The research discussed in this paper explores the impact of a higher education initiative targete... more The research discussed in this paper explores the impact of a higher education initiative targeted at developing entrepreneurial capability and encouraging student technology venturing activity in Northern Ireland. The initiative in question is the £25,000 enterprise competition run by the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship (NICENT). The authors report the outcomes of exploratory survey-based research to establish the competition's impact on participants and its contribution to the development of positive attitudes towards technology transfer and enterprise by aspiring, would-be new venturers.
New Technology Based Firms in the New Millennium, 2013
The ability to develop and manage effective networks is a crucial entrepreneurial competence for ... more The ability to develop and manage effective networks is a crucial entrepreneurial competence for small and medium-sized enterprise establishment and growth. Relatively little attention has been paid to networks/networking in female-owned ventures, however, limited evidence suggests that men and women may develop different approaches to network development and participation. The paper reports findings of exploratory, qualitative research conducted in Northern Ireland focused on the nature and dynamics of entrepreneurial networks in science, engineering and technology, sectors viewed as maledominated. Similarities and differences in female and male network development and quality are explored and their implications are discussed.
Encouraging the establishment and growth of technology-based ventures continues to be the focus o... more Encouraging the establishment and growth of technology-based ventures continues to be the focus of attention from policy-makers globally, linked to enhanced levels of innovation, economic activity and wealth/employment creation. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are prominent among the public, private and not-for-profit organisations supporting the commercialisation of scientific outputs. Modes and vehicles adopted include spin-outs, science parks, intellectual property exploitation and different forms of incubation activity. Some HEIs in the United Kingdom have significant experience of commercialisation and technology transfer activities and have developed markedly different approaches. Meanwhile, HEIs in India are broadening their attention from their teaching-research focus to wider engagement in supporting venture creation. While approaches differ between HEIs all face issues of efficacy and sustainability. Set within the wider context of the HEI commercialisation agenda thi...
Policy-makers are seeking to build vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) to promote innovative... more Policy-makers are seeking to build vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) to promote innovative entrepreneurship. However, the role of government policy in EEs, especially in the emerging economy context, is poorly understood, lacking a systematic concept of policy and theoretical framework, clear policy classification, and empirical research considering distinctive characteristics of policy mixes in EEs. This paper introduces the concept of EE policy mixes and classifies them into seven policy instruments. Using data from 21 national high-tech zones (NHZs) in China, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is applied to identify effective configurations of EE policy mixes that support early-stage and late-stage technology start-ups to produce high entrepreneurial performance. The configurational analysis shows that EE policy mixes present causal complexity and stage differences. Based on interpreting multiple policy interactions, we reveal the differentiated support mec...
This paper focuses on the extracurricular business plan competition (BPC), a common feature on un... more This paper focuses on the extracurricular business plan competition (BPC), a common feature on university campuses worldwide. While such competitions seek to engender entrepreneurial learning and start-up activity there is growing scepticism regarding their utility, largely as a result of overemphasis on the written business plan which can be counterproductive to achieving entrepreneurial activity and learning which competitions seek to encourage, raising the question what a more appropriate model might be. The paper explores the conceptual rationale for such a view, against the backdrop of an effectual turn within entrepreneurship and suggests how effectuation could be translated and embedded within competition practice and provision. A key assertion is that emphasis within competition provision should shift from the action of business plan production toward business implementation. Five guiding principles are offered defining how an implementation competition could be operationali...
... Omar, Wan Zaidi (2008) A need for due diligence systems in commercialization process of ... T... more ... Omar, Wan Zaidi (2008) A need for due diligence systems in commercialization process of ... The UK's University Challenge Funds and Scotland's Proof of Concept Fund are given to ... engineered micro organisms to be patented, resulting in an explosion of research activities in ...
Commercialisation of intellectual property (IP), particularly patent becomes an important agenda ... more Commercialisation of intellectual property (IP), particularly patent becomes an important agenda in most universities. Patents that were licensed to established companies in return for royalties recognised as a traditional mode to commercialise university IPs. As government funding are getting harder to obtain, and demand from the stake holders to see universities play more important role in local economic development, universities are prompts to look at spin-off formations as an alternative route for technology ...
