The literature on mass customization generally focuses on the tradeoff between higher revenues from better matching customer preferences with product specifications, and higher costs of offering a broader - possibly fully customized - product line. Less well-understood is the tradeoff between...

Carbon footprinting is a tool for firms to determine the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their supply chain or with a unit of final product or service. Carbon footprinting efforts typically aim to identify where best to invest in emission reduction efforts, and/or to...

The goal of this special feature is to explore Industrial Ecology (IE) concepts and tools as the basis for competitive advantage for business. Past studies of the relationship between business and IE exist but there is little sustained attention to this important issue. Without an understanding...

For many growth-oriented entrepreneurial firms, the entrepreneur's time is one of the more salient resource constraint. Classifying the entrepreneurs' activities into four categories based on their revenue-related or process-related impact and short-term or long-term effects, we present a...

Entrepreneurs need to invest money and time to grow their firms. Both money and time are often scarce, but the nature of these two resources is fundamentally different. Considering a small, fast-growing entrepreneurial firm, we show that the firm's key bottleneck resource shifts from money to...

This work empirically assesses the degree to which inventory decisions made by entrepreneurs and small businesses are informed by the logic underlying the newsvendor or base stock model and are influenced by the decision-maker's risk profile. We used a web- and email-based survey, combined with...

We present a model of dynamic resource allocation in a setting where continuity of service is important and future resource availability is uncertain. The paper is inspired by the challenges faced by HIV clinics in resource-limited settings in the allocation of scarce HIV treatment among a large...