Strategic Planning and Firm Performance: A Comparison across Countries and Sectors

The level of uncertainty and pace of change in business environments is posing challenges for firms. The developed economies have transformed from the industrial era to the knowledge and service era, while emerging economies thrive with industrial growth. This poses the question of what the key drivers of corporate success are and how far they are different from the old earnings logic. We will focus on one special value-creating resource or capability, namely strategic planning. We empirically examine the performance consequences of strategic planning to determine in what contexts it pays off particularly well. We use data from a large-scale survey of about 2,500 organisations from developed and emerging countries. The survey responses represent a variety of industries from manufacturing to services. The analysis is based on general linear models, and the findings show significant performance differences across countries, industries, and firm size - with strategic planning explaining performance much better than any contextual characteristics

Can role models boost entrepreneurial attitudes?

This multi-country study used role models to boost perceptions of entrepreneurial feasibility and desirability. The results of a structural equation model based on a sample comprising 426 individuals who were primarily from Austria, Finland and Greece revealed a significant positive influence on perceived entrepreneurial desirability and feasibility. These findings support the argument for embedding entrepreneurial role models in entrepreneurship education courses to promote entrepreneurial activities. This direction is not only relevant for the academic community but also essential for nascent entrepreneurs, policymakers and society at large.ISSN:1368-275XISSN:1741-509

Managing uncertainty in forecasting the diffusion of telecommunications innovations

299-304The study presents how adding more independent explaining variables and applying neural networks for forecasting purposes could improve the forecasting accuracy of the diffusion of innovations. The paper proposes a set of uncertainty sources of telecommunications industry that have notable affect on the diffusion of innovations in the field. Diffusion patterns and uncertainty indicators of 81 countries were classified using self-organizing map neural network approach, and the results indicate that various levels and types of uncertainty are likely to produce different types of diffusion patterns