Organizational resources, dynamic capabilities and strategic performance: an analysis of the Real Estate Appraisal Industry in Guangdong, China

With the deepening of market economy, China's real estate appraisal industry is growing from strength to strength. It is characterized by having a small scale, low profits, and weak competition, even though growth differences are becoming increasingly noticeable among companies. Currently, there is a significant shortage of empirical research about what is happening in this transition phase concerning this industry. Therefore, it is important to conduct studies that would help companies to develop business practices that allow them to succeed in the market economy. In this context, this thesis investigates the key factors that facilitate the performance of the organization from the resource-based view, aiming at explaining the interplay between organizational resources, dynamic capabilities, and strategic performance. Based on the existing Chinese and foreign literatures, a conceptual model is developed, and four hypotheses are proposed, for analyzing the influence of organizational resources (entrepreneur traits, TMT characteristics, and network relationships) and dynamic capabilities on the strategic performance of enterprises. This research is conducted with middle-level and senior managers of the real estate appraisal industry, in Guangdong province, China. A structured questionnaire is designed and 274 valid responses are gathered. Data analysis employs the variance-based structural equation model (known as partial least squares-based SEM, PLS-SEM). Results confirms that network relationships and dynamic capabilities have a direct positive effect on strategic performance; entrepreneurial traits, TMT characteristics, and network relationships have a positive impact on strategic performance through the mediating role of dynamic capabilities, which contributes to academia by expanding research into strategic performance in China.Com o desenvolvimento da economia de mercado, a indústria de avaliação imobiliária chinesa está a crescer e a ficar cada vez mais forte. Caracteriza-se pela pequena escala, baixos lucros e fraca competitividade, muito embora os diferenciais de crescimento estejam a tornar-se mais visíveis entre as empresas. Atualmente existe uma grande escassez de estudos empíricos sobre o que está a acontecer nesta indústria nesta fase de transição. Portanto, é importante realizar estudos que ajudem as empresas a desenvolver práticas de negócios que lhes permitam ser bem sucedidas na economia de mercado. Neste contexto, esta tese investiga os fatores chaves que facilitam o desempenho da organização a partir da perspetiva baseada nos recursos, com o intuito de explicar a interação entre recursos organizacionais, capacidades dinâmicas e desempenho estratégico. Com base na literatura, um modelo conceptual é desenvolvido e quatro hipóteses são propostas para analisar a influência dos recursos organizacionais (traços de empreendedorismo, características dos gestores de topo e relações em rede) e as capacidades dinâmicas no desempenho estratégico das empresas. Esta pesquisa é realizada com gestores intermédios e de topo da indústria de avaliação imobiliária, na província de Guangdong, China. Um questionário estruturado é criado e 274 respostas válidas são recolhidas. A análise dos dados emprega o modelo de equações estruturais baseado na variância (conhecido como os SEM baseado nos mínimos quadrados parciais, PLS-SEM - partial least squares - structural equation model). Os resultados confirmam que as relações em rede e as capacidades dinâmicas têm um efeito positivo direto sobre o desempenho estratégico; os traços de empreendedorismo, as características dos gestores de topo e as relações em rede têm um impacto positivo no desempenho estratégico através da mediação das capacidades dinâmicas. Este trabalho contribui para o estado da arte através do alargamento da investigação em desempenho estratégico na China

On the structure and internal mechanisms of business incubators: A comparative case study

