Abstract
Having generated some preliminary propositions on the emergence of lead markets in developing economies on the basis of five cross-sectoral case studies of frugal innovations from India, this and the next chapter serve as a platform to critically evaluate these propositions by the means of an in-depth study of a specific industry, namely the automobile industry. This industry has become known as a hotbed for low cost small cars and applying those propositions in its settings seems to offer promising results. Almost all global carmakers have either already launched or have announced plans to launch India-specific small cars, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
As already discussed in Sect. 1.2, single-case based, in-depth studies of individual industries have been also used earlier to shape the lead market theory. Marian Beise corroborated his conceptual insights drawn from an extensive literature review with an in-depth study of the telecommunication industry supplemented by seven expert interviews (cf. Beise 2001: 131).
- 2.
Dyer and Wilkins (1991) and Eisenhardt (1991) had an interesting and insightful scholarly duel in the Academy of Management Journal on the appropriateness of single cases after Eisenhardt in her (1989) paper had raised some doubts about generalizations based on single cases. Dyer and Wilkins (1991: 614) contended that “[…] careful study of a single case […] leads researchers to see new theoretical relationships and question old ones”. Eisenhardt (1991: 627) concluded: “the similarities between single- and multiple-setting research are vastly more important than the differences. For both, good storytelling is an essential first step, but good theory is fundamentally the result of rigorous methodology and comparative, multiple-case logic”. Nevertheless, the present study makes use of both these methods in different chapters for investigating the same research issues.
- 3.
Barzelay (1993) has extensively analyzed the work of Mashaw (1983) for the purpose of drawing methodological insights on single case studies and states, in regard to questioning conventional wisdom: “The result is that an influential generalization based on experience analysed to date is shown not to hold under certain conditions” (Barzelay 1993: 308).
- 4.
For a list of questions that acted as a rough guideline for the semi-structured interviews, see Appendix B.
- 5.
An anonymized list of interview partners is available in Appendix C.
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Tiwari, R., Herstatt, C. (2014). Investigating India’s Small Car Industry. In: Aiming Big with Small Cars. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02066-2_6
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