Women’s Entrepreneurship in Global and Local Contexts
Artisans working in the developing world face substantial challenges including unreliability of i... more Artisans working in the developing world face substantial challenges including unreliability of income, exploitation by middlemen, and high costs of running their businesses. Founded in 2012 by three women from two continents, Soko is a social enterprise based in Nairobi that connects Kenyan jewellery makers to Western consumers via a mobile phone application and the Internet.
Fungsi universiti dalam mengkomersilisasikan patent telah banyak dikaji oleh penulis. Setengah un... more Fungsi universiti dalam mengkomersilisasikan patent telah banyak dikaji oleh penulis. Setengah universiti telah berjaya mengkomersilisasikan paten mereka terutamanya dengan melesenkan kepada syarikat gergasi atau pun dengan menubuhkan kompeni spin–off. Walau bagaimanapun masih terdapat sebahagian paten universiti yang tidak dieksploitasikan. Kajian ini membincangkan apakah karekteristik paten yang tidak dikomersilisasikan. Sebuah universiti di Scotland telah digunakan sebagai kajian kes. Sepuluh jenis patent yang tidak diekploitasikan oleh universiti berkenaan telah dipilih untuk kajian. Penyelidik daripada paten tersebut telah ditemuduga dengan mendalam menggunakan soalan semi berstruktur. Temuduga telah direkod, ditranskrib, dan data telah dianalisis berdasarkan kepada setiap kes dan silang kes berbantukan Nvivo software. Dapatan menunjukkan sebab yang paling penting kenapa paten tidak dieksploitasikan adalah berkait rapat dengan teknologi itu sendiri. Teknologi didapati berada pa...
Enhancing levels of innovation and entrepreneurship to grow a more competitive economy is the foc... more Enhancing levels of innovation and entrepreneurship to grow a more competitive economy is the focus of much government effort. Attention is paid to changing a culture seen as antagonistic to entrepreneurship through initiatives designed to promote an entrepreneurial spirit. Universities, aware of the importance of developing entrepreneurial potential, are focusing on equipping students with the skills and abilities to contribute to innovation within organisations they join upon graduation, while also providing opportunities for the development of student aspirations. Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) has developed a one week event designed to influence deep personal values and the underlying motivations of potential entrepreneurs. This paper reports on the Connections course content as it was offered at the University of Strathclyde in 2003, content premised on the belief that students are motivated to start new enterprises through enhancement of self-confidence in their entrepreneurial skills. Measures of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and other outcomes are offered, followed by a report of the results found at the end of the event and then six months later. The programme is found to have created enduring improvements in entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and a related strengthening of pre-entrepreneurial awareness and exploration of ideas for starting companies. Other assessment results are presented suggesting the need to include explicit course content on entrepreneurial career paths. The implications of the Connections findings for entrepreneurship teaching in general are discussed. Entrepreneurship education has the potential to develop knowledge and skills for enterprise but also, importantly, increase the willingness of individuals to consider entrepreneurship as a career option. Education is believed to be able to ameliorate negative student perceptions of the probability and costs of failure, and help dispel cultural stereotypes that entrepreneurship is less than ethical. Consequently, a number of current government-funded initiatives are wholly or partly focused on enhancing university-level enterprise education. Science Enterprise Challenge addresses a perceived lack of enterprise skills in science and engineering graduates through education and commercialisation interventions, while CMI, with its remit of enhancing UK competitiveness, is targeting resources at undergraduate education in entrepreneurship. Founded in 2000 with funds from the UK government, CMI's goals include contributing to entrepreneurship in Britain through the identification and study of model programmes. A successful one-week intensive event held annually at MIT that fosters undergraduate leadership skills was adapted for this purpose. The curriculum was reorganised, retaining a pedagogical approach focusing on leadership motivation, teaming and work skills in groups, but narrowed to stress entrepreneurship rather than leadership in general. A premise was the belief that students can be motivated to start new enterprises by enhancing self-confidence in their entrepreneurial skills. Called Connections, the programme was piloted at MIT, offered in the UK at the University of Durham in January 2003, and repeated at the University of Strathclyde in August 2003. This paper presents the theory and methods behind the programme design, reports on Connections programme goals and content, and explores the results of the Connections assessment at the University of Strathclyde.