It is an established economic development paradigm that entrepreneurship promotes innovation and encourages the creation of high quality jobs. In order to enhance entrepreneurial activity, the focus in Ireland to date has been on public-sector venture creation programmes. Of such programmes, business incubators, over the years, politically and in terms of public funding, have received perhaps the highest level of attention. Thus, incubators in Ireland have become important policy instruments for promoting early stage entrepreneurship. The research project outlined in this thesis to investigate this important phenomenon began with an extensive review of the incubator-incubation literature. This review showed that given the importance attributed to incubators, surprisingly little is known about how they function, or, the internal process of incubation. In other words, what is not understood completely are the dynamics of an incubator’s internal processes, normative environment and structural properties which enable human activity. Researching these aspects is important due to their important link with incubation “success”. A more sophisticated understanding of how incubators incubate will allow us to exercise more control over the quality of incubation programs, thereby, influencing the likelihood of incubated firms surviving after the incubation period. In order to investigate the incubation process and incubators’ normative environment and structural properties, a qualitative, multi-site case study approach was utilised. A pragmatist-interpretivist philosophy and the social mechanisms literature informed the research’s meta-theoretical lens. Data was collected during 2009-2010 at two different types of incubation facilities in Dublin; a ‘community enterprise centre’ and a ‘university campus-based hightech incubator’. The research’s most significant finding is that incubation is primarily relational in nature, and the process is co-produced by both the incubator manager (IM) and a specific client in independent dyads. A number of factors influence the development of IM-Client, Client-Client, Client-IM-Client and Client-Third Party relationships, chief of which are the leadership style of the IM, the physical design of the incubator facility, the incubator’s client mix and the incubation ethos. It was also determined that the scale, scope, intensity, frequency and thus the quality of incubation is dependent on, what has been termed, an incubation click. This is a bond based on the understanding that incubation assistance can be competently provided, and that such mentoring, coaching or developmental assistance is also proactively sought. Incubation is triggered in a sophisticated normative environment under the prevalence of ground rules, subtle signals, the interplay of personal histories, hidden agendas, perceptions of value and human biases. As a result of this research our knowledge of various aspects of incubators’ structure and their status as complex hybrid organisations has also increased. Incubators’ structural attributes such as de-coupling, mis-alignment of managerial incentives and sources of internal coordination and control uncertainty suggest why it continues to be difficult to evaluate their performance and socio-economic impact. Overall, the research has raised the profile of incubation research in the incubator-incubation discourse. Although modelling the incubation process is difficult due to high levels of randomness inherent in the internal incubator environment, the increased understanding of process variables, normative patterns and structural properties developed as a result of this research will allow the introduction of efficiencies to improve the chances of incubation “success”

Entrepreneurial talent and venture performance: A meta-analytic investigation of SMEs

AbstractAs the broad link between small and medium-sized firm activity and key policy goals such as employment or economic growth has become generally accepted, the conversation has focused on a more nuanced understanding of the entrepreneurial engines of economic activity. A significant body of research looking at antecedents to venture performance has identified that entrepreneurial talent variables account for meaningful differences in venture performance and that significant heterogeneity exists across performance measures. These are important issues for institutions and policy makers seeking to achieve specific economic goals (e.g., survival or growth of ventures, employment or revenue). Using meta-analysis, we integrate this work to view connections between aspects of entrepreneurial talent and different performance outcomes. Our investigation includes 50,045 firms (K of 183 studies) and summarizes 1002 observations of small and medium-sized firms. Analysis of these data yields an unexpectedly weak connection between education and performance. Furthermore, growth, scale (number of employees) and sales outcomes are significantly related to planning skills, while profit and other financial and qualitative measures are strongly connected with the network surrounding the firm founders. Moreover, we observe that entrepreneurial talent is more relevant in developing economies

Barriers to the implementation of enterprise strategic transformation based on path dependence theory: the case of Jiangsu High Hope Group

