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The purpose of this paper is to address the limitations of prior views regarding knowledge source exploitation by proposing a phenomenological approach to managerial attention and the antecedents of exploiting knowledge sources within the multinational corporations (MNC) network.

A phenomenological approach to attention is taken to explain the antecedents of managerial attention in knowledge source exploitation behavior. This approach provides an alternative way of conceiving of knowledge source remoteness and familiarity, on the one hand, and exclusion and inclusion on the other.

Drawing on a phenomenological approach to attention, the merits and limits of prior studies of attention and knowledge seeking/exchange behavior are addressed and three modes of managerial attention are proposed – relative attention, mimetic attention, implicit attention – to explain the antecedents of managerial attention to MNC knowledge sources.

This approach to knowledge source exploitation and attention provides a rich conceptualization of taken‐for‐granted assumptions in extant literature on managerial attention and knowledge‐seeking behavior. The framework offered here builds on a conceptually rigid foundation of attention that overcomes dualisms such as mind‐body, subject‐object, and thinking‐acting that are often embedded in other mainstream approaches to managerial attention.

The aim of this study is to explore the drivers of supply and demand for attention in the managerial context, and develop a framework of managerial tools for allocating attention to various competing demands.

Deliberative attention refers to the application of attention to prolonged reflection and consideration of problems where routine approaches are insufficient. Drawing on theories of cognitive and structural constraints to the allocation of attention among competing stimuli, the paper investigates how managers match the strategic demands for deliberative attention and the supply available to individuals in their firms. This is used to develop a model of factors influencing the matching of supply and demand.

The paper uses this model to recommend specific strategies for explicitly managing deliberative attention and to categorize the appropriate application of a range of existing strategic management tools based on the nature and inherent uncertainty of the organizational problem being faced.

The model suggests that a primary strategic task of top managers is the appropriate management of attention within the firm. Understanding attention as a firm resource to be appropriately and deliberately managed helps to advance theoretical understanding of the human side of valuable resources in the firm. Such knowledge may also help practitioners to be more cognizant of their investments of valuable attention resources.

This is one of the first studies to treat attention as a scarce and valuable firm resource to be managed, and to use this as the foundation for more appropriate application of a wide range of current management techniques.

The 2008–2009 financial crisis has renewed concerns about managerial short-termism and its negative effects. Based on intertemporal choice theory, this chapter aims to identify the role that performance measurement and compensation systems can play in orienting managers toward building long-term performance potential in addition to achieving short-term results.

The findings suggest that certain types of measures used – in particular broader, more inclusive financial indicators, risk-adjusted measures, and key nonfinancial value drivers – as well as the timing of measurement and payment of rewards can lead to reduced time discounting and a lower devaluation of the future, and consequently to a prioritized managerial attention focus on long-term company goals.

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the institutional determinants of managerial long-term orientation and the influence of organizational systems on goal prioritization in managerial intertemporal choice processes.

The findings have practical relevance for the design of incentive systems that aim to place an emphasis on ensuring long-term value creation.

Systems that guide managerial behavior toward the long term can help to increase economic and societal sustainability.

Despite the emergence of more integrated performance measurement approaches, time horizon has not been in the main focus of research in the field yet. This review provides a first structured overview of the temporal effects of different elements of performance measurement and compensation systems.

Recently, researchers have highlighted the limited attention that has been devoted to managerial capabilities as micro-foundational elements of absorptive capacity. Strategic thinking is one such managerial capability that guides managers during the development of organizational capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the influence of managerial strategic thinking on the development of absorptive capacity.

Data were collected using a sample of 324 senior-level and mid-level managers from the software industry. PLS-SEM was used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Study results indicate that managerial strategic thinking is positively related to absorptive capacity, as well as to each of its four components – acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation.

