Persistence of innovation and firm’s growth: evidence from a panel of SME and large Spanish manufacturing firms

This paper estimates the effect of persistence of innovation on employment in Spanish manufacturing firms during the period 1990–2008. Using GMM-system estimations, we study the importance of persistence of product and process innovation on employment growth according to the size of the firms. The results support that process innovation shows a positive effect on employment, especially for SMEs, while the effect of product innovation is not significant. The study also distinguishes that this effect appears in the contemporaneous year but it increases with the number of lags. This result confirms that compensation effects of process innovation may appear with a certain delay justifying the importance for SMEs of being persistent in innovation strategies to make them compatible with employment growth.     

Digital insurance brokers—old wine in new bottles? How digital brokers create value

This article analyzes digital brokers in the countries of the DACH region, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from a business model perspective. We argue that the potential to create new value for insurance customers has not yet been fully realized. Our analysis has identified two strategic action areas. The first concerns the exploitation of the wealth of customer data available. Those digital brokers who will succeed in generating new content and services using data analytics have the potential to take customer centricity and individuality to new bounds. The second centers around introducing aspects of community, such as connecting peers and enabling them to interact. The critical success factors are volume, a high degree of automation as well as leveraging the infrastructure and data to delivering new, value-adding content and services that go beyond traditional intermediation.     

The impact of coercive and non-coercive forms of influence on trust, commitment, and compliance in supply chains

A major premise in managing channel relationships is encouraging cooperation to achieve the aims of the relational partners. This often requires a balancing act between utilization of influence across the supply chain to motivate decisions, while employing tactics that do not damage the future of the relationship. This paper builds and tests a model of how influence strategies affect relational elements, specifically trust and commitment, which both promote strong inter-firm relationships and act as mediators of joint action, specifically cooperation and compliance across channel partners. Results suggest that coercive strategies are counterproductive in encouraging cooperation and compliance either directly or through relational intermediaries, while non-coercive influence produces positive outcomes and effects on intermediaries. Low levels of coercive influence do appear to generate positive outcomes. Managerial implications and future research based on these results conclude the paper.     

Entrepreneurship: The Role of Clusters Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Evidence from Germany

This paper is about the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. Defining entrepreneurship as the creation of new organisations and clusters as a geographically proximate group of interconnected firms and associated institutions in related industries, this paper aims to answer three research questions : first, do clusters matter to entrepreneurship at the regional level? Second, if clusters are associated with different levels of entrepreneurship, what explains those differences? Third, what do the answers to the previous questions imply for academics and policy makers? To answer these questions, this paper distinguishes between clusters and industrial agglomerations and advances a theoretical model and empirical research to explain the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. This paper uses the 97 German planning regions as units of analysis to test the hypotheses. Using hypotheses testing and OLS fixed-effects model, this paper finds that clusters do have an impact on entrepreneurship at the regional level, but industrial agglomerations do not. Implications for academics and policy makers and suggestions for future research are given in the concluding section.     

The role of e-Health in the changng health care environment

In 2005 health care organizations spent 2.3% of total operating expenses on information technology and are slowly developing the infrastructure necessary to expand e-Health capabilities. E-Health is being recognized as a method to improve the overall health status of the population. It is important to build partnerships among health care providers, local community organizations, and national health care associations to ensure the continued development of e-Health initiatives. This study has managerial implications associated with the strategic application of e-Health systems and policy implications on future resource allocation.