Absorptive capacity generally facilitates the adoption<br> of innovation. How does this rel... more Absorptive capacity generally facilitates the adoption<br> of innovation. How does this relationship change when economic<br> return is not the sole driver of innovation uptake? We investigate<br> whether absorptive capacity facilitates the adoption of green<br> innovation based on a survey of 79 construction companies in<br> Scotland. Based on the results of multiple regression analyses, we<br> confirm that existing knowledge utilisation (EKU), knowledge<br> building (KB) and external knowledge acquisition (EKA) are<br> significant predictors of green process GP), green administrative<br> (GA) and green technical innovation (GT), respectively. We discuss<br> the implications for theories of innovation adoption and knowledge<br> enhancement associated with environmentally-friendly practices.
It has been widely agreed that entrepreneurship leads to firms’ success. Since companies with a h... more It has been widely agreed that entrepreneurship leads to firms’ success. Since companies with a high level of entrepreneurial propensity are focussed on “the pursuit of opportunity regardless of resources currently controlled”, it can be expected that those companies will be highly leveraged, resulting in high performance and effectiveness and eventually will lead to business success. Stevenson’s six dimensional construct of Entrepreneurial Management (EM), as interpreted and operationalised by Brown et al. (2001), consists of strategic orientation (SO), resource orientation (RO), management structure (MS), reward philosophy (RP), growth orientation (GO) and entrepreneurial culture (EC). This study attempts to explore on the issue of as to what extent the entrepreneurial management approach is being adopted by the sample firms. Based on the global measure of EM, the results of the descriptive statistical analysis suggest that a large majority of the firms may be classified as entrep...
Encouraging technology-based entrepreneurship is central to governmental/non-governmental policie... more Encouraging technology-based entrepreneurship is central to governmental/non-governmental policies in many countries. Most entrepreneurs work as employees before establishing technology-based ventures, gaining understanding of product/service markets and strategies, and developing necessary human capital assets for their ventures. Consistent with human capital theory ventures established by individuals/groups with relevant commercial experience benefit from their founders’ knowhow/networks. This paper explores the role of university business plan competitions in stimulating entrepreneurship, focusing on Northern Ireland’s £25k Enterprise Award Scheme. Such initiatives attract students/recent graduates and university staff, raising questions how teams develop commercially-robust ventures, given lack of relevant human capital assets, particularly commercial experience. Analysing business plans of the top ten ventures, this paper explores the entrepreneurial teams, particularly what hu...
As the important carrier for patent sharing, joint creation and application promotion, the indust... more As the important carrier for patent sharing, joint creation and application promotion, the industrial technology standard alliance has increasingly become the main organization pattern for technology standardization around the world. Particularly, technology standard alliance collaborative innovation is more conducive to accelerate the independent innovation pace and technology standard internationalization process of emerging industries in China. Based on analyzing the connotation, characteristics and influencing factors of technology standard alliance collaborative innovation, this paper puts forward the research hypothesis and theoretical framework of alliance collaborative innovation, and then uses a questionnaire survey and a Structural Equation Model to test the influencing factors and their effect path through 196 technology standard alliance enterprises samples. The results indicate that compared with strategy collaboration and process collaboration, patent collaboration has...
European Journal of Management and Business Economics
Purpose In order to deepen our knowledge of governance of family firms, the purpose of this paper... more Purpose In order to deepen our knowledge of governance of family firms, the purpose of this paper is to focus our attention on the relation between family owners who are members of the board of directors and firm performance. Also, this study sheds more light on how the generation in charge of the family firm affects that relationship, as generational involvement may be a unique predictor of governance behavior in these firms. Design/methodology/approach The authors applied a cross-sectional ordinary least squares regression model to test the hypotheses on a sample of 313 non-listed Spanish family SMEs. The authors suggest the possibility of a non-linear relationship between the percentage of ownership by family members of the board of directors and firm performance, and specifically, the authors propose an S-shaped effect that implies two breakpoints. Findings The authors find not only that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists, but also an S-shaped relationship between family b...
Purpose Rarely have studies on the acquisition of knowledge in internationalisation focused on in... more Purpose Rarely have studies on the acquisition of knowledge in internationalisation focused on institutional knowledge. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to investigate the acquisition of this knowledge, and its assimilation and exploitation processes in internationalisation. Design/methodology/approach The paper utilises ten longitudinal revelatory case studies built from multiple semi-structured interviews conducted with three different firm types of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) in the pharmaceutical industry and secondary documents to which the researchers obtained proprietary access. Findings The study enhances the conceptual understanding of the institutional learning process in internationalisation by, for the first time, developing a framework to characterise this process. The study explores and identifies multiple types of institutional knowledge required, the sequencing of their acquisition, sources and learning methods utilised. It also discusses transf...
