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Acquiring Insurance Customer: The CHAID Way
-- P H Anantha Desik and Samarendra Behera
In view of the recent regulatory changes and volatile market conditions, the insurance and finance industry started focusing more on developing strategies to find new customer segments. Acquiring new customers is difficult especially in a fiercely competitive industry like insurance. Also, the dynamic nature of pricing for insurance products makes it even more challenging. In this context, it is essential for an insurer to have knowledge about customers, plan customer-centric offerings, attract more profitable customers and increase the bottom line. In the changing market and economic conditions, the insurance industry has started considering customer-centric rather than a product-centric view to well serve the customers. Information Technology (IT)-driven data analytics now has the capability to discover knowledge hidden inside very large amount of data to help in making business decisions which are customized to customer needs. This paper is an attempt to create business rules from customer lead data which will help in identifying customer segments for better marketing campaign and to acquire new customers, and also to explore answers for specific business problems like low lead conversion ratio, important attributes influencing lead conversion and right customer profile to optimize lead conversion. © 2012 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Eco-Innovation, Knowledge Capital
and the Evolution of the Firm
-- Blandine Laperche and Dimitri Uzunidis
The purpose of this paper is to study the place of eco-innovation in industrial firms’ current strategy and to understand how they achieve this change in their technological trajectory. This is mainly based on the interviews conducted between 2009 and 2012 within eight corporations settled in France. The study revelaed that in a context of crisis, firms consider eco-innovation as a new path which generates growth in future. To refocus their strategy, ‘knowledge capital’, a concept which is considered as a tool to study the dynamic capabilities needed to achieve a change, was reorganized. The capability to develop collaborative research appears central to develop eco-innovation for two reasons: the necessity to share the costs and the risks of development; and the necessity to comply with the various aims and objectives of the stakeholders involved in this type of innovation oriented towards sustainability. Even if the importance of collaboration to develop eco-innovation is confirmed in the literature on eco-innovation, the study is based on eight cases, and is aimed at extending to develop the understanding of eco-innovation development at the firm level. This will also be done notably by including small firms in the population in order to understand the role of size in the development of capabilities needed for scientific and technological networks management. This paper contributes to the literature on the capabilities needed to achieve change; improves the analysis of the roles of collaboration in the case of eco-innovation; and illustrates these ideas with original cases. © 2012 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Knowledge Sharing Barriers: An Approach
of Interpretive Structural Modeling
-- H Madani, R Radfar, M Mahboudi, A Khamse, M Sharbiyani
and R Radmanesh
Knowledge Sharing (KS) is the foundation stone to Knowledge Management (KM). Some variables hinder KS in the organizations. These variables are known as Knowledge Sharing Barriers (KSBs). The objective of this paper is to identify the critical KSBs and their mutual influences. Identification of KSBs which are at the root of hierarchy (called driving KSBs) and those which are at the top of the hierarchy (called dependent KSBs) is the main aim of this research work. The Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) methodology has been used to evolve mutual relationship among the KSBs. It is observed that two KSBs, namely, ‘lack of top management commitment’ and ‘KM is not well understood’, have high driving power and therefore deserve serious attention. Arrangement of KSBs in a hierarchy and their categorization into driver and dependent categories is an exclusive effort in the area of KM. The study concludes with a discussion and the managerial implications. © 2012 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Territorial Intelligence as a Knowledge Creation Process:
The Tunisian National Food Safety System Experience
-- Souad Kamoun Chouk
The study analyzes the perceived benefits of Territorial Intelligence (TI) as a knowledge creation process in the context of food safety in Tunisia. The key territorial stakeholders were interviewed for their perceptions about the current and future situation of food safety. Other sources of information were used to analyze the current state. Research shows that ‘the culture of territoriality’ requires a collective learning process, a high level of integration between the health watch in its environmental and scientific aspects as an internal Information System (IS) for organizations and the warning IS as an inter-organizational one. This integration is considered necessary to control the Risk Analysis (RA) by various stakeholders. It allows a better coordination between risk assessors and risk managers. With the emergence of TI, IS is intended to lead to a unified communication policy targeting both consumers and producers. © 2012 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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