities in the same functional region than to municipalities in different functional regions, indicating that this geographic aspect influences co-inlinking, even though geographic co-inlinking was not a strong trend overall. Because the functional regions are created based on cooperation between the municipalities, we have indirectly been able to map cooperation from co-inlinking patterns on the Web. The main reason to create co-inlinking links to municipalities was that the source of the links wanted to show a connection to its region.     

The stock market and innovative capability in the New Economy: the optical networking industry

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the stockmarket on the innovative capabilities of high-technology companiesthat have been central to what in the last half of the 1990scame to be called the ‘New Economy’. The empiricalfocus is on equipment suppliers in optical networking—anindustry that integrates the bandwidth potential of fiber opticswith the data communications potential of the internet. Thestudy covers the period from 1996 to 2003, during which theoptical networking industry was, first, central to the New Economyboom, and, then from 2001, ensnared by the bursting of the NewEconomy bubble. This paper shows how, responding to the NewEconomy business model brought into the industry by Cisco Systems,three Old Economy companies—Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies,and Alcatel—sought to use their corporate stock as a currencyto acquire technology companies and compensate talented people,and thus accumulate innovative capability. To understand therelation between the stock market and innovative capabilityin the Cisco ‘growth-through-acquisition-and-integration’model and in the ‘creative responses’ of the OldEconomy companies to the Cisco challenge, we apply an analyticalframework that links four functions of the stock market—control,combination, compensation and cash—with three social conditionsof innovative enterprise: strategic control—the abilitiesand incentives of strategic decision makers to allocate resourcesto uncertain investments in innovative capabilities; organizationalintegration—the structure of incentives that motivatesemployees to apply their skills and efforts to collective learningprocesses; and financial commitment—the availability tothe enterprise of resources to sustain cumulative learning processesuntil, by accessing markets, they can generate financial returns.Using this framework, we show that the ways in which the OldEconomy companies used their stock to accumulate innovativecapability in the New Economy boom of 1998–2000 made themmore vulnerable to the stock market collapse and the slowdownin the optical networking industry in 2001–2003.     

An exploratory study on substantive co-link analysis: A modification to total co-link analysis

Since the term “co-link” was put forward, many scholars have done exploratory investigations to prove the applicability and validity of co-link analysis used in mapping internet structure and mining relationships among internet colonies. All of these studies are based on the whole links in the web called “total co-link analysis”. However, there are both substantive and non-substantive links in the web, and the number of the latter outweights that of the former, which makes the preconditions of total co-link analysis untenable. In this paper, we present “substantive co-link analysis”, and believe it is more sound and valid than “total co-link analysis”. Then exploratory investigations on both total and substantive co-link analysis are carried out with the sample of 20 academic blogs on Library and Information Science, the results of which testify our assumption that “substantive co-link analysis” is more efficient and reasonable than “total co-link analysis”.     

Big data analytics business value and firm performance: linking with environmental context

Previous studies, grounded on the resource based view, have already explored the relationship between the business value that Big Data Analytics (BDA) can bring to firm performance. However, the role played by the environmental characteristics in which companies operate has not been investigated in the literature. We inform the theory, in that direction, via the integration of the contingency theory to the resource based view theory of the firm. This original and integrative model examines the moderating influence of environmental features on the relationship between BDA business value and firm performance. The combination of survey data and secondary financial data on a representative sample of medium and large companies makes possible the statistical validation of our research model. The results offer evidence that BDA business value leads to higher firm performance, namely financial performance, market performance and customer satisfaction. More original is the demonstration that this relationship is stronger in munificent environments, while the dynamism of the environment does not have any moderating effect on the performance of BDA solutions. It means that managers working for firms in markets with a growing demand are in the best position to profit from BDA.     

Mapping the web relations of science centres and museums from Latin America

In Latin America, interactive science centres and museums are key institutions for science communication. In order to map their relationship over the Internet, a Web co-link analysis was applied to 18 websites of science centres and museums affiliated to the Network for the Popularization of Science and Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean - RedPOP. Clustering analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS) and an analysis of all pages with links to at least two websites were performed. Results showed that language barriers played a prominent role in clustering, with external recognition by the target public representing a secondary issue.     

Competitive Impact of Strategic Restructuring: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry

Stock market evidence can provide insights into how firms inrapidly changing markets design and implement strategies. Thefailed merger attempt of Bell Atlantic and TCI serves as a casestudy for examining the effects of strategic choices on firmsin the telecommunications industry. The paper documents thevarying strategies of the seven regional Bell operating companies(RBOCs) and analyzes the stock price reactions of industry participantsto the proposed merger and its termination in the context ofthese differing strategic orientations. Results reveal thatthe announcement of the merger generated significant spillovereffects for other cable and local telephone companies as wellas for other industry participants. We use the reactions totest hypotheses regarding the rationale for the merger proposaland the reasons for its demise. Stock price reactions to theproposal were significantly more positive for the three RBOCsthat had committed to strategic approaches similar to Bell Atlantic'sthan for the other three RBOCs. However, reactions to the terminationindicate that investors viewed the hierarchical organizationalstrategy of Bell Atlantic as less desirable than those beingpursued by other Bell companies.     

