Clusters,knowledge spillovers and new venture performance: An empirical examination

Firms in geographic regions with industry clustering have been hypothesized to possess performance advantages due to superior access to knowledge spillovers. Yet, no prior studies have directly examined the relationship between a firm's location within a cluster, knowledge spillovers and firm performance. In this study, we examine whether technological spillovers explain the performance of new ventures in cluster regions. We find that ventures located within geographic clusters absorb more knowledge from the local environment and have higher growth and innovation performance, but contrary to conventional wisdom, technological spillovers are not the contributing cause of higher performance observed for these firms.     

Fiscal Explanations for Inflation: Any Evidence from Transition Economies?

Recent arguments, motivated partly by the new fiscal theory of price level, suggest that fiscal deficits undermine price stability in transition economies. This paper addresses these claims by examining vector-autoregressive models of inflation for three transition economies (Bulgaria, Romania and Russia). The results indicate that fiscal deficits have increased inflation in Bulgaria and Romania but not in the case of Russia. In Bulgaria and Romania, money aggregates and exchange rate have also been more influential to inflation than fiscal deficits. The analysis based on this method therefore suggests that while fiscal deficits have some influence on inflation, monetary factors mostly determine inflation in these three countries.     

Resistance to Inequality as a Competitive Strategy? – The Cases of the Finnish consumer Co-ops Elanto and HOK 1905–2015

Abstract

We examine the common pattern of success-failure-success displayed by many western consumer co-operatives in the twentieth century. We concentrate on the biggest Finnish regional co-ops, Elanto and HOK, and compare their successes and failures as well as those of British co-ops with the help of the Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS). The BOS argues that companies can succeed if they produce surplus value for their clients and if those surpluses simultaneously reduce costs.

We suggest that resistance to inequality was the biggest success factor for co-ops in the twentieth century.     

Intermediary roles in local mobile advertising: Findings from a Finnish study

This research examines the intermediary roles that advertising agencies perform between small local advertisers and a mobile advertising service provider. The intermediary roles have been left unexplored, although the agencies have influence on their client's decisions to use new media. A real-life experiment of new mobile advertising system was conducted, and interview data from eight advertising agencies were collected. The findings show that agencies may play three types of roles. In playing connecting, mediating, and inhibiting roles, agencies influence the value created not only for their clients' but also for themselves and the advertising media provider.     

Explicating the market dimension in the study of digital innovation: a management framework for digital innovation

Digital innovation is gaining momentum among academics and business practitioners. Featuring increasingly cross-industry and multi-actor innovation processes, digital innovation reveals the inherent technology bias in the dominant perspectives on innovation. This study aims to transfer the focus from technology-centred ideas of digital innovation to a more balanced concept in which digital innovation is conceptualised as a combination of multiple needs and solutions linked to various actors and their behaviours. The study builds on a longitudinal case study. The article contributes by providing a partial response to the explicit calls for strategic frameworks that capture the process of digital innovation. Furthermore, the article explicates the market dimension of digital innovation and extends the analysis of the market dimension from a limited view of customer information and user knowledge to further include needs, actions, and behaviours of market actors directly or indirectly using, complementing, or substituting the digital innovation and innovation process.     

Entrepreneurial orientation and international scope: The differential roles of innovativeness,proactiveness, and risk-taking

This research integrates the international business and entrepreneurship literatures by examining the independent influences of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking on the ability of a firm to broaden its scope across international markets. For each dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, a cost–benefit framework is applied to highlight the trade-offs associated with different levels in the internationalization context. Based on a unique dataset of 500 SMEs spanning 10 industries, the results reflect the consequences of being “stuck in the middle” with respect to their strategic posture on innovativeness and proactiveness, but reveal a nuanced role for risk-taking behavior. The non-uniform and non-linear relationships from the findings contribute to a better understanding of when the individual dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation help or hinder entrepreneurial firms in the internationalization process.     

The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Policy

Since the 1980s, many regulatory agencies were either downsized or closed and waves of publicly owned enterprises were privatized. Some scholars interpret this as signaling the retreat of government intervention. We suggest, however, that rather than retreating, public policy towards business is undergoing a profound shift. Specifically, a new set of policies designed to promote entrepreneurial activity has come to the forefront, that focuses on enabling the startup and viability of entrepreneurial firms rather than constraining existing enterprises.     

Effects of alliances,time, and network cohesion on the initiation of foreign sales by new ventures

In this study, we seek to advance the network perspective on new venture internationalization by examining the role of networks in accelerating new venture sales into foreign markets. We propose that knowledge derived from ventures' technology and marketing alliances increases the likelihood that new ventures begin exploiting opportunities in international markets. We also argue that the extent to which the networks open the venture to new knowledge or constrain it to knowledge already shared among the partners will influence the initiation of foreign sales by a venture. Using a longitudinal dataset of 118 ventures in the U.S. biotechnology industry, we confirm that different types of alliances (and, therefore, different types of knowledge—technology and marketing knowledge) differentially impact the likelihood of new venture internationalization. Moreover, network cohesion among venture alliances increases the likelihood that marketing alliances will promote initial foreign market sales, but decreases the likelihood that technology alliances will do so. Our research is a timely response to a call for the study of interactive effects among network structure, complex tasks, and time, and it provides a possible explanation for certain unexpected findings in studies that did not consider the effects of time. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.