E-retailers are embracing new digital marketing strategies to provide more authentic information to their customers. This research examines the impact of live video streaming (LVS), defined as broadcasts in real time to an audience over the Internet for business-to-consumer and business-to-business communication. Although LVS has been adopted as a marketing strategy by e-retailers, its effect on customers’ online purchase intention remains unknown. Drawing on construal level theory, this study empirically examines the impact of LVS on customers’ online purchase intention considering psychological distance and perceived uncertainty. We test the research framework with the aid of a quasi-experiment using secondary data collected from Taobao.com, the largest online trading platform in China, and two experimental designs. The presented results indicate that the LVS strategy can improve customers’ online purchase intention by reducing psychological distance and perceived uncertainty. In addition, product type moderates the impact of LVS on perceived uncertainty. This paper finally provides some of the practical and managerial implications of our findings.

Both Six Sigma and innovation play key roles in improving competitiveness. While there is abundant research on Six Sigma and innovation from many perspectives, rigorous empirical research investigating the impact of Six Sigma on organisational innovation has been limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between Six Sigma practices and different types of organisational innovation including product innovation, process innovation, and administrative innovation. Empirical data were collected from 249 firms in China which had implemented Six Sigma as a formal programme in their organisation. Structural Equation Modelling was used to test the hypothesised relationship between Six Sigma practices and innovation. The results show that Six Sigma management, infrastructure, and core practices have a positive relationship with product, process, and administrative innovation. This study contributes to a better understanding of how firms can take advantage of the Six Sigma implementation to improve their capacity in innovation.

Image-capturing systems are increasingly being used in manufacturing shop floors since they can reliably capture important aesthetic information pertaining to the quality of manufactured parts in real time. State-of-the-art image-monitoring applications have focused on the detection of a single fault; however, the number of fault clusters per image in industrial applications can be numerous. To address this issue, we propose the use of a multivariate generalized likelihood ratio (MGLR) control chart for monitoring industrial products whose quality is described by a specific pattern (e.g. uniform patterns in LED screens or decorative patterns in textile products). Our method is specifically designed for greyscale images that are typical outputs of real-time industrial image-capturing systems. Extensive computer simulations show that the proposed method can detect the occurrence of single and multiple faults. We also present an experimental study to highlight how practitioners can implement and make use of the MGLR control chart in image-monitoring applications.