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Evidence from previous literature indicates that adopting a new innovative technology has a positive impact on a company’s business performance. Much less work has been carried out into examining whether a technology adoption has impact on corporate reputation. This paper aims to examine the latter topic in a context where social media is the channel used to share news about the introduction of a new technology. The empirical setting of the study consists of five retail companies located in the USA that decided to include Bitcoin as a payment platform.

Twitter data were used to measure how sharing news about the adoption of new technology could affect the reputation of the companies selected, keeping a clear distinction between the volume of data relating to social media responses and the sentiment expressed in the tweets. A panel vector autoregression model was used to incorporate series of data relating to news items, volume and sentiment.

The results show that the news about the adoption of a new technology has a positive impact on both the volume of tech-related tweets and the sentiment expressed in the tweets themselves, although the patterns of these two effects are different. The resulting impact decreases after a few days, both in volume and in sentiment.

The analysis has limitations that future research could address by extending and diversifying the examined companies and the social media used as data sources. The research suggests that managers in medium-sized companies can leverage on the introduction of new technologies that have a direct impact on their customers and gain reputational benefits in terms of immediate visibility.

The research introduces an additional dimension of analysis to the current stream of corporate reputation. Although the literature has already covered the dynamics of response to events on Twitter, by focusing on the adoption of the new Bitcoin technology, the paper provides novel insights.

This paper analyzes the importance given by venture capital (VC) firms to the different characteristics of the patent portfolio of a young innovative company (YIC). In an attempt to go beyond previous studies, the authors argue that not only is the size of a technological portfolio significant but also its nature. It is also examined whether the correlation between patents and VC financing varies across different industrial sectors and over different rounds of VC investments.

The empirical analysis has focused on a sample of 1,096 European YICs between the years 2010 and 2014. Target companies were identified in the monthly bulletins of Go4Venture, which reported the largest European deals and gathered information on the amount of VC financing. Additional data was derived from FinSMEs and crunchbase. Industrial sectors were differentiated according to their ability to appropriate the returns of innovation by relying on patent protection mechanisms. A multivariate regression framework at the patent family level was adopted to investigate empirical associations between the amount of VC financing and the characteristics of a YIC's patent portfolio.

The results confirm the positive value of patents. Both the size and the characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio have been found to be positively associated with the total amount of VC financing. Additionally, the correlation between a YIC patent portfolio and VC investment varies across industries and over rounds of funding. Although the number of patents is positively correlated with VC investments in sectors with strong Intellectual Property (IP) regimes, the same does not apply to sectors characterized by lower patent intensity, where qualitative metrics seem to have a stronger correlation. Significant differences have also been found for the different rounds of VC investments.

The limitations of this paper are related to data availability. Empirical associations have been investigated, but causal effects cannot be ascertained in this framework. The authors focused on a sample of firms that received VC funding. Several transactions were excluded, due to a lack of specifications pertaining to the round series. Furthermore, a number of potential drivers of the financed amounts, such as variables related to the founder or the management team, have not been considered in this study.

For firms operating in sectors with weak IP regimes, patents are positively associated with attracting equity capital, if they are the output of R&D collaborations and have higher technical merit. In industries where patent intensity is higher, patent portfolio size matters more than quality. This suggests that VC investors award innovation quality to cases in which patenting is less frequent. Since the results indicate that positive associations between patenting and VC financing are more significant in later stages, managers should plan their patenting strategy in advance to reap the related benefits, and then collect the premium at later VC stages.

In this paper, the importance given by VC firms to different characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio has been analyzed in terms of size, quality, and complexity. While previous empirical analyses mainly focused on a single sector, the authors have examined whether the relevance of patents for VC financing decisions varies across industries and over different rounds of investment. The geographical coverage of the sample is another novelty of the paper. Previous works focused on a limited number of countries, whereas this research has considered firms operating in several European countries.

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, also known as three-dimensional printing (3DP), is a technological breakthrough that have the potential to disrupt the traditional operations of supply chains. They open the way to a supply chains innovation that can significantly benefit hospitals and health-related organizations in dealing with crises or unexpected events in a faster and more flexible way. In this study the authors identify the boundary of this potential support.

The authors adopt a case study approach to understand the dynamics behind a well-known best practice to identify the main opportunities and the main pitfalls that AM may pose to health-related organizations wanting to leverage them.

The case highlights that it is possible to increase hospital flexibility using AM and that by leveraging the Internet it is possible to spread the benefits faster than what it would be normally possible using traditional supply chain processes. At the same time the case highlights that leveraging these technologies needs buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders.

The paper is one of the first, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to highlight the main opportunities and difficulties of implementing 3DP technologies in hospital supply chain management.

It is the responsibility of the national governments to deliver healthcare services that are both effective and affordable to everyone. There are still gaps in this supply, which is extremely demanding. In this sense, companies are attempting to reach neglected markets and disrupt the marketplace with novel solutions. Although there are still anecdotal examples, a thorough literature evaluation is lacking. This study aims to provide a synthesis of the future of healthcare start-ups.

Papers that included the term “healthcare start-ups,” “health-tech start-ups,” “start-up,” “Artificial intelligence in healthcare,” and “Health tech start-ups in India” were considered for the analysis. The Biblioshiny package under the R programming tool was considered for a detailed analysis of the papers.

A total of 854 documents were related to healthcare start-ups, from which only 14 papers are related to health-tech start-ups and four papers are related to artificial intelligence in healthcare start-ups. It has been found from the past works of literature that the effectiveness of technology for information and communication in healthcare has significantly increased in recent years. Technology has already begun to permeate the healthcare market from other fields and industries. One way that the internet will help the industry evolve is by integrating digital health into daily life.

The study is not using other databases but is limited to Google Scholar and Scopus. A significant constraint of this study is the paucity of relevant literature in reputable publications on health and information systems. Another restriction was that gray literature, such as any journal or newspaper written by members of the health community about health-tech start-ups, was not taken into account.

Healthcare players should exhibit a fundamental openness to novel solutions to facilitate the digitalization of the healthcare system. Developing technology is widely used, and from an innovation perspective, a start-up should focus on innovation by employing technology and offering revolutionary healthcare solutions.

The novelty of this research is based on its presentation of an organized and thorough literature evaluation, which defines the current state of the art concerning green start-ups. To create a sustainable start-up, a thorough study of the information gained in respect of its healthcare start-up is presented.