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Examines the relationships between different aspects involved in asthma treatment. Analyses each aspect's impact on overall patient satisfaction with asthma treatment. Also studies how outcome variables such as compliance with physician's recommendations, health‐related quality of life and resource use are affected by the degree of patient satisfaction. The results refer to asthma patients as a group but not necessarily to each patient as an individual. The statistical technique applied for this analysis is partial least squares. Tests the suggested generic model on 599 respondents from a questionnaire survey. The structure of the suggested model is well supported by the data.

Access to finance appears to be the largest challenge for entrepreneurial firms from the small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sector in Poland. To address this concern, the government embarked on a program to yield financial and know‐how assistance to the SME sector. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate public intervention in this area.

The study focuses on the analysis of primary data. The sampling frame for the study consisted of 278,088 firms from the SME sector in the Warsaw region. The sample size was equal to 500 firms from the SME sector. Questionnaires from 262 respondents were included in the study, for an effective response rate of 52 percent.

The study concludes that there are still pronounced liquidity gaps for firms in the SME sector in Poland and that the government programs are not effective in closing these liquidity gaps.

Problems with access to capital continue to be a challenge to developing a vibrant SME sector in Poland and a lack of access to capital is consistently quoted as the major obstacle to the development of the SME sector in Poland. The paper offers three policy recommendations in relation to closing liquidity gaps in the SME sector.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether there were differences in how one public and two private South African organizations created a learning climate.

This article is based on a survey and comparative analysis of specific departments in a chemical and gas company, an insurance company, and a semi‐private state‐owned organization (SPSOO) to establish dimensions that foster the creation of a learning climate.

The findings indicated that management support, autonomy and responsibility, time, the opportunity to develop, and guidelines to access information were pivotal in the creation of a learning climate and varied across organizations.

The results indicated that variations across departments within each of these three organizations relating to employees' perceptions of a learning climate were not considered.

The study revealed that a learning climate can be created in different types of organizations through organizational, group and individual drivers. It further revealed that the strategy in creating a climate of learning should be aligned with the organization's structure, culture and goals.

This article makes a contribution to the literature on talent development in organizations as it indicates that different strategies can be utilized in successfully creating a learning climate in different types of organizations.

Purpose – The purpose of the study was to get a deeper understanding of officers’ views of the factors that contribute to army ranger conscripts’ willingness to apply for international military service as well as to look at the officers’ own role in the recruitment process.

Methodology/approach – A grounded theory approach was used. Nine officers from the Swedish Army Ranger Battalion were interviewed.

Findings – Factors that seem to promote the possibility to recruit conscripts to international military service could be understood from five main categories: international military service, education, officers, the Swedish Army Ranger Battalion, and recruitment.

Originality/value of paper – Interviewing key figures in the recruitment process of the Swedish Armed Forces.

The purpose of this paper is to address the concept of participatory research (PR) in terms of its values and challenges in project work.

A participative research approach was used in which researchers worked collaboratively with key stakeholders involved in the development of a digital network model for expert diagnostics. The approach involved research and data gathering in six work packages: first, participation at workshops, including the presentation of a preliminary research agenda; second, presentation of a revised research agenda; third, interviews with project managers and steering committee members; fourth, feedback sessions; fifth, participation at a project conference, including additional feedback sessions; and sixth, concluding interviews with project managers.

The findings suggest that PR might strengthen project work through challenging interview questions and clear feedback. PR might empower the project manager by illuminating challenges and possibilities in the project process.

Project managers may use PR as one strategy to empower project work.

Despite the vast research on projects and project management, researchers and practitioners are still looking for ways to advance project work. This paper contributes with knowledge on how PR may advance project work.

Extant studies in entrepreneurship have explored factors that influence the birth and growth of start-up firms; however, there appears to be a dearth of studies examining the influence of founders' ambidextrous orientation on start-ups' success, especially their speed of attaining the coveted status of a “unicorn start-up” – which is considered a mega success in practice. This study examines whether and how founding teams’ collective ambidextrous orientation influences their respective start-ups’ pace of becoming a “unicorn”.

This study empirically analyses 220 interviews by the founders of 83 Indian unicorns in examining the influence of the founding teams’ collective exploration-exploitation capability on their firms' speed to achieve the “unicorn” status. The Cox Hazard model was used to test the hypothesized relationships, and linear ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to test the robustness of the results.

The authors find a strong positive relationship between founding teams’ ambidextrous skills and the speed of becoming a unicorn. The study results suggest that the founding teams’ collective exploratory skills may be more influential in their start-up’s speed to unicorn status vis-à-vis their exploitative skills.

This study finds that the founding teams’ ambidextrous orientation and exploratory skills accelerate their start-up’s speed to becoming a unicorn, contributing to the academic discourse on the “unicorn” phenomenon, which is widely acknowledged as a grand success status for start-ups—especially technology and venture capital funded start-ups—among the practitioners. This study contributes to the academic discourse on firm capabilities and founding-team-related antecedents of start-up success by raising a new dimension of the founding team’s ambidextrous orientation.