Wal-Mart innovation and productivity: a viewpoint

Abstract

Technology effects, business process development, and productivity growth are considered in the context of a single company: Wal‐Mart. The starting point is the 2001 McKinsey Global Institute report, which finds that over 1995–2000, a quarter of U.S. productivity growth is attributable to the retail industry, and almost a sixth of that is attributable to Wal‐Mart. Wal‐Mart is interesting as well because of its rapid growth in Canada. This is now Canada's largest private sector employer. We also consider other evidence relevant to public policy formation concerning Wal‐Mart and conclude with a discussion of options for partially filling important data gaps.

Conceptualizing and measuring consumer perceptions of retailer innovativeness in Taiwan

“…Wellgrounded theoretical and qualitative research has supported positive association between a retailer's innovation ability and organizational performance (e.g., Freeman et al, 2011;Grewal et al, 2011;Morrison and Humlen, 2013). Consequently, if the PRI scale's dimensions were positively and significantly correlated with retailer's marketing performance measures, nomological validity would be demonstrated (Hogan et al, 2011).…”

“…1934). Researchers have explored various perspectives to understand innovation, but most innovation-related research focus primarily on manufacturers/firm sectors (e.g., García-Zamora et al, 2013;Hogan et al, 2011;Hsieh et al, 2013;Kunz et al, 2011), whereas only few studies exist that address innovation in retail sectors (e.g., Freeman et al, 2011;Grewal et al, 2011;Morrison and Humlen, 2013).…”

“…The ability of a retailer to innovate has been widely recognized as a key factor why some retailers, such as IKEA and Wal-Mart, are ahead of their competitors (Freeman et al, 2011). Unlike traditional firms, many large retailers are also marketing, organizational, and open innovators because they seek to coordinate not only product and process innovation, but also innovation in their value propositions across the value networks in which they operate (Reynolds, 2014).…”

Grappling with the elephant: a symposium on technical change and productivity

“…The symposium concludes with a viewpoint written by Richard B. Freeman, Alice O. Nakamura, Leonard I. Nakamura, Marc Prud’homme, and Amanda Pyman . Many economists would acknowledge that organizational innovations are an important determinant of productivity.…”

Arbitrarily accurate approximation scheme for large-scale RFID cardinality estimation

“…Imagine a huge warehouse of large retailer like Wal-Mart, thousands of mobile phones, ipods, apparel and other office supplies are intensively piled [9]. A recent report indicates that employee theft, customer shoplifting, administrative error and vendor error cost retailers in the United States and Europe nearly $70 billion dollars annually [10].…”