The concept of open innovation (OI) stresses the notion of leveraging external knowledge and has ... more The concept of open innovation (OI) stresses the notion of leveraging external knowledge and has become increasingly popular both in academic research and industry practice (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014). The basic premise of OI is opening up the innovation process (Huizingh, 2011). Nevertheless, the presence of valuable external sources of knowledge does not imply that the flow of external new ideas and knowledge into firms is an automatic or easy process (Vanhaverbeke & Cloodt, 2014). Implicitly, external knowledge is considered to be 'out there' ready to be harnessed by firms, but we have a limited understanding of the process of sourcing and bringing this into corporations (Dahlander & Gann, 2010). The ability to exploit external knowledge is, thus, a critical component of innovative capabilities (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Despite its popularity, many firms still struggle to manage OI properly, and the internal organization challenges perceived are the most difficult to manage (Vanhaverbeke, Chesbrough, & West, 2014). For instance, results of a survey among large firms in Europe and the United States suggest that it is not easy to implement an OI program and there are a range of challenges and constraints that limit firms' ability to make use of OI, the management of external relationships being an important challenge (Chesbrough & Brunswicker, 2014). In this work, we suggest that the fact that the firm possesses absorptive capacity (AC) facilitates external knowledge identification and exploitation and can be helpful to attenuate some of the challenges posed by OI. AC has been defined as the capacity to learn and solve problems, allowing a firm to assimilate external knowledge and create new knowledge (Kim, 1998; Lane, Koka, & Pathak, 2006; Zahra & George, 2002). It is not only a matter of searching and accessing external ideas and knowledge, but also of being able to generate internally innovative outputs by combining external insights with the firm's internal capabilities. Accordingly, external knowledge does not equally benefit all firms, as the firm's own resources and actions determine the extent to which it will be able to take advantage of it (Fabrizio, 2009). As with OI, the notion of AC is based on the idea that companies can leverage the knowledge generated externally. More particularly, since AC focuses on acquiring and utilizing external knowledge inside the firm, it is a concept at the heart of the outside-in dimension of OI (Vanhaverbeke & Cloodt, 2014).
The research discussed in this paper explores the impact of a higher education initiative targete... more The research discussed in this paper explores the impact of a higher education initiative targeted at developing entrepreneurial capability and encouraging student technology venturing activity in Northern Ireland. The initiative in question is the £25,000 enterprise competition run by the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship (NICENT). The authors report the outcomes of exploratory survey-based research to establish the competition's impact on participants and its contribution to the development of positive attitudes towards technology transfer and enterprise by aspiring, would-be new venturers.
New Technology Based Firms in the New Millennium, 2013
The ability to develop and manage effective networks is a crucial entrepreneurial competence for ... more The ability to develop and manage effective networks is a crucial entrepreneurial competence for small and medium-sized enterprise establishment and growth. Relatively little attention has been paid to networks/networking in female-owned ventures, however, limited evidence suggests that men and women may develop different approaches to network development and participation. The paper reports findings of exploratory, qualitative research conducted in Northern Ireland focused on the nature and dynamics of entrepreneurial networks in science, engineering and technology, sectors viewed as maledominated. Similarities and differences in female and male network development and quality are explored and their implications are discussed.
Encouraging the establishment and growth of technology-based ventures continues to be the focus o... more Encouraging the establishment and growth of technology-based ventures continues to be the focus of attention from policy-makers globally, linked to enhanced levels of innovation, economic activity and wealth/employment creation. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are prominent among the public, private and not-for-profit organisations supporting the commercialisation of scientific outputs. Modes and vehicles adopted include spin-outs, science parks, intellectual property exploitation and different forms of incubation activity. Some HEIs in the United Kingdom have significant experience of commercialisation and technology transfer activities and have developed markedly different approaches. Meanwhile, HEIs in India are broadening their attention from their teaching-research focus to wider engagement in supporting venture creation. While approaches differ between HEIs all face issues of efficacy and sustainability. Set within the wider context of the HEI commercialisation agenda thi...
