Alexander Leitner, Walter Wehrmeyer and Chris France
This paper aims to review how current policy instruments drive (or not) environmental innovation and, by doing so, to reinvestigate the relationship between innovation and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review how current policy instruments drive (or not) environmental innovation and, by doing so, to reinvestigate the relationship between innovation and regulation.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive literature review on innovation and environmental regulation created a theoretical foundation of the paper. Using the grounded theory, a model was developed and evaluated using interviews. This is a timely topic as the new shape of recent environmental regulation appears to be fairly strict. A new model is presented to encapsulate highly dynamic interaction of environmental innovation and regulation to provide results that reflect on the present innovation behaviour and its implications.
Findings
The model highlights various diffusion pathways that are triggered by the main three drivers of innovation namely government (regulation), market (competition and cost) and technology which has the possibility of an autonomous diffusion.
Research limitations/implications
The empirical data are limited to 13 qualitative experts' interviews within industry, consultancies and governmental departments.
Practical implications
The suggested model is particularly useful for policy makers to better understand the innovation dynamics and its diffusion pathways to design smarter regulations that incentivise rather than force organisations to comply with regulation.
Originality/value
The paper shows how regulation drives (or not) innovation and how various diffusion pathways can be used by external stakeholders to direct and promote innovation.
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Korinzia Toniolo, Eleonora Masiero, Maurizio Massaro and Carlo Bagnoli
This research aims to investigate how digital academic entrepreneurship (AE) develops, exploring its evolution from a micro to a macro perspective and highlighting the role of…
Abstract
Purpose
This research aims to investigate how digital academic entrepreneurship (AE) develops, exploring its evolution from a micro to a macro perspective and highlighting the role of intellectual capital along the process. This paper contributes to the Special Issue on digital AE, providing research and practical implications.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adopts a grounded theory approach which allows exploring the “How” question of digital AE. It focuses on the case of “Strategy Innovation,” the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) spin-off.
Findings
Digital AE develops and regenerates through a virtuous cycle that, while supported by digital technologies, starts from single individuals and their networks, reaches a broader ecosystem, and ends once back to individuals. This study offers insights about the social impact of academic venturing activities and provides practitioners with useful insights for the understanding of academic spin-offs activities and related opportunities.
Research limitations/implications
This study focuses on the specific research context of “Strategy Innovation,” Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) spin-off. Future research should address in-depth analyses in the exploration of how digital AE emerges and evolves in different contexts and forms.
Originality/value
This study investigates digital AE's development over time, broadly illustrating the phenomenon from a micro to a macro perspective and presenting an explicative and analytical model.
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Christian Riegler and Christian Höllerschmid
Specific asset recognition rules often bar expenses for research and development (R&D) from recognition on corporate balance sheets. This tangible‐intangible accounting asymmetry…
Abstract
Purpose
Specific asset recognition rules often bar expenses for research and development (R&D) from recognition on corporate balance sheets. This tangible‐intangible accounting asymmetry has led to the development of intellectual capital reports (ICRs) for intangibles in general and for R&D in particular. Thus, two dichotomous reporting formats coexist in corporate disclosure. The purpose of this article is to bring together more closely the information on project intangibles from R&D provided by voluntary and mandatory reporting systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used an experimental case study approach in a joint research project with a non‐university research and technology organisation (RTO). The methods deployed in the project included semi‐structured interviews, Delphi techniques and normative reasoning.
Findings
The results show that it is possible to use financial reporting's systematic approach and typical layout to ally the presumed strengths of financial reporting (i.e. the existence of standardised ways of interpretation and an educated readership) and indicator‐based ICRs (i.e. the capability of capturing the generic features of innovation activity).
Practical implications
Given the predominance of financial reporting's educated readership, it is useful to produce voluntary disclosures in such a form that the information can easily be embedded in the overall picture painted by financial numbers.
Originality/value
Inductive‐analytical ICRs are typically not intertwined with financial accounting. The article elaborates on linkages between financial accounting and inductive‐analytical reporting models and proposes a classification scheme for project intangibles from R&D based on information reliability.
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Alexander Brüggen, Philip Vergauwen and Mai Dao
The purpose of this paper is to examine determinants of the decision to disclose intellectual capital in annual reports.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine determinants of the decision to disclose intellectual capital in annual reports.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper derives theoretical predictions from the previous literature and bases the study on archival data with a sample of 125 publicly listed Australian firms. The authors perform a content analysis of annual reports and complement the data with quantitative data from the sample firms.
