After the 2008 economic slowdown, and with increasing assault from enterprises from emerging economies, many innovative strategic leaders of multinational enterprises are forced to radically transform their enterprises. They often choose to change from low-cost strategy to innovation-driven product differentiation strategy. In this study, we use a multi-level Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) a...

The influence of company reputation or what is often referred to as corporate reputation on branding strategy and producing intangible asset for different industries has been researched in western countries, but there is a gap for the generalizability of findings to countries out of the United State and Europe. To establish the western researcher's external validity of theories in other countri...

The market for security software has witnessed an unprecedented growth in recent years. A closer examination of this market reveals that, unlike a traditional software market, the use of vertical differentiation strategy is quite limited in this market. In this paper, we develop a quantitative model to explore the possible reason. Our model identifies a negative network externality effect as th...

Promotion of remyelination is an important therapeutic strategy to facilitate functional recovery after traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). Transplantation of neural stem cells (NSCs) or oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) has been used to enhance remyelination after SCI. However, the microenvironment in the injured spinal cord is inhibitory for oligodendrocyte (OL) differentiation of NSCs o...

A standard “solution” offered to the deleterious effects of all-out price competition is for firms to engage in differentiation strategies. This solution, however, depends critically on the inability of rivals to imitate a successful differentiation strategy. With imitation, we show how “Red Queen” pricing effects can arise: All firms have an incentive to vertically differentiate and increase m...

The value of delayed differentiation (aka postponement) for a monopolist has been extensively studied in the Operations literature. We analyze the case of (imperfectly) competitive markets with demand uncertainty, wherein the choice of supply chain configuration (early/delayed differentiation) is endogenous to the competing firms. We characterize firms’ choices in equilibrium and analyze the ef...

In the past few decades, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were of great interest as a model system for studying early developmental processes and because of their potential therapeutic applications in regenerative medicine. However, the underlying mechanisms of ESC differentiation remain unclear, which limits our exploration of the therapeutic potential of stem cells. Fortunately, the increasing qua...

This research investigates that brand differentiation creating superior values can be achieved not only by adding meaningful attributes but also meaningless attributes, which is called “trivial attribute effect.” Two studies provided empirical evidences as following; first, trivial attribute effect creates a strong brand differentiation even after subjects realize that trivial attribute has no ...

Due to the abilities of real-time sensing and information sharing, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been applied in more and more fields. Basing on the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), the issue about heterogeneous network integration is becoming more important. We first analyze the new businesses that arise recently for cell phone users as well as the potential effect on carrying networ...