Policy-makers are seeking to build vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) to promote innovative... more Policy-makers are seeking to build vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) to promote innovative entrepreneurship. However, the role of government policy in EEs, especially in the emerging economy context, is poorly understood, lacking a systematic concept of policy and theoretical framework, clear policy classification, and empirical research considering distinctive characteristics of policy mixes in EEs. This paper introduces the concept of EE policy mixes and classifies them into seven policy instruments. Using data from 21 national high-tech zones (NHZs) in China, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is applied to identify effective configurations of EE policy mixes that support early-stage and late-stage technology start-ups to produce high entrepreneurial performance. The configurational analysis shows that EE policy mixes present causal complexity and stage differences. Based on interpreting multiple policy interactions, we reveal the differentiated support mec...
This paper focuses on the extracurricular business plan competition (BPC), a common feature on un... more This paper focuses on the extracurricular business plan competition (BPC), a common feature on university campuses worldwide. While such competitions seek to engender entrepreneurial learning and start-up activity there is growing scepticism regarding their utility, largely as a result of overemphasis on the written business plan which can be counterproductive to achieving entrepreneurial activity and learning which competitions seek to encourage, raising the question what a more appropriate model might be. The paper explores the conceptual rationale for such a view, against the backdrop of an effectual turn within entrepreneurship and suggests how effectuation could be translated and embedded within competition practice and provision. A key assertion is that emphasis within competition provision should shift from the action of business plan production toward business implementation. Five guiding principles are offered defining how an implementation competition could be operationali...
... Omar, Wan Zaidi (2008) A need for due diligence systems in commercialization process of ... T... more ... Omar, Wan Zaidi (2008) A need for due diligence systems in commercialization process of ... The UK's University Challenge Funds and Scotland's Proof of Concept Fund are given to ... engineered micro organisms to be patented, resulting in an explosion of research activities in ...
Commercialisation of intellectual property (IP), particularly patent becomes an important agenda ... more Commercialisation of intellectual property (IP), particularly patent becomes an important agenda in most universities. Patents that were licensed to established companies in return for royalties recognised as a traditional mode to commercialise university IPs. As government funding are getting harder to obtain, and demand from the stake holders to see universities play more important role in local economic development, universities are prompts to look at spin-off formations as an alternative route for technology ...
Women’s Entrepreneurship in Global and Local Contexts
Artisans working in the developing world face substantial challenges including unreliability of i... more Artisans working in the developing world face substantial challenges including unreliability of income, exploitation by middlemen, and high costs of running their businesses. Founded in 2012 by three women from two continents, Soko is a social enterprise based in Nairobi that connects Kenyan jewellery makers to Western consumers via a mobile phone application and the Internet.
Fungsi universiti dalam mengkomersilisasikan patent telah banyak dikaji oleh penulis. Setengah un... more Fungsi universiti dalam mengkomersilisasikan patent telah banyak dikaji oleh penulis. Setengah universiti telah berjaya mengkomersilisasikan paten mereka terutamanya dengan melesenkan kepada syarikat gergasi atau pun dengan menubuhkan kompeni spin–off. Walau bagaimanapun masih terdapat sebahagian paten universiti yang tidak dieksploitasikan. Kajian ini membincangkan apakah karekteristik paten yang tidak dikomersilisasikan. Sebuah universiti di Scotland telah digunakan sebagai kajian kes. Sepuluh jenis patent yang tidak diekploitasikan oleh universiti berkenaan telah dipilih untuk kajian. Penyelidik daripada paten tersebut telah ditemuduga dengan mendalam menggunakan soalan semi berstruktur. Temuduga telah direkod, ditranskrib, dan data telah dianalisis berdasarkan kepada setiap kes dan silang kes berbantukan Nvivo software. Dapatan menunjukkan sebab yang paling penting kenapa paten tidak dieksploitasikan adalah berkait rapat dengan teknologi itu sendiri. Teknologi didapati berada pa...
