Airports are essential to the global economy, providing significant revenue and driving regional growth. In order to remain competitive and achieve sustainable development, airports must continuously monitor and improve service quality. To this end, understanding traveller perceptions of their experiences is important. While traditional survey-based methods are beneficial, managers are increasingly looking for alternative ways of collecting feedback, such as online reviews. Automated text analysis provides a cost- and time-effective technique with which to analyse large datasets of unsolicited online reviews, providing managers with strategic insights to enhance service quality. This study explores the potential of supplementing traditional airport service quality monitoring methods with automated text analyses to better understand traveller feedback and improve service quality. The results provide new methods to measure airport service quality, offering a fresh perspective on customers’ satisfaction with service quality experiences, and highlighting key strategic implications that can help organisations gain a competitive advantage.

The theory of the post-emotional-self and post-emotional society proposes that the industrialized world has become a post-emotional society in which emotion has become separated from action and feeling. If this were the case, then the language used over time should reflect a change from actual emotions, inner feelings, and sensitivities, to outer directed signals designed to influence and manipulate. To test this hypothesis, we analyze the text of almost a quarter of a century of 10-K reports–detailed, objective records of financial performance, filed annually by a publicly traded company. The textual analysis approach we employ is that of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). This considers language in terms of analytical thinking, clout, authenticity, and tone. Our findings largely confirm the rise of the post-emotional society and offer intriguing insights into the direction of how language is changing. Implications for the theory and practice of public relations are discussed.

Killer applications, or killer apps, are technology applications that profoundly change the way any society thinks, works, and functions. This paper explores Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a killer app, with specific application to marketing. Specifically, this paper employs the lens of technology history to explore the relationship between marketing and AI. Using Kranzberg’s six laws of technology, this paper sheds light on all manner of innovations, how technologies have shaped and impacted society, and how marketers can respond to this. This inquiry offers two main contributions: First, it suggests a number of implications for marketing practice and scholars, derived from each of Kranzberg’s laws. These suggestions are intended to guide marketing practice when implementing or using AI. In addition, this article offers a number of research directions that might be fruitful and important areas for investigation in future scholarly work regarding technology’s impact among marketing scholars.

Many industries and their offerings have fallen victim to managerial shortsightedness. Firms often believe they are invincible and see themselves as immune to threats from seemingly unrelated technologies. There seemed to be no apparent link between bound paper books and the emerging internet, no discernible ties between the video rental business and streaming technologies, and no obvious connections between photography and cellular phones. When these associations were established by means of other, newer technologies, major incumbent firms such as Barnes & Noble, Blockbuster, and Kodak came crashing down. CRISPR is the technology of the moment, one that will enable the programming of evolution. While we might think about gene editing in terms of cures for diseases, its repercussions will impact almost every domain of human and planetary development, and sooner than one might think. In this installment of On The Horizon, we adopt an evolutionary perspective to understand the impact of the genetic revolution on firms regardless of industry.

Interest in entrepreneurial ecosystems—the geographically-bound social networks of institutions and cultural values that give rise to and sustain entrepreneurial activity—have intensified in recent years (Roundy 2016; Spigel 2016). This growing attraction is driven by a need to better understand the concentration of high growth ventures in regions with thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems (Roundy and Fayard 2019). Despite the evolving discussions, few studies have conducted a critical analysis of the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature, with a surge in recent calls to do so (Audretsch et al. 2019). To address this gap, this study presents a bibliographic analysis of extant literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems in academic journal articles, spanning the last 25 years. The aim is to identify the most relevant authors, countries, and institutions in the field and to analyze who has contributed to the growth of the concept since its emergence. The Web of Science Core Collection is used as the repository for the bibliometric information, and bibliographic network mapping is developed using the visualization of similarities, VOSviewer, software tool. The most cited paper was published in Research Policy in 2014, by authors Autio et al. (2014), titled “Entrepreneurial innovation: the importance of context”. A citation count over the past twenty-five years shows that the authors who have influenced the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems the most are Wright, Autio, and Kenney. Other notable scholars who have also made significant contributions to the field are the economists Ács, Audretsch, and Etzkowitz, and the entrepreneurship scholars Isenberg, Spigel, and Stam. The most prolific journals on the topic are Small Business Economics, Journal of Technology Transfer, and European Planning Studies, while country-level impact and research productivity is concentrated in the USA and England. Using citations as a proxy, the most influential and prolific academic literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems is produced in countries, institutions, and co-author networks mostly situated in the USA, UK, and the Netherlands. Most commonly co-occurring keywords are innovation, entrepreneurship, performance, knowledge, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Three key themes are also identified: innovation (linked to performance, technology, university, and industry), entrepreneurship (with a focus on an ecosystem, management, and business), and knowledge (with an emphasis on growth, policy, and networks). The findings of the bibliographic analysis highlight the intensified multi-disciplinary interest in entrepreneurial ecosystem research, underlining the diverse international attention that it has amassed over the last quarter-century. 

