SMEs international growth: The moderating role of experience on entrepreneurial and learning orientations

New and small firms operating in the high-tech environments need strong entrepreneurial (EO) and learning (LO) orientations to enhance international growth. Yet, the relationship between these two key strategic dimensions and foreign growth can be contingent to the entrepreneur’s individual characteristics. Bringing together elements from strategic management, organization and entrepreneurship literatures, we employ a dynamic temporal perspective considering two levels of analysis, the firm and the entrepreneur, and we apply a fixed effects pooled time-series regression on a sample of 170 firms in two periods of time (2005 and 2015). Our findings indicate that SMEs that possess greater EO and LO have higher international growth. However, previous entrepreneurial and industry-specific managerial experience of the founder/CEO positively exert their effect on these relationships. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurs and policy makers operating in highly innovative sectors.     

Customer Orientation in Chinese Industrial Firms and Global Marketing Implications

Abstract

The study focuses on the moderating role of environmental context (demand unpredictability and technological turbulence) and technological context (production technology routineness and product complexity) on the relationship of customer orientation with market performance relative to the industry in Chinese state-owned industrial firms. The results show significant moderating effects of technological turbulence and production technology routineness: the greater the technological turbulence and the more routine the production technology, the stronger the customer orientation-market performance relative to the industry relationship. The results also show that market performance relative to the industry is positively affected by customer orientation, but inversely affected by demand unpredictability. The findings have implications for global marketing as well as for theory development.     

Strategic orientations,joint learning,and innovation generation in international customer-supplier relationships

While innovations generated by international supply channel relationships, as opposed to individual partners, are playing an increasingly important role in the success of all international supply chain partnerships, research on how international supply chain relationships cultivate the process of such innovation generation, particularly for contracting suppliers firms, remains scant. This study explores how supplier joint learning capability can play a role in developing both incremental and radical innovations. The empirical test, which used a sample of 204 Taiwanese executives in electronic suppliers, supports most of the hypotheses in the study. The results demonstrate that different strategic orientations can drive various types of innovation through different paths by the mediating effect of joint learning capability. Specifically, we find that long-term orientation influences only incremental innovation, whereas radical innovation is driven by electronic integration and proactive customer orientation by joint learning. Furthermore, environmental uncertainties such as technological uncertainty and demand uncertainty are found to be moderating the impacts of joint learning capability on radical innovations. Some implications of the results are discussed at the end.     

利益导向、收益平稳化和经理股票期权

本文以上市公司为例,首先分析了股东与经理对待收益的态度,认为利益导向产生收益平稳化,并通过实证依据证实了收益平稳化存在的原因。各国对收益平稳化的态度不一致,表现为一种会计准则的利益导向。收益平稳化有一定的好处,但更有明显的弊端。收益平稳化使经理背离股东财富最大化的理财目标,使股东与经理之间有着根本利益冲突。最后提出了解决利益冲突的途径:监督有成本效益的局限性,订立均衡契约也非理想选择,经理股票期权也许是协调双方利益关系的有效方式。随着我国企业激励机制的建立和成熟,经理股票期权也将成为我国企业所有者协调理财目标的重要工具。     

Deconstructing the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance at the embryonic stage of firm growth

Studies of entrepreneurial orientation tend to examine its three most common features only (risk-taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness), merging these into a gestalt construct of entrepreneurial orientation and then analyzing its effect on business performance. This is in contrast to Lumpkin and Dess who stressed an entrepreneurial orientation is best characterized by five dimensions which can vary independently and may not be equally valuable across performance metrics or at different stages of development. We rectify these problems by examining the independent impact of risk-taking, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy on performance of young high-technology firms at an embryonic stage of development. Our results support the concerns of Lumpkin and Dess. Only proactiveness and innovativeness have a positive influence on business performance while risk-taking has a negative relationship. Competitive aggressiveness and autonomy appear to hold no business performance value at this stage of firm growth. From these results, we offer implications for managers in addition to guidance for future research.     

国外压缩机的发展状况

介绍了国外发达国家压缩机公司的产品模式、发展状况及科研动态。     

A survey of market orientation research (1995-2008)

Since 1990, market orientation (MO) has received considerable attention in the marketing literature. Little research so far provides preliminary and useful information to facilitate good understanding of MO. This study presents a comprehensive survey of extant marketing literature using keyword classification from 1995 to 2008. It serves as a tutorial and aims to help the beginner researcher or practitioner to have access to MO, including its definitions, applications and problem domains. Based on the scope of 514 MO articles, we find that the number of publications on MO has significantly increased since 2001 with steady growth in recent years. In addition, these selected articles are scattered across 153 journals and mostly published in 10 academic journals. The contribution of our paper is to provide a means (i.e., keyword index) to conceptualize and operationalize the coverage of MO. It provides a conceptual framework to organize this vast body of research. This study ends with some discussions and conclusions.     

构建和谐企业的必要性和可行性

和谐,是企业的共同理想、企业的价值取向、企业管理制度化。三者相互联系,互相制约,是构建和谐企业不可或缺的条件。具备了上述条件,企业才能持续发展,做大做强。企业和社会是相互依存、相互促进的关系,构建和谐企业既是构建和谐社会的一个重要基础和有机组成部分,也是企业持续健康发展的内在需求。     

“专升本”地方本科院校转型定位研究

本文基于当前我国基本国情与国家教育主管部门相关政策,探讨了"专升本"地方本科院校在向应用型职业教育转型过程中,学校的办学理念、培养模式与考核方式,教师的知识体系与科研方向,以及学生的学习方式方法与就业方向选择等方面,如何进行转型定位。本文研究内容可为响应教育主管部门号召的"专升本"地方本科院校如何向应用型职业教育转型提供一些借鉴。     

Does service intangibility affect entrepreneurial orientation?

Service firms face a unique set of challenges in their internationalization and foreign market growth. Their services' characteristics, particularly intangibility, constrain the options available to them for growth. When such firms are services International New Ventures (INVs), their challenges are combined with those related to rapid internationalization and growth. This research investigates how service intangibility and the typical challenges of INVs relate to the firms' Entrepreneurial Orientation and their foreign market growth. The findings show that indeed service intangibility has a relationship with firm proactiveness, risk-taking, and innovativeness; and that not all elements of Entrepreneurial Orientation have a positive impact on growth.