Strategic decision making in small businesses:implications for strategic flexibility and strategic adaptation

Strategic decision making (SDM) in a small business is an informal, highly personalised cognitive process which is emergent in nature. SDM determines the extent to which decision makers generate innovative decision-making options, and is therefore critical in order for small businesses to achieve strategic flexibility to enable strategic adaptation to turbulent environments. By examining SDM in small businesses, this research has the potential to address a major criticism of the extant literature in that it has been pre-occupied with measuring the formality of strategic planning and has neglected the informal, highly personalised and cognitive nature of strategic decision making in a small businesses.

Unsupervised KDD to creatively support managers' decision making with fuzzy association rules:a distribution channel application

To be competitive in contemporary turbulent environments, firms must be capable of processing huge amounts of information, and effectively convert it into actionable knowledge. This is particularly the case in the marketing context, where problems are also usually highly complex, unstructured and ill-defined. In recent years, the development of marketing management support systems has paralleled this evolution in informational problems faced by managers, leading to a growth in the study (and use) of artificial intelligence and soft computing methodologies. Here, we present and implement a novel intelligent system that incorporates fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms to operate in an unsupervised manner. This approach allows the discovery of interesting association rules, which can be linguistically interpreted, in large scale databases (KDD or Knowledge Discovery in Databases.) We then demonstrate its application to a distribution channel problem. It is shown how the proposed system is able to return a number of novel and potentially-interesting associations among variables. Thus, it is argued that our method has significant potential to improve the analysis of marketing and business databases in practice, especially in non-programmed decisional scenarios, as well as to assist scholarly researchers in their exploratory analysis. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.

The development of a market orientation in a turbulent, transitional environment:the case of Ukraine

This research is concerned with the case of Ukraine where there has been a fundamental change in the economic environment engendered by the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy and the resulting conditions of economic crisis. The way that Ukrainian marketers and consumers are reacting to this environmental change is the principal concern of the research together with the basic linkages between critical environmental elements and strategic marketing decisions. This research analyses the way in which marketing evolves in a turbulent, transitional environment. The study is based on eight case analyses within the retail sector of the Ukrainian market. The process of transition to a free market economy leads a researcher to question the validity of existing theories that have been based on empirical data that has been collected in the stable marketing environment of the West. For this reason an in-depth, theory building methodology is preferred. A number of broad research objectives were set. Firstly, to establish whether the sales - production - marketing stages model of marketing evolution, derived from empirical data collected in stable Western environments, is relevant in the context of the turbulent, transitional environment of Ukraine. Secondly, to establish if, in this turbulent, transitional environment, idiosyncratic approaches to marketing are emerging and thirdly to assess the development of attitudes to marketing, organisation for marketing and the development of marketing strategy in Ukraine. The main conclusions of this thesis are firstly, that the stages model of marketing orientation is not relevant in the context of Ukraine, secondly that there are idiosyncratic approaches to marketing emerging in the turbulent, transitional environment of Ukraine and finally that the above developments have a profound impact on the development of attitudes to marketing, organisation for marketing and the development of marketing strategy in Ukraine.