Enhancing levels of innovation and entrepreneurship to grow a more competitive economy is the foc... more Enhancing levels of innovation and entrepreneurship to grow a more competitive economy is the focus of much government effort. Attention is paid to changing a culture seen as antagonistic to entrepreneurship through initiatives designed to promote an entrepreneurial spirit. Universities, aware of the importance of developing entrepreneurial potential, are focusing on equipping students with the skills and abilities to contribute to innovation within organisations they join upon graduation, while also providing opportunities for the development of student aspirations. Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) has developed a one week event designed to influence deep personal values and the underlying motivations of potential entrepreneurs. This paper reports on the Connections course content as it was offered at the University of Strathclyde in 2003, content premised on the belief that students are motivated to start new enterprises through enhancement of self-confidence in their entrepreneurial skills. Measures of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and other outcomes are offered, followed by a report of the results found at the end of the event and then six months later. The programme is found to have created enduring improvements in entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and a related strengthening of pre-entrepreneurial awareness and exploration of ideas for starting companies. Other assessment results are presented suggesting the need to include explicit course content on entrepreneurial career paths. The implications of the Connections findings for entrepreneurship teaching in general are discussed. Entrepreneurship education has the potential to develop knowledge and skills for enterprise but also, importantly, increase the willingness of individuals to consider entrepreneurship as a career option. Education is believed to be able to ameliorate negative student perceptions of the probability and costs of failure, and help dispel cultural stereotypes that entrepreneurship is less than ethical. Consequently, a number of current government-funded initiatives are wholly or partly focused on enhancing university-level enterprise education. Science Enterprise Challenge addresses a perceived lack of enterprise skills in science and engineering graduates through education and commercialisation interventions, while CMI, with its remit of enhancing UK competitiveness, is targeting resources at undergraduate education in entrepreneurship. Founded in 2000 with funds from the UK government, CMI's goals include contributing to entrepreneurship in Britain through the identification and study of model programmes. A successful one-week intensive event held annually at MIT that fosters undergraduate leadership skills was adapted for this purpose. The curriculum was reorganised, retaining a pedagogical approach focusing on leadership motivation, teaming and work skills in groups, but narrowed to stress entrepreneurship rather than leadership in general. A premise was the belief that students can be motivated to start new enterprises by enhancing self-confidence in their entrepreneurial skills. Called Connections, the programme was piloted at MIT, offered in the UK at the University of Durham in January 2003, and repeated at the University of Strathclyde in August 2003. This paper presents the theory and methods behind the programme design, reports on Connections programme goals and content, and explores the results of the Connections assessment at the University of Strathclyde.
Absorptive capacity generally facilitates the adoption<br> of innovation. How does this rel... more Absorptive capacity generally facilitates the adoption<br> of innovation. How does this relationship change when economic<br> return is not the sole driver of innovation uptake? We investigate<br> whether absorptive capacity facilitates the adoption of green<br> innovation based on a survey of 79 construction companies in<br> Scotland. Based on the results of multiple regression analyses, we<br> confirm that existing knowledge utilisation (EKU), knowledge<br> building (KB) and external knowledge acquisition (EKA) are<br> significant predictors of green process GP), green administrative<br> (GA) and green technical innovation (GT), respectively. We discuss<br> the implications for theories of innovation adoption and knowledge<br> enhancement associated with environmentally-friendly practices.
It has been widely agreed that entrepreneurship leads to firms’ success. Since companies with a h... more It has been widely agreed that entrepreneurship leads to firms’ success. Since companies with a high level of entrepreneurial propensity are focussed on “the pursuit of opportunity regardless of resources currently controlled”, it can be expected that those companies will be highly leveraged, resulting in high performance and effectiveness and eventually will lead to business success. Stevenson’s six dimensional construct of Entrepreneurial Management (EM), as interpreted and operationalised by Brown et al. (2001), consists of strategic orientation (SO), resource orientation (RO), management structure (MS), reward philosophy (RP), growth orientation (GO) and entrepreneurial culture (EC). This study attempts to explore on the issue of as to what extent the entrepreneurial management approach is being adopted by the sample firms. Based on the global measure of EM, the results of the descriptive statistical analysis suggest that a large majority of the firms may be classified as entrep...
Encouraging technology-based entrepreneurship is central to governmental/non-governmental policie... more Encouraging technology-based entrepreneurship is central to governmental/non-governmental policies in many countries. Most entrepreneurs work as employees before establishing technology-based ventures, gaining understanding of product/service markets and strategies, and developing necessary human capital assets for their ventures. Consistent with human capital theory ventures established by individuals/groups with relevant commercial experience benefit from their founders’ knowhow/networks. This paper explores the role of university business plan competitions in stimulating entrepreneurship, focusing on Northern Ireland’s £25k Enterprise Award Scheme. Such initiatives attract students/recent graduates and university staff, raising questions how teams develop commercially-robust ventures, given lack of relevant human capital assets, particularly commercial experience. Analysing business plans of the top ten ventures, this paper explores the entrepreneurial teams, particularly what hu...
