Innovation management practices: review and guidance for future research in SMEs

Management Review Quarterly - This article aims to identify the innovation management practices used by companies worldwide and referenced in the scientific literature. This study employed a...     

An Evaluation of the Use of the Marketplace Game in Junior College Economics

In the search for new and better ways of teaching economic concepts, instructors are turning to a wide variety of materials and methods. There is a need to evaluate any new technique, not only in broad general terms but in its use with a specific type of college or student. Furthermore, one cannot generalize about such things as games and simulations but should concentrate on evaluating particular pieces of material or approaches, and the effectiveness of those items with particular kinds of students. This article will raise many questions about the adequacy of the research that has been done in this field and will undoubtedly inspire others to employ similar means of testing and evaluating new materials and methods. Other educational researchers might be especially interested in the authors' use of factor analysis.     

Employment Services

The TUCE itself is the subject of this research project reported by Lewis and Dahl. The TUCE is examined in terms of its ability to discriminate between good students and poor students, whether its subparts do indeed measure different things, and to what extent the subparts are associated with critical thinking skills as measured by the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. Their findings should help to make the TUCE a more useful instrument of diagnosis and evaluation for other researchers in economic education.     

A systematic review of women's entrepreneurship and internationalization literature

There has been an increased interest in women's entrepreneurship research due to the changing sociocultural conditions in the global marketplace. Despite this trend, there is still a lack of understanding about the role women entrepreneurs play in the internationalization process of firms. The aim of this article is to systematically review the literature on women's entrepreneurship and internationalization by examining the trends in the research. A bibliometric analysis is conducted on articles in the Web of Science databases to understand which researchers are publishing the most and how they are related to other researchers in the field. In addition, a content analysis of the articles from the bibliometric analysis is conducted that reveals three main clusters from the research: (a) epistemological position and gender, (b) cultural and social reasons for the creation of businesses, and (c) motivations, business characteristics, and performance. From the bibliometric and content analysis, implications for policy makers and future research directions for women's entrepreneurship and internationalization patterns are stated.     

Coronavirus and international business: An entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective

Covid‐19 (Coronavirus) is a health pandemic that has significantly affected the global economy and fundamentally changed society. The impacts of coronavirus are most apparent at the international business level due to the restrictions on travel and mobility of labor. This has necessitated an entrepreneurial outlook for businesses in order to survive in the current market environment. The aim of this article is to discuss the implications of the coronavirus for international business by taking an entrepreneurial ecosystem point of view. This enables a reflection on how the pandemic has impacted various entities of the ecosystem in terms of stakeholder engagement. Suggestions for acting in a more dynamic and innovative manner are provided that highlight the importance of utilizing entrepreneurial ecosystems in times of crises.     

Demystifying the folklore of the accidental project manager in the public sector

Many individuals are called upon to undertake project management responsibilities with little or no preparation. Such project managers have been referred to as accidental project managers. This article examines the experiences of 46 accidental project managers within the Western Australian public sector through a questionnaire survey. Findings reveal that most project managers were selected based on their technical or managerial expertise and thus lacked the required competencies to deliver a project. There was a greater propensity for accidental project managers to act in a part‐time mode, undertake nontechnical projects, and be provided with limited training and education.     

Quality distortions in vertical relations

This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a delivery contract comprising the quality of the good as well as a non-linear tariff. Assuming asymmetric information about the actual quality of the product and focusing on incentive compatible contracts, we show that from the firms’ perspective delivery contracts lead to more efficient contracts and thus higher overall profits the lower the firms’ outside options, i.e. the higher their mutual dependency. Buyer power driven by a reduced outside option of the upstream firm enhances the efficiency of vertical relations, while buyer power due to an improved outside option of the downstream firm implies less efficient outcomes.     

Turnover costs and the wage—fringe mix

This paper examines how firms choose their compensation package to influence employee turnover. A firm will attempt to maintain a steady state of trunover consistent with its training and hiring costs. We develop a model of this relationship when the firm's ability to offer a differentiated compensation package. Both the theoretical and empirical findings of our study emphasize the importance of the link between turnover costs and the compensation mix. That is quits are negatively realted to both the share of pensions in the total compensation package and the level of wages. The influence of pensions in attracting stable workers, however, is diminishing. An important implication is that the policies which attempt to standardize worker compensation will hinder the market determination of turnover, and hence, will generate inefficiencies in the labour market.     

Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security,Animating Social Change

This piece is the introduction to a special section on Feminist Geopolitics focusing specifically on securitisation. This introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist geopolitics and situates the contributions of the articles that follow. We argue that the contributions to the section push the field in two distinct ways. First, a number of the pieces draw important connections between geopolitical and geoeconomic processes. Second, the pieces continue to excavate the complex relationship between geopolitical processes and everyday life. Taken as a whole, this special section highlights the utility of feminist geopolitical approaches for gaining analytic clarity and thinking through and enacting positive social change.     

The dynamics of environmental innovations: three stylised trajectories of clean technology

In this article, we explore the dynamics of environmental innovations developed by firms to comply with environmental regulations. Our analysis is based on a micro-simulation model of industrial dynamics. The question arises: how do firms competing in the same industry deal with environmental issues without altering their productive efficiency or the performance of the product? We focus on clean technology which seeks to combine environmental and productive dimensions by way of innovation offsets. Our simulations show that an innovative strategy based on a good balance between environmental and productive dimensions takes more time to develop and needs to address a ‘competence destroying effect’. Finally, we study favourable conditions for the development of this type of clean technology and draw some policy implications.