The Moderating Influence of Financial Market Development on the Relationship between Loan Guarantees for SMEs and Local Market Employment Rates

We empirically examine whether a major government intervention in the small firm credit market yields significantly better results in markets that are less financially developed. The government intervention that we investigate is Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed lending. After controlling for the appropriate cross‐sectional market characteristics, we find that SBA guaranteed lending has a significantly more positive impact on the average annual level of employment when the local market is relatively less financially developed. This result has important implications for public policy directives concerning where SBA guaranteed lending should be directed.     

Belt‐and‐Road Initiative: Driving the need to understand intellectual capital in Chinese multinational enterprises

China's Belt‐and‐Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most ambitious trade and development projects in history which intends to link Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs) to the Asian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe through two trade routes, land and sea. The project involves infrastructure development, human knowledge, and international relations to develop trade relationships. Increased competition along the two routes will see other governments taking initiatives to protect the business community in their nations; thus, adding barriers that must be overcome by CMNEs. The success of CMNEs in the BRI relies on the three components—structural, human, and relational—which are the three components of intellectual capital (IC). Through the use of IC CMNEs can assess their strengths and weaknesses. It will be the understanding of these strengths and weaknesses which will drive the success or failure of CMNEs.     

A maturity framework for autonomous solutions in manufacturing firms: The interplay of technology,ecosystem, and business model

Significant advancements within the fields of digitalization, electrification, and automation have enabled the development, testing, and implementation of increasingly advanced autonomous solutions. Current examples of industrial automation promise significant economic and sustainability-oriented benefits for industrial customers. Yet, implemented autonomous solutions have rarely advanced beyond ‘islands of autonomy’. Although enabling initial improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, they have not led to the systemic process improvements that fully integrated site-wide solutions can achieve. It is becoming increasingly clear that the major challenges in this shift extend beyond technology to focus on business transformation and ecosystem relationships. Yet, extant research offers few insights into these domains. There is a need to develop a business-focused maturity framework for autonomous solutions to contribute to a predominantly technical discourse and support equipment actors and their wider ecosystems in commercializing autonomous solutions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how industrial equipment manufacturers can align the development of technology, business models and ecosystem relationships for the advancement of autonomous solutions. We build on case studies that include 32 interviews from four industrial equipment manufacturers and their extended ecosystems of customers and partners. We capture our findings in a three-level maturity framework for industrial autonomous solutions. This framework unwraps the attributes of each level from the perspectives of technical system development, ecosystem configuration, and business model design and is complemented by three overarching principles for the successful commercialization of autonomous solutions.