Unlocking the power of big data in new product development

This study explores how big data can be used to enable customers to express unrecognised needs. By acquiring this information, managers can gain opportunities to develop customer-centred products. Big data can be defined as multimedia-rich and interactive low-cost information resulting from mass communication. It offers customers a better understanding of new products and provides new, simplified modes of large-scale interaction between customers and firms. Although previous studies have pointed out that firms can better understand customers’ preferences and needs by leveraging different types of available data, the situation is evolving, with increasing application of big data analytics for product development, operations and supply chain management. In order to utilise the customer information available from big data to a larger extent, managers need to identify how to establish a customer-involving environment that encourages customers to share their ideas with managers, contribute their know-how, fiddle around with new products, and express their actual preferences. We investigate a new product development project at an electronics company, STE, and describe how big data is used to connect to, interact with and involve customers in new product development in practice. Our findings reveal that big data can offer customer involvement so as to provide valuable input for developing new products. In this paper, we introduce a customer involvement approach as a new means of coming up with customer-centred new product development

Mentalization and embodied selfhood in borderline personality disorder

Aberrations of self-experience are considered a core feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). While prominent aetiol-ogical accounts of BPD, such as the mentalization-based approach, appeal to the developmental constitution of self in early infant–care-giver environments, they often rely on a conception of self that is not explicitly articulated. Moreover, self-experience in BPD is often theorized at the level of narrative identity, thus minimizing the role of embodied experience. In this article, we present the hypothesis that disordered self and interpersonal functioning in BPD result, in part, from impairments in ‘embodied mentalization’ that manifest founda-tionally as alterations in minimal embodied selfhood, i.e. the first-person experience of being an individuated embodied subject. This account of BPD, which engages early intersubjective experiences, has the potential to integrate phenomenological, developmental, and symptomatic findings in BPD, and is consistent with contemporary theories of brain function

Rebalancing towards a sustainable future: China’s Twelfth Five-Year Programme

This chapter seeks to analyse and assess some of the major opportunities and challenges in China’s Twelfth Five-Year Programme for Social and Economic Development (hereafter 12FYP).1 The main economic thrust of the 12FYP is one of sustainable, balanced and innovative development; its principal social thrust is that the government should enhance its support for ‘livelihoods’ (minsheng) in order to create a ‘moderately well-off’ (xiaokang) society by 2020.

Productivity and efficiency of state-owned enterprises in China

SOE efficiency, SOE performance, Malmquist index of productivity, Productivity growth, O4, P2,

Less meat, less heat - the potential of social marketing to reduce meat consumption

The livestock sector is growing steadily and is responsible for around 18% of global greenhouse‐gas‐emissions, which is more than the global transport sec-tor (Steinfeld et al. 2006). This paper examines the potential of social marketing to reduce meat consumption. The aim is to understand consumers’ motivation in diet choices and to learn what opportunities social marketing can provide to counteract negative environmental and health trends. The authors believe that research to answer this question should start in metropolitan areas, be-cause measures should be especially effective there. Based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB, Ajzen 1991) and the Technology‐Acceptance‐Model by Huijts et al. (2012), an online‐study with participants from the metropolitan region (n = 708) was conducted in which central socio‐psychological constructs for a meat consumption reduction were examined. It was shown that attitude, personal norm and habit have a critical influence on the intention to reduce meat consumption. A segmentation of consumers based on these factors led to three consumer clusters: vegetarians/flexitarians, potential flexitarians and convinced meat eaters. Potential flexitarians are an especially relevant target group for the development of social‐marketing‐measures to reduce meat consumption. In co‐creation‐workshops with potential flexitarians from the metropolitan region, barriers and benefits of reducing meat consumption were identified. The factors of environmental protection, animal welfare and desire for variety turn out to be the most relevant motivational factors. Based on these factors, consumers proposed a variety of social marketing measures, such as applications and labels to inform about the environmental impact of meat products