IMPACT : International Journal of Research in Business Management

11-24

Authors: SORAB SADRI & JAYASHREE SADRI

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need to promote tourism in Kerala and in that regard a strategic examination of the issues have been attempted. The central theme of the paper is to highlight the fact that Kerala is richly endowed with natural beauty making it an ideal place where tourism can be promoted. The promotion of tourism it is argued will fetch revenue for the state both in Indian and foreign currency. This will enable the government to have a greater aggregate disposable income to moot its social programmes, improve its infrastructure, employment potential and thereby improve the quality of life of the populace. Above all it will generate employment, create an enhanced aggregate disposable income and thereby revive the falling fortunes of Kerala’s economy. Kerala has had the distinction of having the first socialist government in India under the legendary E M S Namboodripad. It boasts a high level of social consciousness and a high level of education across all social strata. The state boasts of 100% literacy and the fact that the term literacy may imply only the ability to sign one’s name and engage in socialist rhetoric seems immaterial. Unemployment levels are high and per capita output of labour is low. Moreover industrial development in the state is as poor as is the infrastructure. The roads for instance are narrow, winding and highly dangerous to travel on. The attitude of Kerala Tourism development Corporation KTDC could be more proactive and customer friendly that it is. With this contradictory background we have taken up a case for developing tourism industry in Kerala from a strategic management perspective. In this paper the case of Kozhikode (earlier Calicut) has been taken up to make our point. The choice of Kozhikode was made because of two reasons. The first author spent a full semester as Visiting professor of Business Policy at IIM (K) and made the observations first hand. The second author converted these observations into an argument for sustainable development. The major tourism requirements are accommodation transport intermediaries i.e. travel agents, attractions and amenities. A cursory inspection of the hospitality sector might suggest that a few large companies dominate the market, giving the impression of an oligopolistic structure. However the service hospitality sector is mostly fragmented in many small units where location and the spatial distribution of accommodation are important factors determining the degree of competition. The wide range and quality of accommodation, its multi product nature, seasonal variations in demand, introduce an additional dimension into the operation of the market.

35-44

Authors: MOHIT SHARMA & ADITI MATHUR

The purpose of the paper is to examine the current scenario of Indian mango exports and suggest measures to enhance the same by the adoption of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) standards. India is the largest mango but the production to export ratio for Indian mangoes is about 0.22, which is comparatively very low Indian mango export destinations are mainly UAE (60%), UK (16%), Saudi Arabia (4%) and Kuwait (3%). Among major constraints for Indian mangoes in international market is lack of adherence to quality standards. According to the report of APEDA (2013-14), Maharashtra contributes the highest exports of mangoes with around 85.7% share of the total Indian mango export; on the contrary, the major producer of mango is Uttar Pradesh which contributes to only 2% share in export. Uttar Pradesh is the major producer of Dashehari variety which is one of the most preferred Indian mango varieties in international market. Growers association (mahamango), online traceability system (mangonet), farmers - co-operative linkages, support from state government are found to be the most favorable factors for boosting exports from Maharashtra. The private certification agency GLOBALGAP existed in India for providing GAP certification to the produce, quite recently INDGAP got established to facilitate the process. Further study proposes that by the adoption of GAP standards the competitive pricing to the farmer gets assured and huge potential exists to export mangoes from India, the need is to strive hard and adopt the internationally recognized quality standards during the production and processing.

47-62

Authors: ULO, FABIAN U & MAMAH, AUGUSTINE AIK

In Nigeria, most organization managers absolutely ignore scanning the turbulent and complex environments in which they operate. The absolute neglect to constantly scan the environments by organisation management often result in colossal consequences of not developing new ventures, non-identification of threats and weakness, new opportunities and strengths not improved upon, inadequate new job creation, decrease in profit base and dwindling productivity/performance of the organisation. Based on these problems, this paper examined the extent to which environmental scanning as a strategic management tool could address the problems of new venture creation and product innovation within Nigerian corporate organisations in order to sustain competitive advantage. Two firms in the South East, Nigeria plastic manufacturing industry were selected for investigation. Questionnaire was designed using five point Likert scales. Data collected were summarized in tables, percentages and, analyzed with Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient at 5% level of significance using n-2 degrees of freedom. The result was subjected to t-statistic test. It was discovered that environmental scanning has significance positive relationship with new venture creation and that product innovation is as a result of environmental scanning by the firms. Based on the findings, the study recommended that plastic firms in the South East, and Nigeria should constantly scan the environments in which they operate so as to continually innovate their products and create more ventures that will firm’s sustain competitive advantage.

71-84

Authors: SAMUEL YAKEDOHO NKANOR & GABRIEL OBASI CHIDOZIE UDU

This study evaluated the effects of electronic internally generated revenue (e-IGR) on infrastructural development of Ebonyi State. The main objective of the study is to determine the degree of manual and electronic internally generated revenue’s impact on infrastructure using capital expenditure as proxy. The dwindling revenue from oil and continued need for public utilities caused the need to empirically determine this relationship. To achieve the main objective of this study, three hypotheses were formulated. Ex-post facto research design was used in this work which involved the use of existing data. Data components of manual and electronic revenue and capital expenditure (infrastructure) of Ebonyi State government between 2011 and 2014 was collected and analyzed using regression and Pearson correlation method with the help of SPSS version 17.0. Results show that the extent of relationship between each independent variable (IGR and e- IGR) were very low on the dependent variable which is Infrastructure development using capital expenditure, but cannot ignore the rate at which their degree changed, signifying an increase in associations. In general, it was discovered that there exist no significant degree of relationship of variables studied. This implies that capital expenditure on infrastructure did not largely depend on electronic internally generated revenue in Ebonyi State within the years studied, rather on monthly statutory allocations which is largely from oil revenue. The study therefore recommends that the electronic approach to internally generated revenue be reviewed as a matter of urgency because of the dwindling oil revenue to the State. The executive arm of the state should also take implementation of state revenue laws more seriously

99-108

Authors: SAMUEL Y. RUAN SHIH-CHANG WANG

The differential evolution approach has become a promising optimization technique in recent decades. It has been successfully applied to solve various problems in science and engineering fields; however, few applications have been addressed in the domain of supply chain management. In this paper, an improved DE approach is proposed for the aggregate planning problem in a supply chain. The approach comprises an improved DE variant with a winner-based constraint handling mechanism called the winner-based constrained differential evolution. To test the performance of the approach, it is verified and compared with most commonly used DE approaches. The experimental study shows that the winner-based constrained differential evolution possesses particular qualities in convergence, accuracy, and reliability for the aggregate planning problem in supply chains.