How Firm Performs Under Stakeholder Pressure: Unpacking the Role of Absorptive Capacity and Innovation Capability

Organizational innovation capability is a critical competitive strategy to generate and execute ingenious ideas necessary to offer new services, processes, and products to stay relevant and competitive. This becomes important in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who depend significantly on stakeholders for an uninterrupted supply of relevant resources to produce and provide offerings to the markets amidst fierce market competition to stay competitive. We draw upon resource dependence and dynamic capabilities theory to investigate how stakeholder pressure acts upon SMEs to utilize their absorptive capacity of developing innovation capability to improve their overall performance. We collected data from 291 SMEs from the manufacturing sector to test the hypotheses of the study. Results suggest that absorptive capacity mediates the influence of stakeholder pressure on innovation capability. Furthermore, innovation capability too mediates the relationship between absorptive capacity and firm performance. This article contributes to theoretical and practical implications

Are digital technologies killing future innovation? The curvilinear relationship between digital technologies and firm's intellectual property

Purpose: The study aims to understand how digital technologies impact firm’s innovativeness and intellectual capital creation. Precisely, we argue that digital technologies exert a positive influence on firm’s intellectual property, but the relationship is inverse u-shaped. Design/methodology/approach: Hypotheses are tested through the multiple regression method on a large-scale sample of micro-data drawn from Eurostat. The dataset includes information on European firms. Findings: At large, evidences seem to confirm that digital technologies may have a positive influence on the creation of intellectual capital and innovativeness of firms. However, the results also suggest that this relationship is not straightforward. By contrast, it seems more inverse u-shaped. Also, some components related to both human capital and relational capital hinder the creation of firm’s intellectual capital. Research limitations/implications:. The use of a sample exclusively including European firms might limit the span of the research’s results, albeit European Union might be considered a champion of the diffusion of digital technologies. Practical implications: Practitioners may use the findings of the study to foster the creation of intellectual property and to remove barriers to innovativeness. Originality/value

Ambidextrous innovation orientation effected by the digital transformation: A quantitative research on fashion SMEs

This study introduces a new perspective on ambidextrous innovation orientation, looking at how the current digital transformation is accepted in the fashion industry in Italy. Ambidextrous innovation orientation is thus enriched with the use of new technologies and introduces incremental and radical innovations through the combination of exploitation and exploration processes. These new technologies can be seen in the form of online platforms such as social media networks, which generate self-disruption in all industries, leading to a revival of business process management firms’ business process management. Although small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the fashion industry were initially reluctant to accept this change due to their artisanal and handmade characteristics, nowadays this is one of the most avant-garde and technological sectors. Therefore, this form of business is considered as a fruitful context for analysing the effect of four dimensions of social media networks on ambidextrous innovation orientation: the structural dimension; the relational behaviour dimension; the cognitive dimension; and knowledge transfer practices. Empirically, a regression methodology has been applied to a sample of 853 SMEs in the fashion industry. The results demonstrated that social media platforms serve as spaces for seeking out innovation (structural dimension) where interaction with customers can occur (relational dimension) to develop and collect innovation inputs that will obviously depend on the knowledge mind-sets of the customers concerned (cognitive dimension). Subsequently, the external knowledge collected will need to be combined with the internal knowledge in order to search for innovation (knowledge transfer/co-creation)

Financial management of publicly funded research activities: an explorative study

This research deals with the analysis of financial management, with a specific focus on cash flows, within in-house publicly controlled companies operating in high-technology sectors and characterised by the relevant participation in research projects financed by the European Structural Funds. To this end, three research questions are formulated relating to the liquidity cycle of such organisations. They focus respectively on the risk and return trade-off, on the variability of their cash flows and on the relation between the liquidity and the yields of the financial tools owned. A public–private consortium was the subject of analysis to answer the research questions. Specifically, the Miller–Orr model is applied to the consortium’s cash flows to provide managerial recommendations for the future and a course of action