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Although both the academic and the trade literature have widely acknowledged the need to foster the development of more-innovative products, little empirical research has examined the cognitive processes underlying the creation of these novel product concepts. In this research, three empirical studies examine how analogical thinking influences the idea-generation stage of the new product development process. The first study uses the verbal protocols of real-world industrial designers to trace the role of analogy in the context of a new product development task, and the second and third studies use an experimental approach to assess the effectiveness of different ideation strategies and conditions. Findings from these studies indicate that the originality of the resulting product design is influenced by the extent of analogical transfer, the type of analogies used, and the presence of external primes. In addition, these studies reveal a positive relationship between the originality of the product concept and consumers' willingness to pay for it, an important measure in the concept-testing phase of product development.

Despite the social and (increasingly) commercial significance of sport and sporting bodies worldwide, they remain under‐represented in the mainstream management literature. One of the more recent and dramatic examples of the global sports–media nexus is the ‘Super League saga’ in Australia. This paper recounts the tale of the Super League saga, providing a holistic analysis of the events and competitive issues arising by drawing on literatures concerning the economic nature and value of sports leagues, the resource‐based view of the firm and the nature of psychological contracts in changing environments. The analysis confirms the general monopolistic tendencies of professional sports leagues in an increasingly global industry driven by the sports–media nexus, in accord with a number of comparable cases internationally. The particular conditions of the Australian marketplace that exacerbate this tendency beyond, for example, that found in the USA, and differences in the outcomes of battles between rival leagues are also considered. The Super League saga portrays the importance of effective management of resources key to the production of the ‘rugby league product’ including, among others, the often over‐looked importance of careful management of local resources for the success of global strategies, and, where human resources are key, the importance of psychological contracting. The holistic analysis of the Super League saga in Australia affords lessons that extend well beyond the realm of sports.

Competitive advantage is a key concept in strategic management research for a number of reasons—not the least of which is that an avowed consequence of its attainment is held to be superior economic performance. However, few prior empirical studies have directly and systematically documented the incidence or prevalence of persistent superior economic performance. The research reported here is based on empirical studies of a large number of industry samples for which longitudinal data were stratified by levels of performance using a new methodology and then analyzed in terms of their dynamics. This new stratification technique was used in lieu of autoregressive methods employed in prior studies of performance persistence to allow for a true outlier analysis because persistent superior economic performance both has been argued theoretically, and found empirically, to be rare. Detailed results from a sample of 6,772 firms in 40 industries over 25 years are presented to illustrate the findings that: (1) while some firms do exhibit superior economic performance, (2) only a very small minority do so, and (3) the phenomenon very rarely persists for long time frames. These results, while not providing direct support for a particular extant strategic management or economic theory concerning firm performance, are most consonant with the resource-based view of the firm and have implications for significant aspects of other received strategic management and economic theories.

We present an econometric method for estimating the parameters of a diffusion model from discretely sampled data. The estimator is transparent, adaptive, and inherits the asymptotic properties of the generally unattainable maximum likelihood estimator. We use this method to estimate a new continuous-time model of the joint dynamics of interest rates in two countries and the exchange rate between the two currencies. The model allows financial markets to be incomplete and specifies the degree of incompleteness as a stochastic process. Our empirical results offer several new insights into the dynamics of exchange rates.