ERB Conference 2015 – Raising the competitiveness game: Challenges for companies and countries
On the 27th November 2015, Faculty of Economics Ljubljana hosted the Annual Conference of the Economic and Business Review (EBR), an internationally recognized journal that publishes papers and various research in the area of applied business studies. The conference started with a plenary session and continued with several parallel sessions whose topics were in the areas of Marketing, Management and Innovation and Economics.
“It is important to be humble – we did not invent the concept.”
The plenary session was led by Professor Aviv Shoham, the University of Haifa, Israel. He opened the session with a personal story about his PhD paper and how his paper was accepted at the conference of the Academy of International Business in India, where he has to present his work in front of hundreds of people. Although the name of his presentation was “the Pitfalls of Managing for Improved International Performance: Challenges for International companies”, he also gave some general advice on being published. His emphasis was on the importance of humbleness and understanding that while we may be writing about a concept, the concept has been here long before we decided to research it.
Marketing session – mountain biking, personal data protection and pricing capabilities
The session chair of the marketing session, professor Barbara Čater, opened the session by kindly greeting everyone present and encouraging them to pose questions to the authors of the research after their presentations and openly debate any the questions asked. By doing so, the audience helps the authors develop their papers further and in the right direction.
The first presenter, Andrej Žigon, showed the audience his research on “Mountain Bike Destination Branding”. Žigon argued that although mountain biking has been growing there is still a clear lack of knowledge and understanding the concept. Furthermore, as the trend developed, many tourist destinations created similar facilities to offer mountain biking to costumers, which shows that destinations have to use their branding to help retain competitive advantage. The managerial implications Andrej Žigon proposed were that management should get actively involved in mountain biking and that stakeholders should be motivated and encouraged to identify themselves with the brand.
The second presentation, “Legal Regulation of the Protection of Personal Data (of Consumers) in Electronic Form” was made by Ana Čertanec. She showed that personal data is increasingly appearing in electronic form, which creates scope for new methods of abuse. Various acts and directives from both the European Union and Slovenia contain legislation pertaining to the regulation of personal data held in electronic form; however, the implementation of these regulations is seriously delayed. By emphasizing the need for implementation and supervision, she proposed establishing institutions and the improvement of supervision over the implementation of protection of data, as well as mechanisms that rectify infringements.
The third and final presentation of the first Marketing session was made by Matej Hladnik, who showed the audience his joint research with Barbara Čater : “Pricing capabilities: Insights from Slovenian Business-To-Business Market”. He argued that pricing is the most neglected dimension of the 4Ps and that there is a lack of research on the topic of price dimensions. By conducting four in-depth interviews with a number of Slovenian companies, some conclusions and similarities between the size of the company and investment in certain types of capital have been reached. In addition, working with foreign companies has an impact on both the understanding and implementation of pricing capabilities among Slovenian businesses.
Despite the broad range of topics covered in the first Marketing session, the audience offered its remarks and questions about all three presentations and gave their opinions on each of the issues, which will hopefully help these young scholars to broaden their views and continue with their research in the right direction.
Mirna Lazar, EFnews
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