The Routledge Companion to Marketing and Sustainability

This chapter highlights the relevance and importance of integrating sustainability in business-to-business (B2B) marketing. By adopting a holistic view of the supply chain, both vertically, from raw materials to end consumers, and horizontally, with partners and competitors, firms operating in B2B markets can comply with regulatory requirements, develop a sustainable competitive advantage, and deliver significant societal and environmental benefits. By means of a review of the relevant, recent literature and various, insightful examples, the key principles of B2B sustainability marketing are explained and illustrated, providing a contemporary, coherent, and comprehensive overview of this important development

A priority rule heuristic for the multi-skilled resource-constrained project scheduling problem

The project scheduling problem with skilled resources is heuristically solved. A new resource assignment procedure is presented using fast priority rules. Three sets of priority rules are evaluated for solving multi-skilled scheduling problems. The heuristic obtains new best-known solutions for a benchmark dataset.This research presents a priority rule heuristic approach for the multi-skilled resource-constrained project scheduling problem. The approach is based on a parallel schedule generation scheme which includes a new resource assignment procedure. The scheme combines three types of priority rules in order to schedule activities and assign resources to the skill requirements of these activities. In computational experiments, skill- and resource rule combinations are evaluated and selected based on two metrics using a Pareto Front approach. These rule combinations are then integrated with various activity priority rules after which their solution quality is evaluated. The heuristic approach and the selected rules are then employed to solve all project instances of the MSLIB dataset. It is shown that, on average, the presented approach is able to obtain solutions with a comparable quality to the solution quality of a meta-heuristic procedure from literature. Additionally, new best known solutions are obtained for the MSLIB dataset. The practical applicability of the heuristic is validated by solving empirical project instances

The organizational change capability of public organizations: Concept and measurement

Change is inherent to public sector management, yet many change initiatives in public organizations fail due to a lack of relevant change capabilities within the organization. This article introduces a measurement scale designed specifically to assess the organizational change capability (OCC) of public organizations. Drawing on a literature search, expert review and empirical validation involving responses from 333 professionals across multiple military organizations in Belgium, this study constructs and tests a reliable and valid scale tailored to the unique operational, regulatory, and political landscapes of public organizations. The scale includes 77 items distributed across 15 identified components, highlighting the multidimensional nature of OCCs. Principal component analysis and reliability testing confirm the scale's robust psychometric properties. The OCC scale presented in this article deepens theoretical understanding of how public organizations manage and implement change and provides a foundation for future research in diverse public organizational contexts

Drijfveren voor groei in KMO's

KMO’s die duurzaam willen groeien, moeten consequent investeren in tien verschillende groeicompetenties. Terwijl veel KMO’s het goed doen op vlak van productontwikkeling, leiderschap en financieel management liggen de uitdagingen vooral op vlak van bestuur, digitalisering en HR. Externe investeerders hebben duidelijk een positieve invloed op de bedrijfsgroei. Ook eigenaars-managers met een economisch opleiding investeren meer in groeicompetenties. Familiebedrijven scoren echter voor veel groeicompetenties lager dan het gemiddelde. Tot slot staan grote KMO’s – met uitzondering van digitalisering – over de hele lijn verder wat betreft groeicompetenties dan kleinere bedrijven. Dat zijn de belangrijkste conclusies van een onderzoek bij 162 Vlaamse KMO’s* dat in kaart brengt waarom bepaalde bedrijven sterker groeien dan andere. Het onderzoek werd uitgevoerd door professoren Miguel Meuleman en Yannick Dillen van het Centre for Excellence in KMO Management aan Vlerick Business School in samenwerking met Bank Van Breda en Titeca. Uniek aan dit onderzoek is het holistische perspectief op groei. Enerzijds analyseerden de onderzoekers hoe de bevraagde KMO’s scoren op 10 groeicompetenties die een duurzame bedrijfsgroei beïnvloeden: Purpose, Strategie, Mensen, Financiën, Product, Leiderschap, Besluitvorming en Bestuur, Go-to-market, Structuren en Processen, en Digitalisering. Anderzijds werd er ook gekeken naar kenmerken op vlak van bedrijfsprofiel, de eigenaar-manager, de ondernemende ingesteldheid en de groeimotivatie. Tot slot werd ook de bedrijfsgrootte in rekening gebracht

