King of the Road or Caught in the Headlights? - A Managerial Perspective on the Role and Execution of Peripheral Vision in the German Car Rental Industry
(2018) MGTN59 20181Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- The failure or flourishing of companies in their core businesses can often be attributed to events and developments rooting outside their focus of attention. Many research streams are concerned with early detection, interpretation and acting upon these weak signals from companies’ peripheries - with Peripheral Vision by Schoemaker & Day (2006) being one of the most systematic approaches. Due to exciting recent developments and possible future technological disruptions in its periphery, the mobility sector in general and the car rental industry in particular is an especially vulnerable domain worthy of further discussion.
Based on this, the thesis at hand serves a dual purpose: for one, it investigates the need and capability of the... (More) - The failure or flourishing of companies in their core businesses can often be attributed to events and developments rooting outside their focus of attention. Many research streams are concerned with early detection, interpretation and acting upon these weak signals from companies’ peripheries - with Peripheral Vision by Schoemaker & Day (2006) being one of the most systematic approaches. Due to exciting recent developments and possible future technological disruptions in its periphery, the mobility sector in general and the car rental industry in particular is an especially vulnerable domain worthy of further discussion.
Based on this, the thesis at hand serves a dual purpose: for one, it investigates the need and capability of the German car rental industry to sense, interpret and act upon these weak signals from its periphery, using the Peripheral Vision framework as a base for the assessment. Secondly, the framework itself is examined: by assessing the model’s performance in the process of analysing the industry for its Peripheral Vision, it will create insights on the benefits and limitations of a concept which has never been tested before. This is achieved using a mixed method: qualitatively, research on the industry itself is complemented with a semi-structured interview of an industry expert. Additionally, twelve managers of Germany’s two leading car rental companies were quantitatively questioned using the framework’s self-assessment test. These findings were then analyzed according to the framework’s paradigm as well as through additionally applied statistical tests.
Our results show that the need of the car rental industry to employ Peripheral Vision is remarkably high: technological, political and social trends will disrupt the mobility sector - and not all of these developments are conceivable yet. On the other hand, the capability for Peripheral Vision differs significantly among the industry players. The performance of the Peripheral Vision framework is two-sided: while the model failed to accurately reproduce the industry’s high need for Peripheral Vision, the process of measuring capability produced precise and credible results, leading to a rather ambivalent judgement of the framework. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/8944727
- author
- Hempel, Christian LU and Eichinger, Felix Maximilian LU
- supervisor
-
- Bo Göransson LU
- organization
- course
- MGTN59 20181
- year
- 2018
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- car rental, German car rental market, Europcar, Sixt, mobility, Peripheral Vision, George Day, Paul Schoemaker, strategic eye exam, periphery scanning, weak signals
- language
- English
- id
- 8944727
- date added to LUP
- 2018-06-27 14:32:13
- date last changed
- 2018-06-27 14:32:13
@misc{8944727,
abstract = {{The failure or flourishing of companies in their core businesses can often be attributed to events and developments rooting outside their focus of attention. Many research streams are concerned with early detection, interpretation and acting upon these weak signals from companies’ peripheries - with Peripheral Vision by Schoemaker & Day (2006) being one of the most systematic approaches. Due to exciting recent developments and possible future technological disruptions in its periphery, the mobility sector in general and the car rental industry in particular is an especially vulnerable domain worthy of further discussion.
Based on this, the thesis at hand serves a dual purpose: for one, it investigates the need and capability of the German car rental industry to sense, interpret and act upon these weak signals from its periphery, using the Peripheral Vision framework as a base for the assessment. Secondly, the framework itself is examined: by assessing the model’s performance in the process of analysing the industry for its Peripheral Vision, it will create insights on the benefits and limitations of a concept which has never been tested before. This is achieved using a mixed method: qualitatively, research on the industry itself is complemented with a semi-structured interview of an industry expert. Additionally, twelve managers of Germany’s two leading car rental companies were quantitatively questioned using the framework’s self-assessment test. These findings were then analyzed according to the framework’s paradigm as well as through additionally applied statistical tests.
Our results show that the need of the car rental industry to employ Peripheral Vision is remarkably high: technological, political and social trends will disrupt the mobility sector - and not all of these developments are conceivable yet. On the other hand, the capability for Peripheral Vision differs significantly among the industry players. The performance of the Peripheral Vision framework is two-sided: while the model failed to accurately reproduce the industry’s high need for Peripheral Vision, the process of measuring capability produced precise and credible results, leading to a rather ambivalent judgement of the framework.}},
author = {{Hempel, Christian and Eichinger, Felix Maximilian}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{King of the Road or Caught in the Headlights? - A Managerial Perspective on the Role and Execution of Peripheral Vision in the German Car Rental Industry}},
year = {{2018}},
}