Factors influencing the effects of the Starlink Satellite Project on the internet service provider market in Thailand

This quantitative study explores the impact of the Starlink project on the internet service provider market in Thailand. A convenience sampling technique was used to recruit 617 participants, who completed an online questionnaire. The study examined several independent variables, including demographic factors, such as gender, age, education, status and income, and user behaviour, such as devices used for internet access, time spent online and social media platforms used. Binary regression was used to analyse the data. The results showed that the Starlink project had a significant impact on the competitive structure of the internet service provider market in Thailand. This impact was influenced by factors such as age, education, income, internet duration, mobile internet use, Facebook and TikTok. The study recommends that businesses develop effective strategies to meet the needs and expectations of their customers. Organisations with internet access have the opportunity to collect data to develop new products, which can give them a competitive edge. It is important to maintain a competitive environment to prevent artificially low collection rates or exorbitant prices due to collusion or tacit pricing agreements.     

Determination of appropriate price level in installed-capacity market

As one of the most important approaches for ensuring adequate generation capacity, and hence reliability of electricity supply, the capacity-obligation mechanism is employed in some operating electricity markets by imposing such an obligation on all load-serving entities (LSEs). To facilitate the enforcement of the obligation, an installed-capacity market is established for the LSEs and generation companies to trade installed capacity. In the paper, the optimal allocation strategies of generation capacity for generation companies between two electricity markets under different levels of installed-capacity prices, as well as the optimal purchasing strategies of LSEs, are first examined, and on this basis a new framework is developed to determine an appropriate level of generation-installed-capacity price for ensuring generation-capacity adequacy. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated by a numerical example.     

Digital innovations-driven business model regeneration: A process model

The traditional ways of doing business have changed dramatically with the emergence of new digital technologies. Firms can stay competitive using the benefits of digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things, social computing, Cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, big data and analytics, wireless networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, simulation, etc. The spread of the coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19) all over the world has created a better understanding of the importance of organizations’ ability to keep up with digital innovations. Therefore, the regeneration of business models is becoming an increasingly crucial factor for survival in the digital age. This study develops a process model for digital innovations-driven business model regeneration based on the design science research approach. For this purpose, the existing models and cases in the business model innovation (BMI) literature are examined and the empirical data are collected using semi-structured interviews to complement and validate this knowledge. The collected data are then analyzed and a digital innovations-driven business model regeneration method is developed. The proposed model is demonstrated with a real case. This study extends the BMI literature. The proposed process model can be used by strategic managers to analyze the impacts of potential digital innovations on their current business models and regenerate their business model. Therefore, it can help companies to be able to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors or sustain their business against technological developments.     

Expanding competitive advantage through organizational culture,knowledge sharing and organizational innovation

This research empirically investigates the relationship between organizational culture, knowledge sharing, organizational innovation, and competitive advantage. Data were collected from 294 industrial managers, and PLS-SEM was used to validate data and examine the hypothesized relationships. Results revealed that organizational culture, knowledge sharing, and organizational innovation positively affect competitive advantage. More specifically, organizational culture fosters knowledge-sharing and innovation activities among the workforce and links them with high-level business processes that could be conducive to acquiring advanced manufacturing capabilities. The present study highlighted that organizational culture is indispensable for business operational success, and knowledge-sharing and organizational innovation appear to be key drivers for gaining competitive advantage.     

A comparative study of lean and agile manufacturing with a related survey of current practices in the UK

In response to changing success factors and environmental pressures, companies are aspiring to break out of mass production and become lean or agile. Whereas performance enhancements of lean practices have been demonstrated, it is now the case that markets have become increasingly characterized by turbulence, a situation in which reliance on lean practices is insufficient, and that survival requires adoption of agile practices. As a result, a comparative study of lean and agile manufacturing with a related survey of current practices in the UK was carried out, the results of which is presented in this paper. The paper explored the threats to lean and the drivers of agile manufacturing. Using data from a questionnaire survey, four hypotheses were tested, which was indicative of the benefits of agile manufacturing. In contrast to their lean counterparts, agile companies paid attention to a wider range of competitive capabilities. They therefore had a lower range of mean scores on competitive capabilities. Independent sample tests of significant difference in business performance measures revealed that the agile companies consistently outperformed their lean competitors on all business performance measures studied. In addition, a wider range of competitive capabilities and performance measures of the agile companies correlated significantly and positively whilst such correlation was observed for only a narrow range of capabilities and performance measures for lean companies. The results suggest that competing simultaneously on multiple competitive capabilities enhance performance better than a rather narrow focus on cost and quality.