In this perspectives article, we analyze 20 years of research on the topics of "innovation man-agement" and "new product development" in the technology and innovation management (TIM) domain. More specifically, we investigate the questions related to three issues: (i) Performance: Which authors, institutions, countries, journals, and papers have been most productive (number of papers) and most influential (number of citations)? (ii) Networks: What are the links between authors, between countries, between institutions, between journals and co-citation? (iii) Attention: What has been the shift in research attention (i.e., stated keywords) over time? To do this, we use the VOSViewer bibliographic method to assess the domain's performance and its changes in research attention and present maps of the knowledge structure and networks. Our study adds to and improves upon previous bibliometric reviews in terms of extensivity (i.e., data from 7,612 papers), scope, and accuracy. In addition to the descriptive evaluations of the domain, we also suggest several implications from these results. For performance, we highlight a weak link be-tween productive authors and influential authors, which could be explained by productive au-thors being part of extensive co-authorship networks, being selective and publishing less but in the highest quality journals, and working in countries with institutions that pioneer research on the topic (and conversely, less influential authors working in countries with an incentive structure that rewards quantity but not quality). Our network results help explain that collaborations are linked to research productivity rather than influential research. Further, our network results reveal collaborations based on country linkages that might create research echo chambers in which research attention is augmented or reinforced by a geographical network. From our results on research attention, we discuss how the dominant keywords are restricted to TIM topics and highly influenced by seminal papers and authors outside the TIM domain. Thus, the field is predominantly inward-looking, drawing from other cognate business and management fields, and hardly drawing from other academic fields. These findings elucidate and extend the concerns other innovation management scholars have raised, noting that the lack of varied and cooperative authorship within the TIM domain has led to stale, repeated methods and metrics in TIM papers, potentially reducing the field's future influence. We conclude by outlining some adverse impli-cations of our paper. We explain how its evaluations could further produce confirmation biases author and institution standing and motivate publication strategies and incentives that exacerbate research misconduct.

Across many industries, individuals are increasingly relying on customer ratings and reviews on social media. While customer reviews often provide detailed diagnostic information about experiences, customer ratings often reduce the experience down to a simple number. Moreover, there is evidence to support that customer rating inflation is occurring on social media sites over time, especially in the sharing economy, and especially with regard to travel and tourism experiences. This paper conceptualizes how customer experiences are reduced into customer reviews and further abridged into customer ratings in both the traditional and sharing economy contexts. We propose that customers observe how service providers present themselves as a professional (established chain hotel) or amateur (owner operated vacation rental apartment), and then form different service expectations and perceptions accordingly. We investigate 55,110 customer reviews and ratings of New York City’s accommodation providers and indeed find evidence of rating inflation over the eight years studied. 

Despite efforts to address the lack of female representation in execu- tive leadership roles, the number of women in leadership roles is still low in comparison to men. Data in the form of online interviews were collected for a sample of 69 CMOs from the World’s Most Influential CMO’s report by Forbes Magazine and analyzed using the automated text analysis software, LIWC, employing the dimensions of Analytic, Clout, Authentic, and Tone. A series of ANOVAs was conducted to determine the impact of gender on these dimensions. Clout and Authentic were significantly impacted by the gender of the CMO. The paper considers two gender communication theories that could potentially explain these differences. The paper concludes by dis- cussing managerial implications, acknowledging the limitations, and identifying avenues for future research.

Healthcare consumers are increasingly turning to online sources such as educational websites, forums and social media platforms to share their experiences with medical services and to demystify the uncertainties associated with undergoing various procedures. This study demonstrates a non-invasive way of understanding the feelings and emotions that consumers share via electronic word of mouth. By using IBM Watson, a content analysis tool that harnesses artificial intelligence, we show how a large amount of unstructured qualitative data can be transformed into quantitative data that can be subsequently analysed to generate novel insights into what patients are sharing about their healthcare experiences online.

Developed economies have seen a shift in economic value away from the production of material goods and toward the production of information-intensive offerings. The process of innovation has evolved in parallel, from staged and gated approaches to agile and iterative processes. Agile innovation models developed in software and technology industries have generally stayed within them, thus applicability of these newer models of innovation to information-intensive market offerings has been limited. We use the paradigm of authorship to provide insights into the evolution of information-intensive offerings and subsequently into the requisite evolution of innovation processes. We demonstrate that agile methods are appropriate for a variety of industries and outputs, and furthermore that more gated and hybrid models of innovation are still relevant in the information economy. To conclude, we discuss how various models of innovation and authorship can be applied by the firm, based on managerial objectives and control.