Research Contribution

As what we mentioned in the previous paragraphs, we addressed three research purposes, which includes identifying the dimensions of local cultural which would impact individuals, building the “cultural interpretation” database that can make SMBs know the influence of culture context on them, and the last but not the least through knowing the cultural impact on the SMBs and then analyzing how those cultural interpretation can lead SMBs to do innovation on their current service.

When the time we accomplish the research purposes, we also creates the following contributions attempted:

(1) In this research, come up with a local cultural model which can describe the main local culture context that have influenced individual to think, act or even their inner behavior.

(2) Bring up the social cultural drivers (i.e., cultural interpretations) that might influence SMBs or lead SMBs to do innovation.

(3) Implement those social cultural drivers into the practical, utilizing those social cultural drivers as hints and guidelines for SMBs to do different type of service innovation based on culture.

8 1.6 Content Organization

The research framework of this study is shown below as Figure 1-1, which is composed of three segments: environment, IS research and knowledge base.

Figure 1-1 Information System Research Framework (Hever et al., 2004) This content of this dissertation is divided into the following part:

 Chapter 1 – Introduction

Describe the environment or the situation that we are discussing and researching for. The environment defines the context that the research problem or the phenomena of interest occurs (Hever et al., 2004). The environment is composed by three parts: people, organizations and technology. Similarly, in our research, people refer to the SMB owners, who face the pressure of survival or who want to break through the current status but do not know how to do; organization can be viewed as the strength, advantage, strategies, structure and culture they currently have, that can represent SMB‟s enterprise spirit and characteristic;

9

technology here represents SMB‟s existing or planned technology, which can make them manage the business more smoothly and also help them enlarge their capabilities. After the environment analysis, we can see the lack and need of the SMB.

 Chapter 2 – Literature Review

To survey and collect the previous related research to this study, such as the relationship between cultural influence, personality and service innovation. We view these former research as our foundations, by knowing the existing related research by their merit and inadequate can accelerate us to conduct our research.

 Chapter 3 – Motivation Application

In this chapter we will depict the prior related research and then provide the whole picture of our research project and demonstrate the function of this study within the whole research project context.

 Chapter 4 – A Semantic – Based Service Innovations Recommend Mechanism In this chapter we elaborate the conceptual framework that lead the development of our system and the architecture of the semantic-based innovation recommend system. Besides the description and the explanation of detail design and methodology, the components of relates research problem will also address here.

 Chapter 5 – Application Scenario

In this chapter, we demonstrate an application scenario to show how to use our system, and we also present our back stage flow to explain the mechanism of our on stage process.

 Chapter 6 – Evaluations

To evaluate our propositions, in this chapter, here we use blog analysis to justify our assumption and furthermore we use interview data to evaluate our

10

propositions. We expect to justify our propositions via the process of encoding the raw data which we got from the in-depth interview.

 Chapter 7 – Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter is to conclude our research contribution and the implications of our research. Moreover, the limitation and future research of our study will also be addressed in this chapter.

11

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

In Chapter 2, we provide the background of the previous relevant research addressing cultural influence and SMBs, cultural influence and service innovation, and semantic information system for establishing the foundation and the position of our proposed idea about the local culture‟s influences on SMBs and how SMBs convey the idea and impression to the customers. The first part is to know the relationship between cultural influence and SMBs by examining the existing research about how culture influence SMBs‟ management, such as service offering and decision making. Following the discussion about how cultural influence SMBs, a review of cultural and service innovation needs to be addressed here, and these literatures are provided to conceive the importance and the trend of culture industry development and service innovation, and illustrate the interrelationship between culture and service innovation. Finally, the introduction of semantic information system is given to know the whole architecture and process of our research building.

Chapter 2 has three intentions: First, we review the cultural influence on SMBs different aspects. Second, we examine the trend of cultural innovation and the relationship of SMBs‟ cultural background. The third is to describe the technology we adopt to build our research system and the architecture.

2.1 Culture and SMBs

People grow up in different countries, in different periods, and the ideas they come out cannot help but reflect the effect of their environment (Hofstede, 1993).

When the ideas and decision come out from the SMBs, we can call it the management of their business. However, the definition of management differs from one country to the other, and it should take local conditions such as historical and cultural to consider

12

and understand its process, problems and school of thought; moreover, it is also related to religion and to beliefs about science (Hofstede, 1993). Taking Chinese culture for example, in general, religion plays an important role on the traditional Chinese culture; they affect individual‟s thought and government policy (Yu & Miller, 2003). Yu and Miller (2003) summarized the main characteristics of Chinese business/management style which is under influences of three doctrines (religion) as shown in Table 2-1 below.

Table 2-1 The Main Characteristics of Chinese Business Style Influenced By the Three Doctrines (Yu & Miller, 2003)

In the Table 2-1, it shows the business style of different Chinese belief, due to its different doctrine, coming out to be different business style. For example, the business style of Buddhism is obey, trust, moral and stable mentality; however, in the Taoism, it becomes control, collectivism and hierarchy and the business style of Confucianism is more focus on the friendship, network and loyalty.

