Enablers for end‐user entrepreneurship: An investigation on Italian food bloggers

This article examines unconventional entrepreneurship (accidental or end‐user entrepreneurs) to determine whether the decision‐making phase of the entrepreneurial process is collective. The analysis identified a virtuous circle that links knowledge, innovation, judgment, and decision making to collective interactions built on passion, experience, and sharing. To study food bloggers as unconventional user entrepreneurs, data were collected and analyzed using netnographic analysis. A supplementary online survey of food bloggers and their followers was also performed. Three groups of food bloggers are identified: amusing, functional, and fervent. Only fervent food bloggers, thanks to the virtuous circle built on passion, experience, and sharing as enablers, can be considered accidental or end‐user entrepreneurs.     

Effects of hiring former employees of multinationals in the absorptive capacity of local firms

The attraction of foreign direct investment seeks, among other things, to increase the productivity of local companies through knowledge spillovers. However, the empirical evidence in this regard is contradictory. One influential factor is the absorptive capacity of the local companies. This article analyzes the effect of the presence of former employees of multinational corporations as employees of local companies, on the absorptive capacity of said companies. The study was done in Costa Rica, a country known for its successful strategy in the subject matter. The data come from a survey applied to 1167 companies by the Observatorio Costarricense de las Pymes in 2011. It was found that the hiring of former employees of multinational corporations by local companies has a positive effect on the index of absorptive capacity of companies in all productive sectors. Specifically, this hiring of former employees increases the index of absorptive capacity by nine percentage points, with differences by sector and the size of the company.     

Model misspecification effects for biased samples

The model misspecification effects on the maximum likelihood estimator are studied when a biased sample is treated as a random one as well as when a random sample is treated as a biased one. The relation between the existence of a consistent estimator under model misspecification and the completeness of the distribution is also considered. The cases of the weight invariant distribution and the scale parameter distribution are examined and finally an example is presented to illustrate the results.     

How to implement innovation policies through projects successfully

This paper investigates the types of policy instruments responsible for the success of policy implementation through projects. Based on evidence from 12 comparative multiple case-studies, the paper provides an analytical insight from real practice on how and why different types of instruments lead to either successful or unsuccessful projects. In particular, the key finding is that in order for projects to implement policy successfully, policy instruments have to be designed based on specific systems thinking constructs related to flexibility. The findings provide the crucial but missing holistic conceptual direction for the development of implementation theory, which needs to overcome conceptual fragmentation and polarization. The findings also provide the insight as to how instruments really function which is essential to policy makers and project managers involved in public innovation programs.     

Issues in the analysis of co-authorship networks

Scientific collaboration is a complex phenomenon that improves the sharing of competences and the production of new scientific knowledge. Social Network Analysis is often used to describe the scientific collaboration patterns defined by co-authorship relationships. Different phases of the analysis of collaboration are related to: data collection, network boundary setting, relational data matrix definition, data analysis and interpretation of results. The aim of this paper is to point out some issues that arise in these different phases, highlighting: (i) the use of local archives versus international bibliographic databases; (ii) the use of different approaches for setting boundaries in a whole-network; (iii) the definition of a co-authorship data matrix (binary and weighted ties) and (iv) the analysis and the interpretation of network measures for co-authorship data. We discuss the different choices that can be made in these phases within an illustrative example on real data which is referred to scientific collaboration among researchers affiliated to an academic institution. In particular, we compare global and actor-level network measures computed from binary and weighted co-authorship networks in different disciplines.     

Sell‐Side Analyst Bias When Investment Banks Have Privileged Access to the Board

Research on analyst bias typically identifies affiliation with reference to a subset of the mandates that could give rise to incentives for bias in a multifunction investment bank. This paper develops a new measure of affiliation based upon the UK practice of corporate broking. An advantage of this approach is that affiliation is no longer restricted to isolated equity issuance events as it is an ongoing activity. This research shows that prior US evidence regarding the “Global Settlement” is robust to this new measure and application in the United Kingdom rather than solely the United States. The paper uses a hazard rate methodology focusing on the timeliness of revisions to address selection bias concerns.     

Local banking and local economic growth in Italy: some panel evidence

This article provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level – the Italian ‘province’) in Italy. A comprehensive data set is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of local infrastructures and the production structure of the local economy. A linear within-estimator technique with fixed effects is applied to a modified version of the so-called Barro regression in order to address the well-known econometric issues of reverse causality and estimation bias resulting from unobserved district-specific influences.     

The business model in entrepreneurial marketing: A communication perspective on business angels' opportunity interpretation

Entrepreneurial marketing has emerged as a recent perspective within the marketing field, taking the challenges and characteristics of small firms and founding teams into account. Specifically, in the early stages of entrepreneurial marketing, besides potential customers a variety of other stakeholders tend to be in the center of attention. Among these stakeholders, business angels as early-stage investors represent a vital target group. In this paper, we aim to shed light on entrepreneurial marketing in the early phases of new venture creation, in which entrepreneurial firms have an inherent need to market the value of a business opportunity toward potential investors. In particular, we contribute to the literature by introducing the business model as a narrative device for the marketing of early-stage new ventures toward potential business angels. In this regard, the business model is suggested as playing a critical role through making the inherent economic value of a technology explicit. Building on narrative theory, we investigate the role that the business model plays in the decision-making process of 17 business angels. Based on our findings, we propose a model that links the business model to a business angel's interpretation of an investment opportunity and discuss implications for theory and practice.     

The Total Factor Productivity Gap between Internationalised and Domestic Firms: Net Premium or Heterogeneity Effect?

The empirical literature on international trade predicts that internationally involved firms experience a productivity premium when compared to domestic firms. This finding is supported by comparing the unconditional productivity averages or distributions, or regressing the productivity on the international status dummy, controlled for the relevant covariates. In the present paper, we disentangle the distribution of the gross productivity premium from the component that is created by the different structural compositions of the two groups of firms; we can thereby measure the distribution of the net premium that is attributable to internationalisation. To this purpose, we use the quantile decomposition methodology ( Melly, 2005 ). The main results highlight that (i) the net premium is substantially lower than the gross premium and (ii) while the difference in the gross premium is uniform along the entire distribution, the net premium is significant only for the less productive firms. These results are confirmed even if different internationalisation modes are considered (i.e. exports, agreements and commercial penetration) using the domestic firms as baseline. One exception is the net premium for firms enrolled in foreign direct investment and/or offshoring; this premium does not decrease for firms at the top of the productivity distribution.