Restraining overconfident CEOs through credit ratings

Overconfident CEOs significantly reduce their acquisition activity when facing a higher risk of a credit rating downgrade, possibly because credit ratings impact their ability to access external financing. Investment-grade firms managed by overconfident CEOs that are placed on a negative rating outlook reduce their acquisitiveness by approximately 16 percentage points. Our findings offer a novel perspective on the role of credit rating agencies as an external control mechanism, constraining overconfident managers from pursuing value-destroying acquisitions. Our findings survive a battery of robustness checks, including endogeneity, controlling for internal control mechanisms and market reaction tests

Advancing the cognitive perspective on strategy: Organizational consequences of how CEOs and shareholders think

This dissertation advances the cognitive perspective on strategy by extending fundamental strategic management theories in which CEO cognition has received little attention so far, more specifically, the Behavioral Theory of the Firm and Real Options Theory. Through the integration of insights from strategic leadership with those theories, this work aims to come to a more complete understanding of why firms behave differently. After studying CEO cognition and contributing to those two theories, the final study brings light on cognitive thinking by the organization’s most important stakeholder: the shareholder. This research, building on Signaling Theory and the Sensemaking literature, explains how shareholders may engage in a more complex and holistic assessment of an equivocal firm practice. In addition to advancing the cognitive perspective on strategy, the empirical work in this dissertation brings attention to the European context by leveraging novel datasets of European listed firms

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Private Equity

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by venture capital-backed companies have witnessed a surge in popularity in recent years. This article aimed to comprehensively examine this subject from the buyer perspective. Firstly, we demonstrate that venture capitalists assume multiple roles in M&A deals, including traditional screening, monitoring, advising, and coaching. Secondly, drawing from signaling, agency, resource-based, and organizational learning theories, one might anticipate a higher propensity for VC-backed companies to engage in acquisitions. However, the existing literature presents conflicting findings regarding the likelihood of VC-backed takeovers. Likewise, the assessment of short-term and long-term performance outcomes, typically measured through stock returns, yields inconclusive results

Financial versus strategic buyer interest: initiation, competition and persistence during the private bidding process

Purpose This paper aims to explore how target firm attributes affect the interest and persistence of financial versus strategic bidders in the private stages of a corporate takeover process. We study strategic and financial bidder attraction from deal initiation onwards, as such it is unaffected by deal process characteristics or pricing strategies. Design/methodology/approach Relying on the Edgar filings published by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), we hand-collected the number of strategic and financial bidders in each stage of the private bidding process for a sample of 606 takeovers announced between 2005 and 2016. To assess bidder interest, we use three proxies: bidder initiation, bidder competition in the private bidding process, and bidder persistence throughout the entire bidding process. In addition, we compare acquired targets to a matched control group of non-targets. Findings Our results indicate that financial bidders, compared to strategic bidders, are more likely to display interest across the various private deal stages in targets with low market-to-book ratios, high cash flow generation and low R&D expenses. Financial buyers, hence, are particularly attracted when targets offer stand-alone value improvement potential or are undervalued, when cash flow generation allows for exploiting the benefits of debt financing and when technological innovation is low. Originality/value This paper is the first to investigate strategic versus financial bidder interest in the private phases of the M&A process, allowing us to explore true interest in specific targets rather than the outcome of a competitive deal process. Our results provide valuable insights into how targets’ antecedents attract both types of bidders

