Central European Business Review

5-16

Authors: Bojana Suzić, Miroslav Karlíček, Václav Stříteský

Conceptual evolution of the Internet and Web, substantiated through Web 2.0 and the emergence of online social networks, reinvented the way that enterprises interact with their customers. Museums, as cultural institutions with an important mission, are not unaffected by that change, however. In order to fulfil their duties and societal purpose successfully, they have to attract visitors’ attention and engage the public effectively in a highly competitive and saturated environment. The goal of this paper is to analyze and compare the social media presence of museums in two European capitals. It focuses on museums in Prague and Berlin, and considers their general Web presence and the dynamics of activities on Facebook. In order to understand the integrative social media approach of museums in both regions, we investigated additionally Twitter and Youtube presence among museums with a Facebook account. The study reveals a lower presence of Prague museums both on the Web and in the identified social media networks, in comparison to Berlin museums. Moreover, we conclude that the presence of both regional museums on social media networks is low, while the integration and simultaneous application of more networks at the same time are negligible, both for Prague and Berlin museums.

37-46

Authors: Edina Berlinger, Gyorgy Walter

Income contingent schemes have been widely used in student lending in the last few decades. Recently, in the aftermath of the crisis of 2007-2008, several authors argued that income contingent loans have much better risk profiles than traditional fixed loans, and they proposed to extend their scope to other areas of retail lending, too. Hence, understanding this scheme can be relevant from the point of view of both human resource management and financial engineering. In this paper we analyzed the unusual characteristics of income contingent repayments, and derived closed formulas for stability, success and shape. We concluded that humped debt paths can be frightening; however, if the growth rate of the debt is lower than the growth rate of the income, then it is not a debt trap, but a natural consequence of this patient and flexible scheme, which requires new methods of communication, risk management, financing and administration.

57-73

Authors: Lidia Danik, Izabela Kowalik, Petr Král

The goal of this paper is to compare the characteristics of Polish and Czech companies which follow the Born Global internationalization model. More concretely, the analysis aims to discover the differences or similarities in terms of the internationalization paths of Polish and Czech SMEs in the characteristics of their managers in terms of the so-called “international vision” and in their innovativeness level. The introductory part of article provides a description of this internationalization model and the International New Ventures traits (INV) and summarizes the recent studies on this topic conducted in Poland and Czech Republic. In the empirical part, the International New Ventures from the two countries are compared. The Polish sample includes 105 companies which were surveyed with use of computer assisted telephone interviews in autumn 2014. For the Czech Republic, the sample consists of 54 small and medium-sized companies, which were surveyed using the computer assisted web interviews from November 2013 till January 2014. The surveyed companies in both countries fulfilled the definition of Born Globals. Descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation analysis and non-parametric tests are applied to accomplish the goals of the paper.

5-28

Authors: Daniel Seelhofer

This conceptual paper examines the rationale for strategic planning in business schools and outlines an applied strategy development and controlling process that has been in use at a major Swiss business school for several years, contributing to a significant strengthening of the school's strategic position. It explains the strategy hierarchy and the strategy planning cycle, describes how to conduct a consistent strategic situation analysis, and details how to develop and manage a coherent strategy at all levels (normative, strategic, tactical, and operational), including type, nature, and structure of the corresponding documents.

37-44

Authors: Andrea Szalavetz

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of MNCs’ crisis-driven cost-cutting and organizational restructuring actions on their local subsidiaries in Hungary. We hypothesize that much of the cost-cutting minded and efficiency-focused organizational transformation prompted by the global crisis of 2008 can actually be beneficial to some subsidiaries. Drawing on interviews carried out at 13 manufacturing subsidiaries, we find that upgrading occurs partly as a consequence of MNCs’ pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency, partly as an outcome of organizational restructuring and resources reallocation, and partly as a result of an increasing delegation of advanced functions to production subsidiaries. Although the Hungarian subsidiaries were on the receiving end: they hosted some of the relocated production activities, the main managerial implication is that caution is needed, success often breeds failure. The resulting overconfidence may prevent local managers and policy-makers from monitoring and analyzing industry-specific technological and market trends to detect opportunities and threats as early as possible.

62-68

Authors: Hana Machková

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