Findings
The paper finds that industry type plays a key role as a determinant for the disclosure of intellectual property in annual reports. In addition, firm size is another determinant for intellectual disclosure of firms. In contrast with earlier studies and theoretical predictions of voluntary disclosure, however, the paper does not find any relationship between the level of information asymmetry and intellectual capital disclosure.
Research limitations/implications
One limitation refers to the content analysis. Analyzing the annual reports based on the specified list of IC‐related terms may not provide the whole picture as well as the IC disclosure practices. Despite these limitations, the study helps to understand better in general what kind of firms actually disclose information on intellectual capital.
Originality/value
In contrast with earlier studies the study uses significantly more observations, which makes the results more reliable and generalizable. Of further significance is the finding that information asymmetry – one of the main problems between investors and firms – is not driving the decision of firms to disclose information on intellectual capital.
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Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Paul Kaplan and Jamie Longazel
There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the…
Abstract
There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the country account for death sentences and even fewer for executions. Drawing on theoretical work that seeks to account for why these locales continue to use capital punishment, we provide in this chapter a thick description of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary United States. In doing so, we demonstrate how capital punishment operates in a field of violently defended racial boundaries. Our chapter shows the roles of various local actors across time in fortifying such racial boundaries through historical white terrorism and more recent reinforcement of zones of racial exclusion that are embodied especially in communicated fears of “illegal immigrant gangs.” We contend that the case of Maricopa County points to the importance of attending to racist localisms as a catalyst for the continued implementation of the death penalty in the United States.
Corporate governance is the practice of balancing various stakeholder interests within the legal device of the chartered business. Recent changes in the competitive capitalism…
Abstract
Purpose
Corporate governance is the practice of balancing various stakeholder interests within the legal device of the chartered business. Recent changes in the competitive capitalism including the Great Recession, now entering its second decade, have called for reforms within the defined corporate system. To sketch a wider picture of corporate governance issues and the debate over time, this paper aims to identify two philosophical traditions, a British and liberal tradition and a continental statist tradition, which have bearings for how the legal device of the corporation is understood.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper combines legal philosophy and legal studies, management studies, economics and economic sociology literatures.
Findings
In the former tradition, the firm and its ownership are exclusively associated with irreducibly individual rights. In the latter tradition, property rights remain the core of legal systems, but rather than being an end in itself (as in the liberal tradition), such property rights are merely the starting point for the individual’s wider engagement in social and public affairs. These two traditions enact the firm differently and emphasize specific benefits. In the former tradition, associated with a shareholder primacy model, individual rent-seeking is foregrounded; in the latter tradition, associated with legal and management scholarship, the team production qualities of the firm are emphasized.
Originality/value
This conceptual paper offers an analysis of the roots of differences between Anglo-American and continental corporate governance traditions, a scholarly study that is of great theoretical and practical relevance in the era of the Great Depression.
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Alexander Ahammer, Rene Wiesinger and Katrin Zocher
We study the sustainability of the Austrian healthcare system. In the first part of the chapter, we provide background on the state of the Austrian healthcare sector. In the…
Abstract
We study the sustainability of the Austrian healthcare system. In the first part of the chapter, we provide background on the state of the Austrian healthcare sector. In the second part, we review major healthcare interventions that recently took place in Austria, discussing their effectiveness and implications for sustainability. In the third part, we address five public health challenges that are particularly interesting in the Austrian context: ageing, risky health behaviours, healthcare access in rural areas, refugees and infectious disease epidemics.
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Jose M. Barrutia, Alexander Velez and Carmen Echebarria
This paper aims to study the moderating effect of customer type (business customers versus private customers) on the link between two forms of openness (cross-industry networks…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to study the moderating effect of customer type (business customers versus private customers) on the link between two forms of openness (cross-industry networks and customer integration) and two front-end innovation outcomes (a creative idea and a product definition), in the context of radical innovations.
Design/methodology/approach
An agreement was established with the Statistical Office of the Basque Government. This agreement enabled us to access a reliable list of innovative companies in the region that constituted our sample frame. Questionnaires were collected by phone. The response rate was 41.6%, which led to a sample size of 189 firms. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.
Findings
The study reveals that idea creativity is explained by different external drivers in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) settings. In B2B settings, customer integration is found to have no effect on idea creativity. For product definition, however, both the external drivers, namely, cross-industry networks and customer integration, matter, although the latter is more salient.
Practical implications
In the search for creative ideas, managers of firms that serve business customers should focus on cross-industry networks, while those that serve private customers should concentrate on customer integration.
Originality/value
Most previous quantitative studies on the front end have focused on internal drivers, and some of them use a mix of B2B and B2C data, which could lead to misleading conclusions.