Search results

The study aims to examine the development of student venture creation in a co-curricular business model lab initiative with collaboration between students, researchers, technology transfer offices (TTO) and industry. It presents a fresh approach to the study of student venture creation by discussing a unique co-curricular case, its embeddedness in a network and drawing on the concept of tension.

A qualitative, case-based research design is applied containing data from interviews, observations and active participation.

The findings point to the inherent difficulties in managing and organizing student venture creation and networks surrounding the student venture creation in a co-curricular setting that can lead to several different types of tensions. Episodes where task-, role-, process-, affective- and value-related tensions arise are identified. Furthermore, the findings highlight that affective-related tension is often an outcome of other types of tensions.

Our theoretical implications point to the importance of the context of student venture creation, but not only regarding curricular and co-curricular initiatives; depending on the context, such as if student surrogate entrepreneurship is used, different types of support structure might also be needed to enable student venture creation.

Research on the entrepreneurial university has mainly focused on entrepreneurship education and ventures created by researchers. This study responds to recent calls for research on the venture creation of students. The limited research conducted on student venture creation can be divided between curricular and co-curricular initiatives. Our research points out that many other contextual factors are of importance, such as the origin of ideas, student surrogate entrepreneurship, industry collaboration, team formation and expectations.

Supply chains need to be made viable in this volatile and competitive market, which could be possible through digitalization. This study is an attempt to explore the role of Industry 4.0, smart supply chain, supply chain agility and supply chain resilience on sustainable business performance from the lens of natural resource-based view.

The study tests the proposed model using a covariance-based structural equation modelling and further investigates the ranking of each construct using the artificial neural networks approach in AMOS and SPSS respectively. A total of 234 respondents selected using purposive sampling aided in capturing the industry practices across supply chains in the UK. The full collinearity test was carried out to study the common method bias and the content validity was carried out using the item content validity index and scale content validity index. The convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs and mediation study was carried out in SPSS and AMOS V.23.

The results are overtly inferring the significant impact of Industry 4.0 practices on creating smart and ultimately sustainable supply chains. A partial relationship is established between Industry 4.0 and supply chain agility through a smart supply chain. This work empirically reinstates the combined significance of green practices, Industry 4.0, smart supply chain, supply chain agility and supply chain resilience on sustainable business value. The study also uses the ANN approach to determine the relative importance of each significant variable found in SEM analysis. ANN determines the ranking among the significant variables, i.e. supply chain resilience > green practices > Industry 4.0> smart supply chain > supply chain agility presented in descending order.

This study is a novel attempt to establish the role of digitalization in SCs for attaining sustainable business value, providing empirical support to the mediating role of supply chain agility, supply chain resilience and smart supply chain and manifests a significant integrated framework. This work reinforces the integrated model that combines all the constructs dealt with in silos so far in prior literature.

Today’s organizations face constant structural and cultural changes at an accelerated pace, with a growing focus on self-determination to improve employee motivation and organizational performance. The shift toward a self-determined organizational culture allows employees greater autonomy in making decisions related to their work which are found to provide many positive organizational- and individual-level outcomes. However, adapting to an autonomous work culture is a complex process and demands cognitive capacity, which is especially challenging for those who have previously experienced low autonomy in their work. Consequently, individuals are found to experience mixed feelings as they make sense of ongoing changes and fear potential dangers that change entails. The purpose of the present study is to understand what employees perceive as frightening in a self-determined organizational culture, which is generally associated with a positive image and that so many organizations are increasingly leaning to in that direction.

In this study, we collected ten in-depth-interviews from employees from a case company, Finnish financial services company that was undergoing an organizational change toward a self-determined organizational culture. We approached data from grounded theory perspective that revealed that fear was explicit in participants’ narration, which then led us to focus on fears. By applying the Gioia method to the analysis, we recognized how individuals made sense of change through fears.

In our findings, we recognized that individuals made sense of the change in an organization’s culture through processing fears on three levels: fears of doing, being, and becoming. This revealed that individuals do not fear an organization’s cultural change only because they need to adjust to new ways of working but because they themselves must change too. While individuals are experiencing enormous changes at work, they are engaging in a process where they try to make sense of expectations and struggle to create new meanings and behaviors. Expressing worries of an organization’s actions and development can be one way of distancing oneself from the change while evaluating one´s own position.

This study provides an understanding of an ongoing organizational culture change in the context of a transition to a self-determined organizational culture. Although the benefits of self-determined organizing and culture have been strongly emphasized, this study points out the challenges that an increase in autonomy causes among employees and how demanding the process in adapting to a new culture can be.