This paper aims to take a disaggregated approach to investigate the relationships between single entrepreneurial orientation (EO) dimensions and firm performance in the wine…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to take a disaggregated approach to investigate the relationships between single entrepreneurial orientation (EO) dimensions and firm performance in the wine industry, with the generally established positive relationship between aggregated EO dimensions and firm performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Literature review, field studies, pilot tests, survey and structural equation modelling were used to build hypotheses and to test these hypotheses.
Findings
Proactiveness was identified to be the predominant EO dimension that contributed most to winery market performance. Entrepreneurial opportunity perception, however, was found to positively mediate the risk taking–winery market performance relationship, while negatively mediating the competitive aggressiveness–winery market performance relationship. The authors found no innovativeness and autonomy winery market performance relationships.
Research limitations/implications
First, as with much survey-based research, the study relied upon self-report measures and there was only a 12.4 per cent response rate. Second, we used Australian wine industry cross-sectional data in the research. Third, this research used conceptual measures of market performance including sales growth, market share growth, profitability and customer retention. Fourth, while the present research investigated the mediating effects of entrepreneurial opportunity perception to introduce new wine styles/services into national and/or international markets, additional research could explore the same questions in the context of some specific types of entrepreneurial opportunity perceptions.
Originality/value
The research adds evidence to the ongoing debate about whether there are five or three EO dimensions by examining five EO dimensions and their individual relationships with firm market performance. This research meets Miller’s (2011) call for research on the disaggregation of EO components, in particular, research contexts. This research contributes to the limited empirical research on entrepreneurial opportunity perception. This research also has important practical implications for practitioners and government.
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Allan O'Connor, Göran Roos and Tony Vickers‐Willis
The purpose of this paper is to provide explicit thinking about the organizational elements that support or hinder innovation in the government sector as it increasingly faces…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide explicit thinking about the organizational elements that support or hinder innovation in the government sector as it increasingly faces demand for innovative solutions to policy areas. The paper aims to present the development and findings of an evaluative case method conducted for an Australian state government department's organizational innovation program.
Design/methodology/approach
The evaluative case study was developed and conducted in two phases. First, an intellectual capital conceptual framework was applied to four independently sourced and discreet case organizations to represent multiple exemplars of innovation capacity building. These exemplars were suspended from their context in order to identify essential elements of the innovation capacity development process which in turn were then applied in phase two to the Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF), a Victorian (Australia) public policy organization.
Findings
The case raises critical distinctions between “innovation capability” and “innovation capacity”. The discussion offers insight into the process of developing innovation capacity for government policy organizations.
Research limitations/implications
The evaluation method incorporated a novel technique and trialed a phase development instrument for testing the embeddedness of organizational innovation. Both the technique and the instrument would benefit from further refinement, testing and development.
Originality/value
This paper develops work previously presented in O'Connor and Roos that considered the conceptual framework for using intellectual capital as an evaluation framework for organizational innovative capacity. It extends this work by piloting its application in a specific context and offers new insight into the organizational design issues of government organizations facing the challenge of producing innovative policy solutions.
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R.N. Allan and N.M. Abu‐Sheikhah
Analytic and computational techniques for evaluating reliability functions and data are described. Estimation and goodness‐of‐fit tests using graphical methods and interactive…
Abstract
Analytic and computational techniques for evaluating reliability functions and data are described. Estimation and goodness‐of‐fit tests using graphical methods and interactive procedures are presented, based on several alternative distributions.
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The task of this paper is to critique the ethics of an university entrepreneurship curriculum. For what purpose is entrepreneurship curriculum designed? Who decides what is to be…
Abstract
The task of this paper is to critique the ethics of an university entrepreneurship curriculum. For what purpose is entrepreneurship curriculum designed? Who decides what is to be included in an entrepreneurship curriculum? Ethics has a plurality and implies moral judgment informed by any individual’s values. In applying entrepreneurship education the rationale and justification of what is offered and why should be clear. The paper provides a synthesis conducted on an extant literature review on the ethics of an entrepreneurship curriculum, entrepreneurship education stakeholders, and stakeholder rights and obligations. An ethics enquiry framework is concluded that entrepreneurship education curriculum designers can apply to surface the assumptions underpinning the curriculum and assist educators to be clear and explicit about the intent and ambitions for an entrepreneurship education curriculum design. While this paper develops a framework, it has yet to be tested. Further research can examine specific sets of stakeholder expectations, variations in obligations among regulatory or institutional settings, explicitly examine the range of effects of an entrepreneurship curriculum, and report the usability and practical relevance of such an evaluative framework. Ethics in entrepreneurship education is under-researched and more particularly the ethics of the entrepreneurship curriculum appears to have rarely been questioned. Entrepreneurship education lays the foundation for the future actions of those who shape and socially structure entrepreneurship. Therefore, as educators, there is a greater responsibility for ensuring that the education provided meets certain expectations of and obligations to various stakeholder groups.