With the deepening of economic globalization and the improvement of the trade structure mode, China has gradually become a global trade power, enjoying increasing space for the development of its foreign trade enterprises. However, under the comprehensive influences by external factors, China's foreign trade enterprises are faced with huge pressure to survive. Foreign trade enterprises in the new situation must continue to carry out strategic transformation in order to survive and develop. However, in the dynamic environment, the traditional enterprise strategic transformation is faced with serious path dependence, which leads to obvious inertia, which seriously hinders enterprise strategic transformation implementation and even leads to transformation failure. Existing studies only focus on enterprise strategic transformation, whereas this thesis discusses the inertial factors that hinder enterprise strategic transformation implementation from the perspective of path dependence. In other words, this thesis incorporates the theory of path dependence into the theory of strategic transformation, and probes into enterprise strategic transformation from the perspective of path dependence. Proceeding from theory and demonstration and with Jiangsu High Hope Group as the research object, this thesis studies the path dependence factors that hinder Jiangsu High Hope Group's strategic transformation implementation. Relevant suggestions on addressing path dependence barriers to the case company's strategic transformation are put forward from five aspects, namely, enterprise structure, enterprise employees, enterprise core competencies, enterprise culture and external environment, in view of the fact that the case company’s path dependence hinders its strategic transformation implementation.Com o aprofundamento da globalização económica e a melhoria do modo de estrutura comercial, gradualmente, a China tornou-se em uma potência comercial no mundo, desfrutando de um espaço cada vez maior para o desenvolvimento de empresas de comércio exterior (ECE). No entanto, sob as influências abrangentes de fatores externos, as ECE da China enfrentam uma pressão enorme para sobreviver. Na situação nova, as ECE devem continuar a realizar a transformação estratégica (TE) para sobreviver e se desenvolver. Entretanto, no ambiente dinâmico, a TE da empresa tradicional é confrontada com uma séria dependência de trajetória (DT), o que leva à inércia óbvia, o que prejudica seriamente a implementação da TE da empresa, até leva ao fracasso da transformação. Os estudos existentes concentram-se apenas na TE da empresa, enquanto esta tese discute os fatores de inércia que impedem a implementação da TE na empresa a partir da perspetiva da DT, ou seja, esta tese incorpora a teoria da DT na teoria da TE e investiga a TE da empresa a partir da perspetiva da DT. Partindo da teoria e da investigação empírica e tendo como objeto de pesquisa o Grupo Jiangsu High Hope, esta tese estuda os fatores de DT que impedem a implementação da TE do Grupo. As conclusões mais relevantes sobre como lidar com barreiras de DT para a TE da empresa em causa são apresentadas em cinco vertentes, nomeadamente, a estrutura empresarial, os colaboradores de topo de empresa, competências essenciais da empresa, cultura empresarial e o ambiente externo. Este caso lustra bem em como a DT da empresa constitui dificuldade de implementação da TE

Core Firm Based View on the Mechanism of Constructing an Enterprise Innovation Ecosystem: A Case Study of Haier Group

The fierce competitive status of the business world has urged innovation activities to transform from mechanistic to ecological and organic. An innovation ecosystem consists of multilateral organizations and emerges as a favorable mechanism for value co-creation and sustainable growth. Yet the theorizing of an innovation ecosystem is still at an early stage and in-depth studies from emerging economy leaders are insufficient. This study aims to investigate how an innovation ecosystem is constructed and coordinated from a core-firm based view. An exploratory single case study on the Haier Group is adopted. Through analyzing the multi-bedded units (i.e., six innovation projects/technological breakthroughs), we extract and depict Haier’s innovation ecosystem and the ecological niches within it. We highlight an innovation ecosystem that promotes sustainable development and is based on complementarities in technologies and resources, while at the same time integrates non-technological issues such as strategy, culture, institution, and the market. Regarding ecosystem coordination, value appropriability should be ensured to sustain the innovation ecosystem. Moreover, we argue that the ultimate purpose of innovation ecosystem is not to facilitate the realization of one specific project, but rather to improve the overall success rate of innovations within it. This research complements and extends literature on enterprise innovation ecosystems, and provides implications as to the construction, coordination, and sustainability of innovation ecosystems for emerging economy firms

Importance of Social Networks for Knowledge Sharing and the Impact of Collaboration on Network Innovation in Online Communities

Innovation results from interactions between different sources of knowledge, where these sources aggregate into groups interacting within (intra) and between (inter) groups. Interaction among groups for innovation generation is defined as the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among members of a social system. Apart from the discussion about knowledge management within organizations and the discussion about social network analysis of organizations on the topic of innovation and talks about various trade-offs between strength of ties and bridging ties between different organizational groups, within the topic of open source software (OSS) development researchers have used social network theories to investigate OSS phenomenon including communication among developers. It is already known that OSS groups are more networked than the most organizational communities; In OSS network, programmers can join, participate and leave a project at any time, and in fact developers can collaborate not only within the same project but also among different projects or teams. One distinguished feature of the open source software (OSS) development model is the cooperation and collaboration among the members, which will cause various social networks to emerge. In this chapter, the existing gap in the literature with regard to the analysis of cluster or group structure as an input and cluster or group innovation as an output will be addressed, where the focus is on “impact of network cluster structure on cluster innovation and growth” by Behfar et al., that is, how intra- and inter-cluster coupling, structural holes and tie strength impact cluster innovation and growth, and “knowledge management in OSS communities: relationship between dense and sparse network structures.” by Behfar et al., that is, knowledge transfer in dense network (inside groups) impacts on knowledge transfer in sparse network (between groups)