The current study adopts a micro-foundations perspective and delves into the development and orchestration of organizational capabilities. This study is the first to empirically investigate the relationship between managerial strategic thinking and absorptive capacity. Prior literature on absorptive capacity has focused on its influence on phenomena that are downstream to absorptive capacity, e.g. innovation, new product development and firm performance. The research offers new insights into the relationship between absorptive capacity and managerial strategic thinking, a hitherto unexplored upstream phenomenon. Scholars have theorized that managerial strategic thinking plays a pivotal role in managerial decisions, making it a critical factor in developing the absorptive capacity of an organization. The authors believe that the empirical evidence of the theorized relationship offers valuable insights that will aid scholarly research on organizational capabilities.

In the era of Big Data, larger volumes of data arrive in various forms at an increasing pace but of questionable quality and value. The abundant information (that emanates from these 5Vs – volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value) taxes the bounded capacity of managers. This chapter introduces a taxonomy of approaches available for strategic decision making in an information-rich environment, several of which showcase that automation can help to augment (not supplant) managerial decision making. This taxonomy is then applied to an innovation context. Mapping a stylized version of the phases of the innovation process (i.e., front-end innovation, new product development, commercialization) onto the four decision-making approaches yields an organizing framework for understanding strategic decision making in the realm of innovation. The chapter concludes by identifying promising areas for future research.

This conceptual chapter: (1) explicates the foundational terminology regarding strategic decision making in a marketing context; (2) provides a primer on the era of Big Data and making strategic decisions in an information-rich environment; (3) introduces a taxonomy, which features approaches to decision making in an information-rich environment; and (4) applies the taxonomy in an innovation context to yield an organizing framework.

This chapter focuses on the nascent field that is emerging at the intersection of innovation, marketing strategy, and information-rich environments, and breaks new ground by exploring automation available to aid managerial decision making in this realm.

The main practical implication is to elucidate that managers can apply different approaches to decision making in today’s information-rich environment. Tables 2–4 provide to managers 12 examples of the types of decision making in an innovation context.

This chapter introduces a new taxonomy to classify four approaches for making strategic decisions in an information-rich environment, and extends that framework to the innovation realm. This framework aims to prompt researchers to explore important topics that exist at the intersection of innovation, marketing strategy, and managerial decision making in an information-rich environment.

This paper aims to attempt to develop an integrative theoretical framework that approaches global industrial marketing from a managerial cognition perspective.

Drawing from the managerial cognition research, business strategy research, and international business research, this paper develops a theoretical framework that is relevant to global industrial marketing.

Global industrial marketing research has much to gain from the managerial cognition literature. The framework developed in this article presents relevant managerial cognition variables, their individual and firm level antecedents, and desirable outcomes.

The framework presented in this paper provides strong theoretical foundation for further theory development in global industrial marketing research and managerial cognition research. However, given the conceptual nature of our research, empirical scrutiny and further conceptual and empirical research are required.

Given the growing importance of global industrial marketing, the authors hope that this article provides a theoretical foundation for future research. For practitioners, the framework provides a useful starting point for evaluating managerial cognition in their firms and effective usage of the managerial cognition concept.

We return to the problem that motivated the original behavioral theory of the firm, price adjustment, but from the standpoint of post-Carnegie School perspectives on cognition, attention, and routines. Whereas work in the Carnegie School tradition has tended to develop models of firms in opposition to economic theory, we seek to understand how economic ideas are used to shape decision processes. Using a combination of interview, observational, and archival data gathered at a large manufacturing firm that produced parts to maintain machinery, we develop a behaviorally plausible story of how organizations shape price adjustment. We follow three successive waves of managers seeking to improve the pricing routines through shifting attentional perspective, managing attentional engagement, and structuring attentional execution. We demonstrate how managers redesign routines to shape cognition and attention, thereby developing greater coherence in the market representations of the sales force. Our findings show how reshaping cognition and attention in pricing routines can improve organizational intelligence in pricing decisions. Economists treat markets as the ideal – the best that can be imagined – and organizations as second-best options – the best that can be achieved, but our findings invert the story, suggesting that in modern market economies, organizations and routines are essential to making the price system work.

