Métodos de control

As depicted in Figure 4.3 (Phase Two), once the expert judges’ feedback was received, decisions about which items to keep or delete in Step 6 were undertaken. As illustrated in Figure 4.5, this study followed the three-stage procedure suggested by Ngo and O'Cass (2009) to make decisions about keeping or deleting items. This procedure was developed as a synthesis of the sum-score and complete rules (Ngo & O'Cass, 2009; O'Cass & Ngo, 2011a). First, within each group of expert judges, the sum-score for an item across three judges was calculated. As noted before, every expert judge was asked to rate an item as either “not representative”, “somewhat representative”, or “very representative”. These judgements were scored as 1, 2, and 3 points respectively. To this end, an item may receive a sum-score ranging from 3 to 9. As shown in Figure 4.5, decision rule 1 focuses on an item being removed if its sum-score was below 6. Following decision rule 2, an item being removed that did not receive a score of 1 (not representative) from one of the three judgements. Subsequent

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to the decision rule 2, decision rule 3 focuses on an item being kept if it received two scores of 3 (very representative) and one score of 2 (somewhat representative). Following this three- stage procedure, 2 items from exploratory strategy, 2 items from exploitative strategy, 2 items from exploratory marketing, 2 items from exploitative marketing, 1 items from exploratory R&D, and 1 item from exploitative R&D. In total, 10 items were deleted and 75 items were kept in the refined item pool.

Figure 4.5 – Decision rules for keeping and/or removing items

In addition to the refined item pool of constructs noted in Table 4.3, eleven items pertaining to demographic characteristics of the firm were added including: types of business the firm is operating (i.e., service provider or manufacturing); types of business model (i.e., B2B or B2C); types of industry the firm is operating within (i.e., IT/telecommunication, construction, industrial automation); the ownership types (state-owned and private); the number of full-time employees; the number of years since the firm was founded; the number of new products the firm has introduced in 2008, 2009, and 2010; respondent’s designated title; and respondent’s education level (i.e., undergraduate, graduate). In terms of the selected product’s characteristics, three items were added to identify product newness (i.e., new to the

Decision Rule 3

Keeping items with scores of 3 and one score of 2

Decision Rule 2

Removing items with one score of 1

Decision Rule 1

Removing items with sum- scores below 6 High Low L ev el o f so ph is tica tio n

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firm and new to the market); branding mode (i.e., launched using a new brand versus an existing brand); and innovation mode (i.e., developed and marketed using the firm’s internal know-how, manufactured and marketed under license of another firm).

Finally, to ensure the integrity and reliability of the responses obtained, this study adopted a similar procedure to Atuahene-Gima (2005) and De Luca and Atuahene-Gima (2007) in which two specific questions were developed to assess respondents’ knowledge and confidence. First, the respondents were asked to clarify that they were knowledgeable about their firms’ strategies, routines, characteristics, performance and business environment (at the beginning of the questionnaire) using 7-point scale (1= “Not at all” to 7= “Very much so”). Second, they were asked to identify their confidence in possessing the necessary knowledge to complete the statements asked throughout the questionnaire (at the end of the questionnaire) using 7-point scale (1= “Not at all” to 7= “Very much so”). Adopting this procedure requires a judgement about keeping and removing respondents and it was decided to drop any respondents who answered below 5 on these two questions. As shown in Table 4.4, the final questionnaire encompasses 91 items.

Table 4.4 – Refined item pool and demographic items

Constructs Number of Items

Exploratory strategy 6 Exploitative strategy 6 Exploratory R&D 5 Exploitative R&D 5 Exploratory marketing 14 Exploitative marketing 14 Product Performance 8 Firm Performance 7 Control Variables 10 Demographic items 11

Selected Product’s Characteristics 3 Respondent’s knowledge quality 2

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Step 7: Pre-test

According to Figure 4.3 (Phase Two), after purifying the measures through face validity assessments, pre-testing was conducted before launching the full-scale questionnaire. Pre- testing can be conducted quantitatively or qualitatively (Presser et al., 2004). This study adopted a qualitative approach of pre-testing which has been widely used in the marketing literature (e.g., Jaworski & Kohli, 1993; Zhou, Yim, & Tse, 2005). To do so, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty marketing and management senior managers following the procedure suggested by Presser et al. (2004) and DeSarbo et al. (2005). Before conducting interviews the questionnaires were translated into Persian in Iran following the conventional back-translation process suggested by Atuahene-Gima (2005) (see Section 4.5.2.3). Senior managers were asked to complete and discuss the items of the questionnaire. In particular, they were asked whether they think of more than one way to interpret what each item was asking and to report these interpretations. Findings from the in-depth interviews with senior managers revealed that in general the items of the questionnaire were understandable and meaningful. In summary, having completed all items on the questionnaire and the in-depth interviews with senior managers, no problems were reported on any of the items, indicating that the questionnaire was clear of serious flaws. In addition, the feedback obtained from the pre-test allowed researchers to make minor formatting changes in terms of layout (i.e., highlight, bold) to enhance the readability of the survey.