In addition, different cultures will contribute to different types of good service behaviors (Winsted, 1997). The good service behaviors can be viewed as one of the management or business style of SMBs in terms of the way the SMBs contribute. As we mentioned earlier, the management will be different due to the different of local conditions, such as cultural, historical, religion, etc. Hence, Hofstede‟s (1993) culture study mentioned that culture can be described in five dimensions, and we can use this to make some predictions on the way to know their society operates, including

13

management. For the reason that the research of Hofstede is based on the employee‟s working attitude, and the employee here also includes the management level, who has the responsibility to do the management task in the film. Therefore, According to Hofstede‟s research, each of these cultural dimensions all has two opposing sides, as illustrated in below (Hofstede, 1994):

(1) Power Distance: It can be defined as the inequality between people. In high power distance, people can easily accept unequal, however; in low power distance, people are relatively equal.

(2) Uncertainty Avoidance: It can be defined as the degree of tolerance for structured or unstructured situations. For the people living in a country, structured situation are those with the clear rules and guides to tell ones how to act and behave; in contrast, unstructured situation are the things which with ambiguous situation and people cannot easily predict what it will be in the future. The people who have high uncertainty avoidance will tend to be more nervous energy, and the people who have low uncertainty avoidance will show more curious about the new things.

(3) Masculinity: It can be defined as the manlier role, which values success, competition and ambition, etc higher than everything in their life. The opposite of the masculinity is femininity, which refers to more gentle roles, such as caring, well relationship maintaining, etc.

(4) Individualism: It can be defined as the degree of people who prefer to work alone or to be in a team work. That is, the opposite of individualism is collectivism.

(5) Long-term Oriented: It can be defined as the values oriented which people find towards the future. Long-term oriented one considers the value which he can find more in the future; nevertheless, the one who is short-term oriented will consider

14

finding the value more in the present or the past.

Besides Hofstede (1993), Adler (1991) also proposed the culture and behavior cycle theory to demonstrate how culture (values, beliefs and attitudes) influences management behavior. Furthermore, not only the management style, the guidance of individuals‟ decision making is given by cultures different rules and principles (Donnel A. Briley et al., 2000). Additionally, Donnel A. Briley et al., (2000) still mentioned that “cultural differences in the frequency of generating particular types of reasons mediated the difference in choices.” Cultures differences include the patterns of decision making, how the individual is related to each other, and ways in completing works and responding to change (Meen, 1995). The decision making rules and principles that an individual possesses are derived from their cultural knowledge (Donnel A. Briley et al., 2000). We should have both knowledge and empathy of the entire local scene in order to understand and realize the management in a country (Hofstede, 1993).

With the previous review of related research, we can realize that different culture will cultivate different business management style, and it can approve that culture do effect SMBs. Therefore, to further understand the effect of culture to the SMBs management style (i.e. decision making, service offering) in Taiwan, our study intends to develop a examine model , which includes the different dimensions (social cultural embodied, religion, social relationship) of Taiwan‟s local culture context and Hofstede‟s cultural dimensions and Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa &

McCrae, 1992), in order to realize Taiwan SMBs local culture and how local culture effect SMB‟s business behavior.

15 2.2 Culture and Service Innovation

Culture and creative industries are getting more and more attention now, there are many different policy regimes that come to support and promote the development of culture and creative industries (Cunningham, 2002). Additionally, many western countries focused on the development of local cultural activities (Kong, 2000). In order to develop culture industries, we can combine creativeness with the local culture and then produce a series of service and products innovation (Zhong et al., 2008).

“The definition of service innovation in firms can be characterized by changes in (1) the service concept, (2) client interface, (3) delivery systems and (4) technological options. (J.P.J de Jong et al., 2003)” Service innovation can be an idea for a performance in offering customers a sufficient appealing new benefit (Berry et al., 2006). After knowing that we can use service innovation to facilitate the development of culture industries and give customers a whole new experience. The following is the practical example about utilizing culture to do service innovation in order to develop cultural industry.

Nearly, Taiwan government is working hard on facilitate the development of culture and creative industry; they focus on how to utilize culture to form a series of creative design. The relationship of culture and industry is becoming closer and closer.

For industry, adding the elements of culture can create the core value of the products;

for culture, industry can be the energy to facilitate the development of culture (Lin &

Lin, 2009). And we are looking forward of the product value added within the utilization of culture (Lin & Lin, 2009). Lin (2009) proposed that we should transfer culture and creative industry to the industry which is based on the service innovation and with the intrusion of local culture, technology and aesthetics. According to Lin‟s (2008) integrative creative living industry research model, it demonstrated that if we

16

want to develop culture and creative industry, we have to facilitate and design it with creativity in order to become a good feeling experience to the customers. The following Figure 2-1, it displays a process of create a story of the service and then empathizes customers with the atmosphere created by the server, in order to let customers feel impressed and happy to the service (Lin, 2011). Lin (et. al., 2010 c) wants to use this model to know the hostel case of Chinkuashi, how they utilize the elements of local culture and the innovation of service to impress and convey their caring to the customers.