The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the canonical contribution of the classical theories of multinational enterprises (MNE) and complement them with congruous multi-theoretical lenses to a propose a meta-theoretical view for competitive advantage. The proposed framework is applied to fundamental questions of MNE, and exploratory insights are revealed.

This study sought to review the literature on various paradigms such as resource-based view, knowledge-based view, attention-based view, relational view, dynamic capability view and institution-based view to propose a meta-theoretical approach explicating the phenomenon of competitiveness.

This study proffers that the key to global competitiveness lies in building micro-foundational, multidimensional and multilevel multinational orchestration capabilities. The requisite orchestration capabilities are capabilities par excellence that explain: how organizational capabilities originate through the cognition of individual employees at the micro level; how individual-level abilities are amplified when they are harnessed through relational capabilities to form knowledge capabilities at the meso-level; and how the confluence of knowledge capabilities and higher order dynamic capabilities gives rise to heterogeneous firm-level knowledge-based dynamic capabilities that can be combined with institution capabilities to aggrandize the prediction of competitive advantage for MNEs.

The successful development of MNE competitiveness as a field of academic inquiry, brought about by an increasing amount of theoretical specialization, has come at the price of significant fragmentation of the overall scientific quest. The abovementioned paradigms and their underlying constructs have primarily been conceptualized in silos. The classical theories of MNE have been used a starting point to which complementary multidisciplinary views have been scaffolded to gain a more nuanced understanding of global competitiveness.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology permeating various sectors, corporate management has increasingly directed their focus toward AI-driven innovation. Particularly, in response to escalating environmental standards, chief executive officers (CEOs) of manufacturing companies are turning to AI as a strategic tool to address challenges in green innovation. This paper aims to reveal the complex relationship between CEO AI orientation and green innovation through the attention-based view. Furthermore, it seeks to explore strategies to enhance corporate green innovation leveraging CEO AI orientation.

The paper uses computer-assisted text analysis to extract data from annual reports of listed Chinese manufacturing companies and assesses them using negative binomial regression.

The empirical findings indicate the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO orientation and green innovation. Initial green innovation performance increases with CEO AI orientation, reaching a peak before declining. Moreover, as CEO AI orientation increases, companies with higher levels of human resource slack are likely to reach the peak of green innovation earlier.

Firstly, this paper introduces CEO AI orientation as a novel factor within the framework of the attention-based view for understanding green innovation. Secondly, the study investigates both the benefit effect and the cost effect (resource constraints) of CEO AI orientation on green innovation, examining the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO orientation and green innovation. Thirdly, this paper explores the moderating effect of human resource slack on the relationship between CEO AI orientation and green innovation, setting the boundaries of CEO AI orientation’s impact on green innovation.

This study updates the discussion on demand-pull attention as a source of radical product innovation. Demand-pull attention shows an ex ante alignment with market characteristics and needs as opposed to pushing resources toward markets. The authors suggest a holistic framework and specify three dimensions of demand-pull attention: anticipated or revealed market demand, market environment, and external economic environment. Based on a large German longitudinal panel consisting of 941 firm-year observations from 2003 to 2013, the authors conceptualized the measurement of demand-pull dimensions’ attention and radical product innovation using computer-aided text analysis of annual reports. The authors analyzed the relationship between the attention that a firm pays to different demand-pull dimensions and the firm’s strategic intention to radically innovate; thus, the authors actually focused on the cognitive sources of radical product innovations. This chapter suggests that radical product innovation activities are positively driven by attention toward the market environment and market demand orientation. However, the hypothesis, which assumed a negative relationship between attention toward the external economic environment and radical innovation, could not be significantly confirmed. This demands a closer look into the underlying decision processes of firms when deciding on radical product innovations. With the theoretical grounding on the attention-based view of the firm, the authors contribute to a better understanding of the role that organizational cognition plays in innovation processes.