As the important carrier for patent sharing, joint creation and application promotion, the indust... more As the important carrier for patent sharing, joint creation and application promotion, the industrial technology standard alliance has increasingly become the main organization pattern for technology standardization around the world. Particularly, technology standard alliance collaborative innovation is more conducive to accelerate the independent innovation pace and technology standard internationalization process of emerging industries in China. Based on analyzing the connotation, characteristics and influencing factors of technology standard alliance collaborative innovation, this paper puts forward the research hypothesis and theoretical framework of alliance collaborative innovation, and then uses a questionnaire survey and a Structural Equation Model to test the influencing factors and their effect path through 196 technology standard alliance enterprises samples. The results indicate that compared with strategy collaboration and process collaboration, patent collaboration has...
European Journal of Management and Business Economics
Purpose In order to deepen our knowledge of governance of family firms, the purpose of this paper... more Purpose In order to deepen our knowledge of governance of family firms, the purpose of this paper is to focus our attention on the relation between family owners who are members of the board of directors and firm performance. Also, this study sheds more light on how the generation in charge of the family firm affects that relationship, as generational involvement may be a unique predictor of governance behavior in these firms. Design/methodology/approach The authors applied a cross-sectional ordinary least squares regression model to test the hypotheses on a sample of 313 non-listed Spanish family SMEs. The authors suggest the possibility of a non-linear relationship between the percentage of ownership by family members of the board of directors and firm performance, and specifically, the authors propose an S-shaped effect that implies two breakpoints. Findings The authors find not only that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists, but also an S-shaped relationship between family b...
Purpose Rarely have studies on the acquisition of knowledge in internationalisation focused on in... more Purpose Rarely have studies on the acquisition of knowledge in internationalisation focused on institutional knowledge. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to investigate the acquisition of this knowledge, and its assimilation and exploitation processes in internationalisation. Design/methodology/approach The paper utilises ten longitudinal revelatory case studies built from multiple semi-structured interviews conducted with three different firm types of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) in the pharmaceutical industry and secondary documents to which the researchers obtained proprietary access. Findings The study enhances the conceptual understanding of the institutional learning process in internationalisation by, for the first time, developing a framework to characterise this process. The study explores and identifies multiple types of institutional knowledge required, the sequencing of their acquisition, sources and learning methods utilised. It also discusses transf...
The concept of open innovation (OI) stresses the notion of leveraging external knowledge and has ... more The concept of open innovation (OI) stresses the notion of leveraging external knowledge and has become increasingly popular both in academic research and industry practice (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014). The basic premise of OI is opening up the innovation process (Huizingh, 2011). Nevertheless, the presence of valuable external sources of knowledge does not imply that the flow of external new ideas and knowledge into firms is an automatic or easy process (Vanhaverbeke & Cloodt, 2014). Implicitly, external knowledge is considered to be 'out there' ready to be harnessed by firms, but we have a limited understanding of the process of sourcing and bringing this into corporations (Dahlander & Gann, 2010). The ability to exploit external knowledge is, thus, a critical component of innovative capabilities (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Despite its popularity, many firms still struggle to manage OI properly, and the internal organization challenges perceived are the most difficult to manage (Vanhaverbeke, Chesbrough, & West, 2014). For instance, results of a survey among large firms in Europe and the United States suggest that it is not easy to implement an OI program and there are a range of challenges and constraints that limit firms' ability to make use of OI, the management of external relationships being an important challenge (Chesbrough & Brunswicker, 2014). In this work, we suggest that the fact that the firm possesses absorptive capacity (AC) facilitates external knowledge identification and exploitation and can be helpful to attenuate some of the challenges posed by OI. AC has been defined as the capacity to learn and solve problems, allowing a firm to assimilate external knowledge and create new knowledge (Kim, 1998; Lane, Koka, & Pathak, 2006; Zahra & George, 2002). It is not only a matter of searching and accessing external ideas and knowledge, but also of being able to generate internally innovative outputs by combining external insights with the firm's internal capabilities. Accordingly, external knowledge does not equally benefit all firms, as the firm's own resources and actions determine the extent to which it will be able to take advantage of it (Fabrizio, 2009). As with OI, the notion of AC is based on the idea that companies can leverage the knowledge generated externally. More particularly, since AC focuses on acquiring and utilizing external knowledge inside the firm, it is a concept at the heart of the outside-in dimension of OI (Vanhaverbeke & Cloodt, 2014).
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