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Seeking for Solutions within a Project Setting

  • Research Article
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Journal of business market management

Abstract

There has been increasing attention focused on the importance of ‘solution selling’ in the often very close relationships that characterize business-to-business marketing. While an extant predominantly product-centric view of solutions prevails in the literature, this has recently been juxtaposed with a more process-oriented view. We review such a process-oriented solution model briefly, and focus on the managerial challenge of how firms make this process-oriented approach work in practice. We argue that, in parallel to adopting a process-oriented approach, companies also have to focus their attention specifically on how to mobilize the different parties in order to amalgamate the perspectives and orientations between the interacting counterparts. We propose an interaction process model of how this ‘collective mind’ is achieved, using as an example a study of the United Kingdom’s Lean Aerospace Initiative (UK LAI), a large project with a specific solution in mind – improving the global competitiveness of the UK’s Aerospace industry. We use our model to show how the three main groups of actors (Government bodies, four Universities, and the aerospace companies themselves) interact in their pursuit of co-creating their collective solutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester, Booth Street West, UK

    Peter Naudé, Stephan C. Henneberg & Carla Ramos

  2. ManagementSchool, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Stefanos Mouzas

  3. School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Andrew Graves & Valerie Crute

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  1. Peter Naudé
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  2. Stephan C. Henneberg
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  3. Stefanos Mouzas
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  4. Carla Ramos
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  5. Andrew Graves
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  6. Valerie Crute
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Correspondence to Peter Naudé.

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Naudé, P., Henneberg, S., Mouzas, S. et al. Seeking for Solutions within a Project Setting. J Bus Mark Manag 3, 151–170 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12087-009-0022-8

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