Timo Tammi

This study surveyed 1562 wellness tourists in Finland, the St. Petersburg area, and Lithuania to explore what were their motivations for taking a wellness trip, to investigate what differences there were between different nationalities and determine how wellness tourists could be segmented based on their motivation. As most previous studies analysed wellness tourism motivations in one chosen destination, this study fills the gap in cross-cultural analysis of motivations. Exploratory factor analysis revealed six motivational factors including status, beauty and appearance, personal development, nature and outdoors, socialization, and resting and relaxation, the latter factor being dominant across all nationality groups. Seemingly unrelated regression analysis revealed significant differences in terms of the importance of beautification, improving physical condition, nature, and the desire to indulge in luxury experiences.

Purpose: The aim is to examine the importance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) see in different network partners regarding successful tendering in public procurement, and whether this perception predicts the number of joint bids and wins.Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected by an electronic questionnaire which was sent to the registered users of the leading electronic platform for public procurement in Finland. The data were analysed with statistical methods.Findings: The findings suggest that a favourable perception of the importance of horizontal networks in public procurement is associated with a larger number of joint bids and better success in joint bidding. However, the results do not establish a positive correlation between vertical networks and consortium bidding.Research limitations/implications: The data were collected from a single EU country. Since the criteria for bidding consortia may vary between countries, different results might have been achieved from other countries.Practical implications: SMEs should be encouraged to form bidding consortia and acquire related experience. Policymakers should minimise barriers to consortium bidding, e.g. by offering more information. They should also assess the merits of joint bidding because they rarely encourage SMEs to bid as a consortium.Social implications: Consortium bidding is a way of enhancing SMEs’ possibilities to participate in public tender contests, even in large contracts.Originality/value: While consortium bidding has been recognised to enhance SMEs’ possibilities of participating in public procurement, there is limited research into how SMEs’ network collaborations relate to bidding as a consortium.

Purpose: Public procurement of innovations (PPIs) addresses a specified need of the public-sector customer or aims at fostering private firms’ innovativeness. In an operational sense, issues of information asymmetry and risk sharing between the public agency and the supplier are of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the contract design issues of PPI. Design/methodology/approach: Explicit and implicit contracting methods are reviewed, and a conceptual framework is proposed in which procurement characteristics are analyzed, focusing on the dimensions of the supplier’s sensitivity to the procurement risk and the power of implicit contracting methods. Findings: Because of its complex nature, applying cost-plus contracts instead of more common fixed-price contracts is advisable in PPI. Originality/value: Possible reasons for the more prominent role of contract design in the USA as opposed to the European Union procurement are discussed.

A general view is that small and medium-sized enterprises are underrepresented in public procurement due to their resource constraints. The recent literature suggests that small and medium-sized enterprises' strategic orientations could also have a role in the underrepresentation. In addition, small and medium-sized enterprises tend to position themselves either towards national or wider level public sector customers or towards sub-national level public sector customers. This paper studies how strategic orientations, namely entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation, affect small and medium-sized enterprises’ targeting of public sector customers, and how this affects their performance. Our findings show that market-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises tend to focus on sub-national level public sector customers, whereas entrepreneurially oriented small and medium-sized enterprises have more often national or wider level public sector customers. It also appears that higher performance is associated with national or wider level rather than sub-national level public sector customers. In consequence, more attention should be paid to the differentiation of public procurement markets in developing and refining policies aimed at increasing small and medium-sized enterprises participation in public procurement and at using public procurement as a means to strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises’ roles in promoting overall economic development.