Doing More with Less: The Disordinal Implications of Firm Age for Leveraging Capabilities for Innovation Activity*

Innovation requires the entrepreneurial capabilities of opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation. Such capabilities generally accrue over time from a firm's cumulative learning and experience. In this study, we theorize that firm age should therefore moderate the firm's ability to leverage these capabilities for innovation activity, such that older firms can obtain higher outputs from their capabilities than younger firms can. We examine this relationship using a sample of 676 small and medium enterprises. We find that when both younger and older firms have highly developed innovation capabilities, older firms appear to enjoy higher levels of innovation activity than younger firms do. However, younger firms generally appear more likely to have higher levels of innovation activity than older firms do, when neither firm has highly developed innovation capabilities. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for research and practice.     

Methoden der empirischen Makroökonomik

Selten hat die Vergabe des Preises für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der schwedischen Reichsbank eine so kritische Diskussion ausgel?st wie in diesem Jahr. W?hrend das Preiskomitee die Leistungen von Thomas Sargent und Christopher Sims auf dem Gebiet der empirischen Makro?konomik würdigt, sehen Kritiker in ihnen Mainstream-Theoretiker, die Politikineffektivit?t predigen und an effi ziente M?rkte glauben. Nach ihrer Auffassung ist die Vergabe gerade vor dem Hintergrund der Finanzkrise der letzten Jahre hochgradig problematisch. Hat sich das Preiskomitee tats?chlich geirrt oder ist die Kritik letztlich unberechtigt?     

Ökonomische Folgen eines Atomausstiegs in Deutschland

Nach der Atomkatastrophe in Fukushima hat die Bundesregierung beschlossen, bis Mitte Juni die Zukunft der Atomenergie in Deutschland zu überdenken. Dabei k?nnen unterschiedlich weitgehende Szenarien betrachtet werden. Sie reichen von einer Rücknahme der im letzten Herbst beschlossenen Laufzeitverl?ngerung bis hin zum vollkommenen Ausstieg aus der Kernkraft. Die Autoren vertreten grunds?tzlich die Auffassung, dass die wirtschaftlichen Folgen eines Atomausstiegs zu bew?ltigen sind. Mit einer Steigerung der Energiepreise muss allerdings gerechnet werden — wie deutlich diese ausf?llt, und welche Referenzwerte herangezogen werden müssen, h?ngt von vielen Faktoren ab.     

Current account deficits in Greece,Portugal and Spain — origins and consequences

In light of the shortcomings of the Stability and Growth Pact, there has been a recognition that a surveillance framework is needed which goes beyond fiscal issues to cover wider macroeconomic factors. The question arises whether the surveillance and connected reform criteria should be applied symmetrically, to all members of the eurozone, or whether they should specifically target countries with current account deficits.     

Responsible Leadership Outcomes Via Stakeholder CSR Values: Testing a Values-Centered Model of Transformational Leadership

The Encyclical-Letter Caritas in Veritate by Pope Benedict XVI suggests to advance towards a new conceptualization of the tenuous relationship between economics and ethics, proposing a “new humanistic synthesis.” Where social encyclicals have traditionally justified policy proposals by natural law and theological reasoning alone, Caritas in Veritate gives great relevance to economic arguments. The encyclical defines the framework for a new business ethics which appreciates allocative and distributive efficiency, and thus both markets and institutions as improving the human condition, but locates their source and reason outside the economic sphere. It places a clear accent on the ontological connectedness of the economic and ethical dimensions of human action. It is the proper ordering of means towards the end of integral human development that allows mankind to leave a vicious circle of consumerism and enter a virtuous circle that applies the creativity fostered by markets. This vision implies a new model of business management that integrates considerations of vocation, purpose, and values at a theological level.     

Toward a More Humanistic Governance Model: Network Governance Structures

This conceptual article suggests a reexamination of current governance structures, specifically those of unitary boards after the financial crisis of 2008. We suggest that the existing governance structures are based on an outdated paradigm of business, rooted in economics. We propose an alternative paradigm, a more humanistic paradigm, which allows conceiving alternative, network-oriented governance structures. As hierarchical firms grow larger and more complex, the risk of failure increases from biases, errors, and missing data in communication and control systems. These problems are exacerbated by information overload on senior managers, directors, and their respective regulators. In contrast to traditional corporate governance, network governance introduces a division of power via multiple boards, checks and balances, and active stakeholder engagement. We argue that those features could have prevented the stresses and failures of financial firms in 2008, since they were anticipated by both individuals within firms and external commentators. However, those exposed to risks possessed insufficient influence in either governing and/or regulating firms to take corrective action.     

