‘Arrivederci CIAO.com, Buongiorno Bing.com’—Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), antecedences and consequences

The Internet facilitates access to online product reviews and comments written by consumers. This paper offers new insights on the motives and antecedents of the reading behaviour of consumer reviews in online opinion platforms. This research was carried out from 2005 to 2008 using a case study approach. The case involved working with a prominent and successful online opinion platform (CIAO.com). The company was so successful it was purchased by Microsoft for $486 million in 2008 and is now incorporated into their main search engine which is still a market leader today. The research highlights four different types of motives that drive customers to read online reviews: decision-involvement, product-involvement, social-involvement and economic-involvement motives. The outcomes also demonstrated four different new types of motives: self-involvement motives, consumer-empowerment motives, new social-involvement motives and site-administration motives. Several related themes were also investigated, such as the preference for reading or writing online reviews and the reasons for choosing one over the other. The research tested the relevance of the online reading motives and their influence on consumer buying and communication behaviour. In summary, some theoretical and practical implications are highlighted and discussed.     

Regionally asymmetric knowledge capabilities and open innovation: Exploring ‘Globalisation 2’—A new model of industry organisation

This paper proposes to review and assess social scientific debate about the origins and nature of innovation in modern society. It focuses on three sub-sets of conceptualisation, critique and commentary that refer specifically to sub-national or regional innovation systems. Research in the latter field has grown enormously in recent years. Moreover, new perspectives from other disciplines than regional science have been promoted. One distinctive view of relevance in that it is focused on the role in innovation of specific ‘entrepreneurial universities’ in relation to industry and government is, of course, the ‘Triple Helix’ approach. This is reviewed and sympathetically critiqued. A second view, less sympathetically critiqued here, is one that itself attacks all so-called ‘new regionalism’ for stressing the importance of institutions, industry embeddedness and the micro-science of regional economic development. Dazzled by ‘Globalisation 1’ and the totalising power of ‘scale’ geographies, this rejection of the worth of spatial analysis at less than the global or national ‘scalar envelope’ is assessed for its potential insights into weaknesses of the regional innovation systems approach but found wanting in both technical accuracy and scholarly competence. Finally, the state of the art in regional innovation systems research is sketched by reference both to recent longitudinal findings and elaborations into specific technological fields, particularly but not only Bioregional Innovation Systems that help move us towards a newer theory of economic geography in the knowledge economy, based on ‘regional knowledge capabilities.’ The analysis conclusively proposes ‘Globalisation 2’, a ‘ground-up’ knowledge-driven evolution of the earlier ‘top-down’ multilateral trade institution and corporately driven ‘Globalisation 1.’     

Best entry points for structured document retrieval—Part II: Types,usage and effectiveness

Structured document retrieval makes use of document components as the basis of the retrieval process, rather than complete documents. The inherent relationships between these components make it vital to support users’ natural browsing behaviour in order to offer effective and efficient access to structured documents. This paper examines the concept of best entry points, which are document components from which the user can browse to obtain optimal access to relevant document components. It investigates at the types of best entry points in structured document retrieval, and their usage and effectiveness in real information search tasks.