Uncovering the dynamics of corporate climate disclosure using machine learning

Climate change significantly affects the way firms do business. Firms must not only manage and mitigate the financial impacts of climate-related risks—such as transition risks from policy uncertainty or physical risks from exposure to extreme weather—but also take responsibility for the externalities they impose on society, including biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. With societal awarenss of climate change being at an all-time high, this underscores the importance for firms to be transparent about their exposure to climate change, not only to inform decision-making in capital markets, but also to establish and maintain legitimacy toward its stakeholders, ultimately increasing accountability. However, while we have witnessed an increase in the disclosure of climate-related information (Lin et al., 2024; Müller et al., 2024), these disclosures are not without criticism. Investors have repeatedly voiced concerns about the value-relevance of climate risk disclosure (Ilhan et al., 2023), and empirical evidence documents substantial use of boilerplate language (Bingler et al., 2022, 2024; Lin et al., 2024). Meanwhile, popular concern about greenwashing is soaring (Montgomery et al., 2024). In response to these concerns, policymakers globally are increasingly considering mandating the disclosure of nonfinancial information, including climate-related information, to enhance firms' transparency and, ultimately, accountability. Yet, recent regulatory developments have illustrated the challenges that persist in designing and implementing effective nonfinancial disclosure standards and regulations. Motivated by the relevance of climate disclosure and the challenges firms and regulators face in designing optimal disclosure practices, this dissertation aims to provide fundamental insights into how firms report climate-related information in their annual reports, a key source of both financial and nonfinancial information for investors and other stakeholders (Lin et al., 2024). Moreover, it explores factors influencing firms' reporting choices and the relevance of climate disclosure to external stakeholders. To uncover these "dynamics" of climate disclosure, this dissertation draws on innovations in machine learning, enabling the large-scale analysis of several dimensions of firms' textual climate disclosures. The first chapter examines how the disclosure narrative in firms' annual reports has developed over the last decade. To model this narrative, the chapter introduces a machine learning approach that combines ClimateBERT (Webersinke et al., 2022) with a structural topic model (STM) (Roberts et al., 2016), enabling the discovery of a latent set of disclosure themes in firms' annual reports. The findings indicate that, over the period 2010-2022, the disclosure narrative has significantly shifted toward topics that are expected to be primarily of interest to investors. Additional analyses reveal that these disclosure changes are likely driven by the introduction of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive, which presented an EU-wide shift from voluntary toward mandatory nonfinancial disclosure. Overall, this study contributes to developing a better understanding of the pathways to the current state of climate disclosure and contributes to the debate on the effects of nonfinancial disclosure regulation. The second chapter zooms in and explores whether and when climate risk disclosure influences capital market participants' decision-making, focusing on financial analysts. The findings reveal no general relationship between climate risk disclosure and analysts' earnings forecasts. Nevertheless, results of additional tests show that when firms face negative news exposure, analysts are more likely to downgrade their earnings forecasts, with analysts' revision depending on climate risk disclosure and the materiality of climate risk. These findings illustrate the complex role of climate risk disclosure in capital markets, thereby contributing to the debate on the value-relevance of these disclosures. Another key finding of this chapter is that the perceived credibility of disclosure also influences analysts' judgements of a firm's disclosures, which might lead them to overract to these disclosures. The third chapter, in turn, explores the dynamics of climate disclosure in buyer-supplier relationships. The findings illustrate that there is significant alignment in the way buyers and suppliers report climate-related information. Interestingly, this is driven by the suppliers' imitation of their buyers' disclosure practices, as well as by assortative matching, where buyers and suppliers having similar disclosure practices match in the contracting process. These findings illustrate the importance of moving beyond the focal firm if we are to fully understand firms' climate disclosure choices. Moreover, they should be of interest to policymakers globally, as they illustrate how disclosure practices might spill over from regulated toward unregulated firms due to supply chain dynamics

Compulsory Licensing as an Instrument to Tackle High Medicine Prices: A Realist Review of Industrial and Health Consequences

Although compulsory licensing of medicines is traditionally discussed in the context of low- and middle-income countries tackling high prices, it has recently sparked debate in several high-income countries. This study aims to examine the industrial and health consequences of compulsory licensing when applied by a high-income country. Our literature review found that the impact of compulsory licensing is challenging to predict as it can have multiple (opposing) consequences in terms of economic activity, patient outcomes and public health. Compulsory licensing can, under particular circumstances, serve as a lever of industrial policy in a country that wishes to develop its domestic generic pharmaceutical industry. However, originator pharmaceutical companies and other industries may reduce investment, which can be negative for countries with a high presence of innovators, adversely impacting long-term economic activity. Compulsory licensing may also induce state retaliation against the license-issuing country. From a health policy perspective, compulsory licensing likely increases patient access to expensive medicines and frees up resources that can be invested in other (health) programs. However, pharmaceutical companies may delay medicine launches or cancel clinical trials in the license-issuing country. Although there are benefits resulting from a credible threat to use compulsory licensing, the overall desirability of actually using it depends on the specific context and needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.(Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre|KCE_HSR 2020-50