Business Cases

The underlying paper displays the case of a client that is a European player in the software industry. The case focuses on strategies and measures taken to access new clients via already existing customers or contacts in saturated markets. The clients need was to optimize investments into reference customers or potential high level targets by influencing their networks more efficiently, effectively and in a more sustainable way. Generally spoken it demonstrates how key-account and sales activities were optimized by means of knowledge from the field of Social Network Analysis (triangular marketing). It is demonstrated how by means of SNA key actors, key links and clusters were determined and how based on this knowledge trust relationships were built and utilized for enhanced key account management.

The underlying case focuses on optimizing resource allocation in the field of strategic lobbying and government of stakeholder relations. It is demonstrated how by means of Social Network Analysis the stake holder environment was mapped and how Key Actors, Key Links and bottom-up target groups/ oppositional groups were analyzed.

The case offers insight into the techniques used to optimize resource allocation by prioritizing investments into high-level targeting. It demonstrates how trust relationships were built and utilized for enhanced strategic lobbying and how it was accomplished at an operative stage. Evaluation and monitoring of success was accomplished through re-mapping of the stake holder environment.

The underlying case demonstrates how Co-Publishing structures of certain fields were mapped and resource allocation was optimized by means of Social Network Analysis. The case further shows how Co-Publishing data was utilized and how it produced benefits when merged with other data, for instance on journal/ institutional interlock (editors) to accomplish tasks of wider strategic scope.

The case offers insights how tool and packages by FAS.research can be used to identify key actors (key opinion leader, key decision maker), key connections and representatives of opposing traits (bottom up cluster analysis) in a certain scholarly field or across scholarly fields. The more, core networks of reviewers, editors, authors, topics or journals can be analyzed and structures of historically grown trust, potential topics and authors of tomorrow can be revealed.