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The purpose of this paper is to report on an industry policy implementation case involving around 30 manufacturing firms, where the intellectual capital (IC) lens, and especially…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on an industry policy implementation case involving around 30 manufacturing firms, where the intellectual capital (IC) lens, and especially the intellectual capital navigator (ICN) approach, was found to be very useful for evaluating alternative servitisation strategies. Servitisation is a form of business model innovation and as such involves restructuring the firm’s resource deployment system including its IC resources.
Design/methodology/approach
The ICN was one of several methods and themes used by a sample of manufacturing firms during a 12 month period. Data capture were through video filming, observation, and formal interviewing during and after the interventions.
Findings
The ICN is considered to be the third most valuable theme in a strategic and operational servitisation programme for manufacturing firms, primarily in the domain of effectiveness evaluation of alternative resource deployment strategies and as such should be one of the key dimensions in a business model template for manufacturing firms that aim to servitize. This research also illustrates the usefulness of the intellectual capital lens in the policy implementation process.
Research limitations/implications
The findings of this study is limited to the servitization process of SME manufacturing firms in an Anglo-Saxon operating environment which very rapidly have gone from low to high cost.
Originality/value
The development of service-oriented business models for manufacturing firms suffers due to traditional business model frameworks not having a high relevance for servitising manufacturing firm. Consequently it is important to understand the potential contribution that the IC lens through the ICN can make in the servitisation process.
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Allan O'Connor, Kai Du and Göran Roos
Developed economies with high-cost environments face industrial transitions from scale-based manufacturing (MAN) to knowledge, technology and intangible asset-based sectors. The…
Abstract
Purpose
Developed economies with high-cost environments face industrial transitions from scale-based manufacturing (MAN) to knowledge, technology and intangible asset-based sectors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in employment and value-adding profiles of transitioning industry sectors in Australia and discuss the implications for policy that influences the intellectual capital (IC) profile of industrial sectors in transition.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach borrowed concepts from the firm-level strategic management literature and applied them to a macro level of industry analysis. In this paper the authors examine the transitions in the Australian economy which, due to a rising cost base, is experiencing a decline in its value chain-oriented MAN sector. The authors contrast four industry sectors with the MAN sector and examine the different value creation models.
Findings
The findings clearly show how the contribution to employment and value added (termed Economic Value Contribution ) of the different sectors vary. The authors extend these findings to a discussion on policy and the dimensions of IC that may have a role to play in facilitating transitions within an economy. The main conclusion is that a more rapid transition and higher value may be created if innovation and entrepreneurship are facilitated by targeted policies in transitioning sector.
Research limitations/implications
This work is based on a single country analysis of selected industry sectors. Further work needs to be done across many more countries to contrast the findings across nations/regions that differ in industrial complexity and to refine the analytical framework to improve construct validity and increase analytical power.
Practical implications
This work has implications for policy-makers facing the challenges of a transitioning economy, whether national or regional. Governments that are hands-on with respect to interventions to salvage and/or extend the life of sectors are at risk of missing opportunities to build the capacities and capabilities of emerging sectors while those governments that are hands-off, deferring to market mechanisms, risk transitions that are too little and/or too late to maintain a national or regional competitiveness.
Originality/value
To the authors knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate the specific firm-level strategic management perspectives, used in this paper, with the macro-policy level to examine industry sectors with the twin metrics of economic productivity and employment in transitioning economies.
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Alex Maritz, Quan Nguyen and Sergey Ivanov
Despite the significance, university student start-ups and student entrepreneurship ecosystems (SEEs) have been subject to little research. This study aims to apply a qualitative…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the significance, university student start-ups and student entrepreneurship ecosystems (SEEs) have been subject to little research. This study aims to apply a qualitative emergent enquiry approach to explore best practice SEEs in Australia, complimented by narratives from leading scholars in higher education institutions with the aim of delineating the integrative components of SEEs.
Design/methodology/approach
Adopting the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework and aligned to the social cognitive theory, this paper explores the components and dynamics of SEEs, contributing to an understanding of how such components can better support the growth, sustainability and success of student start-ups. The authors extend entrepreneurship research on social construction using narrative research.
Findings
The findings provide guidelines for researchers, entrepreneurship scholars and educators, entrepreneurship students, policymakers and practitioners to enhance the impact and success of university student start-ups by adopting a student ecosystem approach.
Research limitations/implications
The narratives represent a limited number of universities with an opportunity for further research to empirically measure the impact and outcomes of SEEs. The research is exploratory, inherently conceptual and emergent, providing an opportunity for validation of narrative frameworks in future studies.
Practical implications
The findings may assist university managers to be more aware of their own subconscious preferences to student entrepreneurship and start-up initiatives, which may be useful in refining their impact and offerings regarding a quest toward the entrepreneurial university.
Social implications
From social perspectives, the alignment of the components of SEE has the ability to enhance and shift the entrepreneurial mindset of entrepreneurship students, notwithstanding enhancement of intentionality and self-efficacy.
Originality/value
This is the first study of SEEs in Australia, highlighting the importance of the integration of entrepreneurship education programs, entrepreneurship education ecosystems, the entrepreneurial university and specific start-up initiatives such as university accelerators. Furthermore, students may enhance their entrepreneurial mindset by actively engaging in such ecosystems.