Quinlan Professor Pens Paper About AirBnB’s Innovation

Loyola Quinlan School of Business management professor Arup Varma recently co-authored ‘AirBnB: Exciting Innovation or Passing Fad’, a paper that describes AirBnB’s groundbreaking, technology-fueled business model of “disruptive innovation.” Published in Tourism Management Perspectives, Varma co-wrote the place with Nenad Jukić, Clifford Shultz, Svetlozar Nestorov and Almir Pestek.“At Quinlan, we do cutting-edge, current research. AirBnB is absolutely current: it’s happening now and it’s still evolving,” Varma told Quinlan. “As faculty, we are immersed in the business world in the traditional sense but also want to expand to topics that are relevant and timely for our students.”

Varma recently sat down with Quinlan and discussed key insights from the research and why disruptive innovation is important to the business world and Quinlan students. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:

Varma was asked what questions he was trying to answer in the paper:

“The two main questions we attempted to answer in our paper were “What are the factors that motivate people to use AirBnB versus traditional hotels,” and “what impact has Airbnb had on the hotel industry as a whole?”

“In our study, we found that the main factors that seemed to guide people that use AirBnB were price, image, the peer-review system that AirBnB offers and location. Most of what we found in our research was along the lines of our predictions—people like convenience and usability. That being said, we thought that hotels’ loyalty programs would hamper AirBnB’s popularity. However, they did not. Price trumped loyalty programs!”

He was also asked made his research relevant to the Quinlan community:

“My research is designed to be current, and of interest to society. I am not interested in doing research strictly for the benefit of the corporations, but for people and that of course includes the students at Quinlan. As a Jesuit school, Loyola emphasizes care for the person—and this fits very well with the focus of my research.”

“When students come to Quinlan, we want to offer them something different—something that makes us stand out in comparison with any other business school. One example of that is our faculty actively conducting research on cutting-edge topics like AirBnB and Uber in order to understand trends and practices that affect the societies in which we live and work. We prepare our students to be outstanding professionals, we also want to make sure that they are also outstanding citizens.”

You can read the entire interview here.

regions: Chicago

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