Mobile marketing apps have been progressively employed as business gadget innovations in developing economies. Research has acknowledged a number of encounters between women entrepreneurs and innovation opportunities. One identified opportunity is the application of technology to enable women entrepreneurs' access to market information with ease. This paper reports the cocreation process of a mobile application contextualized to Tanzanian women entrepreneurs to facilitate access to market information for improving their business performance and livelihood. Our study employs design science research (DSR) strategy for the cocreation and codesign of the mobile application artifact. After evaluating in the wild the mobile application, the women entrepreneurs participating in the study reported that through the codesigned mobile phone app access to market information is facilitated, and their business and the networks could be expanded. The contribution of our paper highlights the benefits of employing codesign and cocreation in combination with DSR to achieve a meaningful and contextualized virtual platform for accessing market information and for business networks expansion through direct contact with target consumers.
Women entrepreneurs are key players in the economic development of societies in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, research has reported that business and technology incubators offer insufficient support to their enterprises. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore and highlight the present status of the contribution of business and technology incubators to women entrepreneurs' businesses. The study collected data through exploratory focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and structured questionnaires. The data were analysed and interpreted using the convergent parallel method. The findings indicate that business incubators provide women's business with training and to some extend enhance their access to market information and business networks. However, the study also finds a lack of contextualisation in the business and technology incubators' services to the real needs of the incubatees, which eventually makes their support less impactful. In this light, the study recommends the provision of incubators' services tailored to the real needs of women businesses. Our work puts forward recommendations to support women entrepreneurs' business development through the contextualisation of the incubators' services tailored to the incubatees' real needs including appropriate training beyond business management. Further investments for establishing new incubation centres are also recommended.
An extended SERVQUAL instrument is developed, validated and used to measure perceived service quality delivered to students by business schools in an emerging market economy. A longitudinal survey is conducted with selected students in their final year of study from two business schools in an emerging market economy. The use of the extended SERVQUAL model is suggested to monitor student/employee expectations and perceptions during and after the education service delivery process. Students attach different weights to the service quality dimensions. A new Process Outcome dimension is found to substantially add to the SERVQUAL model and is more important than the other dimensions. The validity of the extended SERVQUAL model for practical use is α >0.95. Prediction of the level of service quality delivered, using four dimensions, indicates that the level of service quality is explained mostly by Process Outcome and Tangibles dimensions. It is suggested that using the extended SERVQUAL model as a tool can enable managers of business schools to identify the factors on which students/employees base their quality assessment of the education services they receive. Knowledge of these factors will enable managers in emerging economies to periodically assess, sustain and improve quality of the whole service delivery process. Priorities can be set to allocate scarce resources properly to make effective investment decisions to improve quality per school and in higher education, in general. The paper further suggests that regulatory bodies make use of this model when comparing performance of business schools, focusing on student experiences as a supplement to the traditional performance measures.
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