Figure 2-1 Feeling Experience Mode (Lin et.al, 2010c)

This hostel located in Chinkuashi, the place which is full of the historical remains, beautiful scenery and the beauty of humanities spirit and local culture; it takes time to feel and sense with heart slowly (Lin et. al., 2010 c). Accordingly, Lin (2011) used this hostel to show the practical operation of feeling experience mode, as indicated in Table 2-2.

17

Table 2-2 The Hostel in Chinkuashi Case of apply Feeling Experience Mode (Lin et. al., 2010 c) It has five rows in Table 2-2. The first row is the description of “sense”, which means the service that they offer to the customer will satisfy customer‟s sense, includes high quality infrastructure service, customized room smelling and treating customer like close friend. The second row is about the “feeling” such as the hostel offering very warm and heart-touched room which will make tourist to remind the trip after or some short words but will arouse the deep feeling of the readers. The third row is about

“thinking” such as the hostel trying to inspire customer to think about the culture of that area, and to think about what will be the souvenir to memorize the place. The fourth row is about “active” such as the hostel of Chinkuashi wanting to create their place as a place which can make customers feel relaxed, cozy and fulfill their energy.

The last flow is the most important one called “relevance” such as the hostel viewing the interaction with customers and their service evaluation feedback importantly, and expecting to provide the service which is start from the heart (Lin et. al., 2010 c). In this case, it introduces new service innovation into the business model in order to make customers impressed and then the creative living industry can become sustainable management. Moreover, Lin (2011) also pointed out that we have to utilize culture and technology on the design of living style and living originality, in order to elevate the competitive strength of the design industry.

18

The above case demonstrates the example of connecting culture and service innovation together to guide the growth and competitive strength of the design industry. However, knowing the importance of service innovation is not enough, there are many aspects influencing the result of service innovation, especially” people”. We have to know that to support service innovation, people are the key point of new service development success or not (J.P.J de Jong et al., 2003), especially when we want to utilize the local cultural with service innovation.

If we want to utilize the local culture, and then achieve the goal of develop local cultural industries by service innovation; we then have to know the people there deeply. For the reason that people are influenced by their culture background; the culture context will contribute different mental programming determines the type of people‟s thinking, feeling and acting (Hofstede, 1984). Accordingly, knowing the people who deliver and create the new service innovation is important. In the small and medium-size business, the owner operates and dominates the firm, their culture background such as beliefs, attitudes will affect the way they manage and organize the business work; and furthermore, owner‟s underlying culture–influenced beliefs and attitudes would influence the changes of the business (Bhaskaran, 2006). For example, if people grow up in a collectivistic culture, they were more likely to cooperate and interact with others, and it can reflect on their work attitude (Mannix & Neale, 2005).

In addition, the culture-influenced beliefs, attitudes and the way they respond to service innovation also are influenced by the business skills, personal contact networks that SMBs develop and access (Bhaskaran, 2006). That is, both culture and personal characteristics nurture the performance of innovative products (Scott &

Bruce, 1994).

According to the previous literature review, we can know that cultural innovation

19

is to utilize culture to find a new way of innovation, and can be done through a series of service innovation by people. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of local culture industry development, we have to know the people first because people are the one who execute the service innovation and people are the one who are influenced by their culture context. In our case, the people who perform the service innovation is the owner of SMBs; that is, we have to know the culture influence on the SMBs and how culture affect SMBs to do service innovation and develop local culture industry.

However, limited studies have described the kind of value or attitude that is fulfilled by SMBs doing service innovation based on culture. Consequently, we propose a concept of “cultural interpretation”, it is an interpretation of local culture context influence which means the impression and the idea that SMBs want to express to their customers and do service innovation. We intend to achieve the goal of utilizing local culture to do service innovation and cultural industry development by adopting the concept of cultural interpretation as a guide and hint to stimulate the possibility of SMBs‟ service innovation.

2.3 Semantic Information System

In general, information systems are used to present, reflect or imitate the activities, phenomena in the real world (Weber, 1997). These phenomena and activities comprise the business technology and human activities, such as supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, etc (Fill, 2009). The optimal balance between business requirement and technological opportunity is to use social and semantic technologies in business demand (Fill, 2009).

The term of semantic signifies that when the system is processing it will take the meaning of the information into account (Fill, 2006). Accordingly, when we use

20

information system, it comes to the interaction between human and computers and we would think about the interaction of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels (Fill, 2009). Furthermore, with all types of the interactions, to clearly describe the meaning conveyed with input and output in the semantic level is very vital (Shneiderman, 1993). The inclusion of semantics in the information systems can be regarded as a helper to ease the work and operate with the large amount of information and data (Fill, 2006).

After the brief introduction about the semantic information system, we know that we can use the perspective of semantic to facilitate the data operating work in the information system. The whole concept of our system is a semantic perspective information system. The semantic perspective indicates that the way we store our data is based on its semantic aspect rather than the way data are stored. We use ontology to

After the brief introduction about the semantic information system, we know that we can use the perspective of semantic to facilitate the data operating work in the information system. The whole concept of our system is a semantic perspective information system. The semantic perspective indicates that the way we store our data is based on its semantic aspect rather than the way data are stored. We use ontology to