Search results

Firms seek to improve their decision-making and enable more “fact-based” decisions by using business analytics. While the benefits of using business analytics to monitor, develop and improve daily operations have been reported by many scholars, using it in more complex top management decisions has received less attention. Building on the resource-based view of the firm, this study aims to investigate top management perceptions of using business analytics for making decisions on firm resources.

This study uses semi-structured interviews to collect perceptions of 12 top managers in large firms on when and why they use business analytics in their decision-making.

Top managers use business analytics output as their main source of information for monitoring ongoing business performance against set targets and taking corrective actions. Concerning future-oriented planning and strategic decision-making involving more complex changes on the firms’ resource base, top managers proactively complement knowledge derived via business analytics with other sources of knowledge, such as stakeholder and expert opinions. Moreover, top managers use of business analytics depends on their own expectations of its value potential and on the expectations of their organization.

This study adds to the extant literature on the business value of business analytics by outlining the purposes and reasons for top management business analytics use. By demonstrating when and why top managers apply business analytics when making decisions on the firm’s current and future resource base, this study contributes to the discussion on the resource-based view and decision-making practices of the firm.

Firms need to constantly renew themselves to keep up with the pace of competition and proactively establish innovations to the markets. This requires capabilities in learning and renewing of the firm’s knowledge base, conceptualized as renewal capital of the firm. On the other hand, firms that acquire high levels of competitiveness by renewing their knowledge base also need to protect that knowledge from unwanted spillovers. This study aims to examine how renewal capital affects incremental and radical innovation performance of the firm, moderated by the firm’s protection of its strategic knowledge.

The study is based on a multi-industry survey study with a time-lagged data set, with independent variables collected in the first wave, followed by a second wave four years later for the dependent variables. The authors test the hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The authors find that firms’ renewal capital is positively associated with the level of incremental and radical innovation. Furthermore, the authors find that knowledge protection negatively moderates the relationship between renewal capital and incremental innovation performance of the firm. In case of radical innovation performance, similar moderating effect is not statistically supported.

With a time-lagged research design, this study study reveals the interdependent roles of renewal capital and knowledge protection for firm’s innovation performance, and provides insights of when (and when not) it would be beneficial for a firm to seek renewal and protective oriented approaches.

Successful firms are important sources of productivity, employment and economic stability in societies. As the micro-level origins of firm innovations are increasingly attracting attention amongst innovation scholars, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of managerial innovativeness, i.e. small firm managers' innovative behaviour for firm performance. Specifically, the present study investigates managerial innovativeness as a predictor of small firms' product innovativeness and market performance.

This research model suggests that managerial innovativeness is positively linked to firms' market performance and that product innovativeness partially mediates the relationship between managerial innovativeness and market performance. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with a dataset (N = 93) collected from small logistics firms in South-Eastern Finland.

The findings support the authors' hypotheses and show that managerial innovativeness had a direct effect on firms' product innovativeness and market performance. The authors also found that firms' product innovativeness mediated the relationship between managerial innovativeness and firms' market performance.

This is one of the few studies that shed light on and show that managerial innovativeness is significantly and positively related with small firms' product innovativeness and market performance, whereas earlier research tended to focus on managers' personalities, traits, characteristics or managerial actions, leaving managerial innovativeness unexplored.

In 2000, Cañibano et al. published a literature review entitled “Accounting for Intangibles: A Literature Review”. This paper revisits the conclusions drawn in that paper. We also discuss the intervening developments in scholarly research, standard setting and practice over the past 20+ years to outline the future challenges for research into accounting for intangibles.

We conducted a literature review to identify past developments and link the findings to current accounting standard-setting developments to inform our view of the future.

Current intangibles accounting practices are conservative and unlikely to change. Accounting standard setters are more interested in how companies report and disclose the value of intangibles rather than changing how they are determined. Standard setters are also interested in accounting for new forms of digital assets and reporting economic, social, governance and sustainability issues and how these link to financial outcomes. The IFRS has released complementary sustainability accounting standards for disclosing value creation in response to the latter. Therefore, the topic of intangibles stretches beyond merely how intangibles create value but how they are also part of a firm’s overall risk and value creation profile.

There is much room academically, practically, and from a social perspective to influence the future of accounting for intangibles. Accounting standard setters and alternative standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and European Union non-financial and sustainability reporting directives, are competing complementary initiatives.

Our results reveal a window of opportunity for accounting scholars to research and influence how intangibles and other non-financial and sustainability accounting will progress based on current developments.