Research @ Babson is published by the Babson Faculty Research Fund Upcoming Research Program Tuesday, April 14 Noon -- 1 PM – Needham Room, Olin Hall
Qualtrics Survey Software Babson is pleased to make Qualtrics survey software available (at no cost to you or your department) to support research, teaching, and administration at the College. Qualtrics combines exceptional ease of use with an advanced set of features. Matthew Reis, Organizational Development, HR, will give a live demonstration of the software and answer any questions you might have. If you are involved in or planning a project that involves a survey, join us on April 14 for demonstration of Qualtrics, feedback from faculty users, and a chance to ask questions.
Research Expense Funds Janice Yellin, Arts and Humanities
Faculty News “Small Business Leadership: Does Being the Founder Matter?” by Elaine Allen, Entrepreneurship, and Nan Langowitz, Management, has just been accepted for publication in Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and will be forthcoming in Volume 23(2). This research was supported by a BFRF 2007 summer stipend. Dhruv Grewal, Marketing, and co-authors, Dipayan Biswas from Bentley University and Anne Roggeveen from Babson were awarded the ‘Best Paper’ in the consumer behavior track at the Winter American Marketing Association Conference, for their paper entitled “How the Order of Sampled Experiential Goods Affects Choice.” World Trade Review (2009), has published “The political economy of WTO accession: the unfinished business of universal membership, by Kent Jones, Economics.
“Talking about Sexual Orientation, Teaching about Homophobia – Negotiating the Divide Between Religious Beliefs and Tolerance for LGBT Rights in the Classroom,” by Toni Lester, Accounting and Law, was published by Duke Law School Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law – Special Issue on Religious Conservatism (2008). Share Your ‘Research News’ Please forward the details of your recent research activities and publications to the Babson Faculty Research Fund, Babson 204.
BFRF Final Products Accepted Abdul Ali, Marketing, “Technical Skills vs. Marketing Skills and New Product Performance for small firms: An empirical test of the Ambidexterity Hypothesis “ The literature on order of market entry suggests that technical skills help a firm to develop pioneering products while marketing skills will be beneficial for incremental innovations. Some research scholars, however, call for a better fit between a firm’s existing base of marketing, technical skills and resources to improve the success rate of its new product development. This study is aimed to reconcile the conflicting recommendation about technical and marketing skills by suggesting that a firm needs to be ambidextrous with both skills in order to improve its chance of new product success. More specifically, this study explores the moderating role of uncertainty and product innovativeness on the relationship between skill ambidexterity and new product performance. Based on the concept of “organizational ambidexterity” researched in the organizational science area, this paper has explicitly developed a construct of skill ambidexterity and empirically observed from a survey of 110 small manufacturing firms in computer related industries that uncertainty moderates the relationship between skill ambidexterity and product development time; whereas product innovativeness moderates the relationship between skill ambidexterity and two different measures of initial market performance. As firms increasingly rely on new product development for competitive advantage, and need a balanced portfolio of new products, managers cannot afford to be too specialized with one set of skill and hope to compensate for over-skill in one area with lack of skill in another. The message is that while “Jack of all trade, master of none” is definitely a bad idea, “master of one” is probably not a good idea either, especially when a firm wants to develop new-to-the world products under conditions of a high level of uncertainty. Yunwei Gai, Economics, “Can Empirical Demand Models Assist in CON Comparative Reviews? A Case Study in Florida” Potential adverse effects of Certificate-of-Need (CON) programs for new hospital construction arise out of difficulties in the comparative review process for competing applications. We trace the problems to conflicts in evaluative criteria and other well-known special interest effects. At the same time, however, empirical analysis of revealed preferences using data on patient choices of hospitals can be useful in understanding the relative merits of competing proposals. We adopt the Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) method that based on conditional logit models of patient choice of hospitals to estimate the additional contribution of a hospital to patients’ utility. Empirical results obtained provide measures of the net benefit of a hospital to the community. We evaluate the set of competing CON applications in Clay County, Florida in 2005 to illustrate how the WTP method may be constructively incorporated in the review process. We then simulate the welfare effects of the proposed hospitals and predict how prices of hospital care would likely be affected by the choice of applicant. We show that the WTP method has its limitations, however; proposals cannot be uniquely ranked without more information on the efficiency of the proposed facilities and their quality of care.
Dennis Mathaisel, Mathematics and Science, “Implementing a Lean Enterprise Approach to Achieve Business Excellence” In the current global market, it is not enough for an enterprise to just meet the competitive challenge to achieve excellence. Rather, an enterprise (a business unit, corporation, institution, or government agency) must transform itself into a lean enterprise. The transformation should occur using a lean enterprise architecture that is structured on the life cycle of the enterprise, as well as its products, and is phased to include a strategic plan, an acquisition and integration plan, an implementation plan, and change management. This paper presents a lean enterprise architecture to assist any enterprise in its transformation to being lean.
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, Skelper: Four Chapters of a Novel This project involved researching and writing four chapters, plus prologue, of a novel provisionally entitled Skelper. The novel is told through the voice of an almost-eighty-year-old Irish former boxer. The completed chapters move backward and forward in time from present-day Paris and L’Hôpital St-Louis to the Irish midlands in the post-WWII period and on into the amateur boxing clubs of 1950s London. The journey is both geographical and retrospective, as the narrator recounts a sequence of events that has brought him to Paris. The completed chapters are later chapters in the novel, to be followed by two or three more. Joel Shulman, Entrepreneurship, “A Typology of Social Entrepreneurs: Motives, search Processes and Ethical Challenges” Social entrepreneurship has been the subject of considerable interest in the literature. This stems from its importance in addressing social problems and enriching communities and societies. In this article, we define social entrepreneurship; discuss its contributions to creating social wealth; offer a typology of entrepreneurs' search processes that lead to the discovery of opportunities for creating social ventures; and articulate the major ethical concerns social entrepreneurs might encounter. We conclude by outlining implications for entrepreneurs and advancing an agenda for future research, especially the ethics of social entrepreneurship.
Denise Troxell, Mathematics and Science, “On Island Sequences of Labelings with a Condition at Distance Two” L(2,1)-labelings of graphs model the problem of assigning non interfering frequencies to transmitters in a communications network so that geographically “close” transmitters are assigned different frequencies and “very close” transmitters are assigned non-consecutive frequencies. For efficiency purposes, one would like to avoid unused frequencies (holes) within the range of frequencies used. Networks may or may not admit L(2,1)-labelings without holes. In the former case, the focus is on minimizing the range of frequencies used by L(2,1)-labelings without holes. In the latter case, we look into the relationship between the distribution of holes and the network’s structure.