Social Constructivism,Mental Models,and Problems of Obedience

There are important synergies for the next generation of ethical leaders based on the alignment of modified or adjusted mental models. This entails a synergistic application of moral imagination through collaborative input and critique, rather than “me too” obedience. In this article, we will analyze the Milgram results using frameworks relating to mental models (Werhane et al., Profitable partnerships for poverty alleviation, 2009), as well as work by Moberg on “ethics blind spots” (Organizational Studies 27(3):413–428, 2006), and by Bazerman and Chugh on “bounded awareness” (Harvard Business Review, 2006; Mind &; Society 6:1–18, 2007) Using these constructs to examine the Milgram experiment, we will argue that the ways in which the experiments are framed, the presence of an authority figure, the appeal to the authority of science, and the situation in which the naïve participant finds herself or himself, all create a bounded awareness, a narrow blind spot that encourages a climate for obedience, brackets out the opportunity to ask the moral question: “Am I hurting another fellow human being?” and may preclude the subject from utilizing moral imagination to opt out of the experiment. We will conclude that these forms of almost blind obedience to authority are correctable, but with difficulty. We will argue that linking the modification of mental models to an unbinding of awareness represents an important synergistic relationship and one that can build effectively on the lessons learned from our experience with moral imagination.     

A review of the effect of cigarette advertising

Because of the inconsistency in the findings from past decades of research and the lack of consensus regarding the relationship between advertising exposure and cigarette consumption, the large body of extant research on the effectiveness of cigarette advertising has generated equivocal conclusions on this subject. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of cigarette advertising research to determine what impact, if any, cigarette advertising has on cigarette consumption. Unlike previous attempts to synthesize the cigarette advertising literature, this study examined three specific levels of the criterion (i.e., initiation, continuation, and brand behavior) rather than examining only aggregate consumption.     

New business formation in a rapidly growing economy: the Irish experience

The extraordinary growth of the Irish economy since the mid-1990s—the ‘Celtic Tiger’—has attracted a great deal of interest, commentary and research. Indeed, many countries look to Ireland as an economic development role model, and it has been suggested that Ireland might provide key lessons for other EU members as they seek to achieve the objectives set out in the Lisbon Agenda. Much of the discussion of Ireland’s growth has focused on its possible triggers: the long-term consequences of the late 1980s fiscal stabilisation, EU structural funds, education, wage moderation and devaluation of the Irish punt. The industrial policy perspective has highlighted the importance of inflows of foreign direct investment, but a notable absence from the discourse on the ‘Celtic Tiger’ has been any mention of the role of new business venture creation and entrepreneurship. In this paper we use unpublished Irish VAT data for the years 1988–2004 to provide the first detailed look at national trends in business birth and death rates in Ireland over the ‘take-off’ period. We also use sub-national VAT data to shed light on spatial trends in new venture creation. Our overall conclusions are that new business formation made no detectable contribution to the acceleration of Ireland’s growth in the late 1990s, although we do find evidence of spatial convergence in per capita business stocks.     

Worth waiting for: increasing satisfaction by making consumers wait

A truism in the marketing literature, and among many marketing practitioners, is that requiring consumers to wait negatively impacts quality evaluations, purchase intentions and a range of other important outcomes. However, it is also true that consumer waiting or queuing has historically been considered from an operations perspective. The present research takes a different approach and examines waits in the context of their ability to function as a signal of quality. Four experiments demonstrate a required wait can indeed signal quality to consumers and increase, rather than decrease, both purchase intentions and actual experienced satisfaction. Three moderators of this effect are examined: preexisting knowledge, consumption motivations, and the extent to which quality is difficult to objectively determine. The results suggest in situations where quality is important, unknown or ambiguous, managers may increase consumer satisfaction by making consumers wait.