Adoption of "eco-advantage" by SMEs: emerging opportunities and constraints

Purpose: A recent study has asserted that businesses need to adopt “eco-advantage”. This paper aims to explore the viability of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) achieving “eco-advantage” by exploring their understanding of sustainability issues, how they adopt and innovate in terms of sustainability and the benefits and obstacles they face. Design/methodology/approach: The research approach is exploratory, comprised of 15 SME embedded cases based in the UK. The cases are participants in short interventions in sustainable product and process design as a part of a university knowledge transfer project, representing the overall case. Cases are based on interviews with company participants and collaborating academics, supplemented by documentary and observational evidence. Findings: The results build on the work on “eco-advantage” found in a recent study, highlighting marketing, rather than compliance issues as a catalyst for change. The newly aware SME enters a development process which involves cumulative capabilities, gaining a nascent inner confidence, which includes espousing wider sustainable values. Research limitations/implications: The results reveal the scope and challenges for SMEs to adopt more sustainable practices, encompassing innovations and a broad set of capabilities. Further research points to the need to monitor benefits as well as inputs in evaluating sustainability improvements and to consider longitudinal business sustainability issues. Originality/value: The paper informs the emerging debate on sustainability in SMEs, providing a rich source of data to enhance the provision of business support and knowledge transfer activities, where a more holistic and customised approach is required to realise the real environmental and economic benefits accrued from implementing sustainable improvements

Social Capital and Industrial Transformation

This paper is an exploration of the social capital needs of industrial development. 'Social capital' attracts considerable attention in socio-political analysis and we are beginning to see its application to development economics. There has not, as far as I know, been any attempt to apply it to the determinants of successful industrialisation in the developing world. This essay is a preliminary sketch of the concepts rather than a report on research findings or a complete analysis with specific policy recommendations. Nevertheless, it illustrates the value and significance of bringing social capital concepts to bear on specific aspects of development

Housing supply chain model for innovation: research report

The aim of this research is to undertake a case study analysis of successful delivery of an innovation to the Australian housing construction industry. This study is conducted on the “innovator group”; that is, the group that created the idea of an innovation for the housing sector and then were intimately involved in creation, development and diffusion. It is apparent that there were key players involved in this process which are representative of various organisations along the supply chain – designer, developer, subcontractor and supplier. Much rhetoric states that integration of the supply chain actors will solve construction problems, however, in reality we know little beyond this in the Australian context as there has been little research conducted previously. This study will examine in detail the process undertaken by this particular group to deliver an innovation to the housing sector which required an integrated construction supply chain model. This report was published by the Australian Housing Supply Chain Alliance and written by Professor Kerry London, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University with Research Fellow, Jessica Siva

Linking business analytics to decision making effectiveness: a path model analysis

While business analytics is being increasingly used to gain data-driven insights to support decision making, little research exists regarding the mechanism through which business analytics can be used to improve decision-making effectiveness (DME) at the organizational level. Drawing on the information processing view and contingency theory, this paper develops a research model linking business analytics to organizational DME. The research model is tested using structural equation modeling based on 740 responses collected from U.K. businesses. The key findings demonstrate that business analytics, through the mediation of a data-driven environment, positively influences information processing capability, which in turn has a positive effect on DME. The findings also demonstrate that the paths from business analytics to DME have no statistical differences between large and medium companies, but some differences between manufacturing and professional service industries. Our findings contribute to the business analytics literature by providing useful insights into business analytics applications and the facilitation of data-driven decision making. They also contribute to manager's knowledge and understanding by demonstrating how business analytics should be implemented to improve DM

Catching up or being dependent: the growth of capabilities among indigenous technological integrators during Chinese development

The thesis appraises certain key processes – albeit rather limited in number and scope – widely assumed to be associated with assessing the role of technological capability building in developing country (DC) firms. The latter are affected by their DC status on both the demand side (e.g. by rapid growth of the economy via consumption and trade) and the supply side (of technological catch-up etc.). Such broad considerations set the scene for our specific study. In this thesis, the component of technological capabilities that we highlight by studying local integrated product providers is the capability for systemic product development. We argue that the organisational system of industrial firms in DCs plays a fundamental role in their technological learning performance. Here, the developmental context is stressed because we suggest that the knowledge about how to organise effective learning, termed 'social technology', is at least as scarce as the 'physical technology' in such contexts, compared with those prevailing in the developed countries. Therefore, when DC firms shift into a new domain, the organisational systems that they rely on often have to be created rather than simply selected. This may be because, as first-movers in their circumstances, even when they are informed by external sources, they have very little practical experience of carrying out similar actions successfully within their own contexts. Therefore, studying organisational building in their early phase could prove critical for understanding their capability building processes. Empirical studies of China‘s car-making and telecom-equipment sectors over the past three decades are taken to support theoretical exploration in this thesis. Some scholars (e.g. Bell and Pavitt, 1992) point out that, in DCs, the growth of production capacity does not automatically lead to the building of technological capability. The experiences of China‘s car-making and telecomequipment sectors are exactly in line with this point of view. From the mid 1980s, the Chinese government implemented a 'trading market for technology (TMFT)' policy, encouraging its backbone SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) to establish productive joint ventures (JVs) with MNCs (Multinational Corporations). By doing so, policy-makers expected backbone SOEs to undergo a bottom-up capability building trajectory via learning closely from their JV partners. We term these SOEs and their JVs the 'Group-A firms' in our research. Contrary to the expectations of policy-makers, Group-A firms were locked into the manufacturing segment even after twenty years of TMFT practices, and seldom had new systemic products developed indigenously, prior to 2005 at least. On the contrary, the indigenous advance of technological capability building has actually been led by some new entrants. Their development has been independent of the advocacy of TMFT. They relied on in-house developed products from the very beginning after entering the corresponding industries, and succeeded in building sustainable competitiveness. We term them the 'Group-B firms'. By comparing these Group-A and Group-B firms, we argue that there are distinctive differences in organisational learning systems between them. Four components are developed of the concept of organisational learning systems, i.e. the strategic intent, the authority over strategic resource allocation, the pattern of organisational mobilisation and learning integration, and the facilities and institutions for knowledge accumulation. For the latter three components, we succeed in generating a clear contrast between these two groups of firms. We undertake a thorough comparison of authority over strategic resource allocation by studying the constitution of their top committees. As for the patterns of learning mobilisation and organisational integration, we find distinct differences in the scope of knowledge communication of front-line engineers, and relevant institutional arrangements to mobilise, integrate and direct the content of communication. Regarding the facilities for knowledge accumulation and application, the study of their knowledge database building engenders a clear contrast, as well as the institutional arrangements to regulate and promote relevant activities within their organisations. We also discover significant connections between the organisational systems of Group-B firms and their processes of knowledge search, generation and accumulation. Three important mechanisms of new knowledge creation in Group-B firms are examined, namely learning through recruitment, learning through cooperative projects and learning through interaction with customers. Our empirical study reveals that the authority stressing the investment in new product and technology development, the cross-boundary inter-departmental platform of knowledge conversion, the comprehensive knowledge-accumulating facilities, and the institutions backing these components play fundamental roles in shaping these learning mechanisms. Therefore, the organisational differences of these two groups of firms are connected with the differences of these two subsets of firms‘ technological learning performances. Besides, we discuss the social roots of their organisational systems by historically revisiting China‘s industrial system. By doing so, for the research community that focuses on technological learning in DCs, this thesis advocates a shift of research from stressing assimilative processes of firms to giving more emphasis to organisational changes as a centrepiece of studies