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Entrepreneurs approach the startup process with a stock of experience and a unique range of accumulated skills and abilities. Their prior experience shapes an “information funnel” through which the entrepreneurs’ attention is filtered. This study aims to investigate the impact of the relatedness of prior knowledge and knowledge acquisition activities on entrepreneurs’ perceived knowledge access.

Survey data were collected from 100 early-stage entrepreneurs in the New York City metropolitan area to empirically test the proposed relationships with the method of conditional process modeling.

Findings from this study demonstrate a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ prior experience and their perceived ability to access knowledge. However, this negative relationship can be mitigated by seeking tacit knowledge through informal channels. In addition, the relatedness of prior experience plays a positive role in influencing media use and knowledge network engagement. While media use is a positive predictor of perceived knowledge access, engagement within knowledge networks shows no direct influence on perceived knowledge access.

This study sheds light on the dimensions of entrepreneurial knowledge and recognizes perceived knowledge access as an important concept in forming an entrepreneurial intention and adds to the current dialogue on the interpretation of entrepreneurs’ prior experience. For practitioners, this study offers insights into the formation of founding teams and the approaches to obtaining valuable information.

Up until recent years, all agricultural production in Norway was strictly regulated through spatial policy (location), production quotas and other price and market regulations. Prices and products were handled by the farmers’ cooperatives. International (e.g. WTO agreements) and domestic pressure has gradually loosened the governmental regulation of chicken and eggs. Economic (e.g. new ownerships), technological (innovations throughout the whole chain), political and institutional (liberalization) and cultural (e.g. in consumption and farming) changes have reconfigured the landscapes of chicken meat production, opening up new opportunities for the chicken industry. Chicken therefore makes a particularly good case for exploring recent major changes in the agri-food system. In this chapter, we investigate evolving rules, risks, challenges and opportunities in and around chicken meat value chains. Empirically, we build on interviews, document studies and statistics on the structural development of the chicken industry and we discuss how these changes are developing in other parts of the Norwegian agri-food system.

The purpose of this study is to compare the life cycle environmental impacts of the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering and Applied Sciences' current printed annual report to a version distributed via the internet.

Life cycle environmental impacts of both versions of the report are modeled using the online environmental input‐output life cycle assessment (EIO‐LCA) tool. Most monetary model inputs were obtained from the University of Cincinnati and the others were estimated. Results are presented for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy use, water use, and human and ecosystem health impacts. Alternative scenarios reflecting different reader behaviors were evaluated.

The electronic report reduces economic costs and all categories of environmental impacts so long as the recipients do not print the report at home. Impacts of the printed report were higher than the electronic report due to impacts associated with paper production and disposal and to a lesser extent differences in the impacts of mail versus electronic distribution. The environmental preferability of the options is heavily influenced by the number of users who choose to print the electronic report at home; if more than 10 percent print at home, it offsets the benefits of the e‐report.

Using the EIO‐LCA tool limited the accuracy of the results by using average US data for a specific supply chain. It was limited by assumptions about reader behavior with the e‐report.

This case study demonstrates how a screening level life cycle assessment (LCA) might be used by a university administrator to make decisions supported by quantitative environmental information.

The screening level LCA‐based approach can provide grounding for environmental decision making within a reasonable time period and cost while maintaining sufficient accuracy for guiding purchasing or product decisions.

We assessed attempts by federal and state agencies to utilize a Community Oriented Policing and Problem Solving (COPPS) approach to address endangered species and natural resource protection issues in two watersheds in Washington State involving listed species of salmon, steelhead and bull trout. In the wake of the listing of these species, NOAA Fisheries and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) joined to implement a multi-party collaboration to enforcement termed Resource-Oriented Enforcement (ROE). We sought to determine if federal and state resource agencies can collaborate effectively and if collaborative approaches can achieve short- and long-term resource protection goals. A citizen mail survey (n=800+ in each location) and extensive personal interviews with key actors were conducted to assemble evidence on the degree of success achieved in implementing ROE. Observed results suggest that collaboration can

This paper aims to determine the opportunity cost borne by US commercial banks to reduce non-performing loans (NPLs) by one unit within the global financial crisis framework.

To achieve this aim, the authors use the directional output distance function to estimate the technical efficiency while considering NPLs as undesirable output. Then, they estimate the shadow prices of NPLs by using the envelope theorem and solving the revenue function.

The results indicate that medium-sized banks are the most efficient, while small banks are the most inefficient ones. Moreover, the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks are higher than those of small and medium-sized banks. This implies a more elevated cost when lessening bad loans in large banks. This is more prominent during the crisis given that the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks have risen sharply over that period.

Shadow prices have important managerial implications given that they display the amounts of required reduced revenues to lessen NPLs. Accordingly, banks’ managers are called to reduce these loans by paying more attention when choosing their customers.

With the absence of an observable market price for bad loans in financial literature, the shadow price notion offers an adequate measure to evaluate them. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides an estimation of the shadow price of NPLs in the US banking sector.

Sustainability performance in higher education is often evaluated at a generalized large scale. It remains unknown to what extent campus efforts address regional sustainability needs. This study begins to address this gap by evaluating trends in performance through the lens of regional environmental characteristics.

Four sustainability metrics across 300 North American institutions are analyzed between 2005 and 2014. The study applies two established regional frameworks to group and assess the institutions: Commission on Environmental Cooperation Ecoregions and WaterStat (water scarcity status). Standard t-tests were used to assess significant differences between the groupings of institutions as compared to the North American study population as a whole.

Results indicate that all institutions perform statistically uniformly for most variables when grouped at the broadest (Level I) ecoregional scale. One exception is the Marine West Coast Forest ecoregion where institutions outperformed the North American average for several variables. Only when institutions are grouped at a smaller scale of (Level III) ecoregions do the majority of significant performance patterns emerge.

This paper demonstrates an ecoregions-based analytical approach to evaluating sustainability performance that contrasts with common evaluation methods in the implementation field. This research also identifies a gap in the literature explicitly linking ecological sub-regions with their associated environmental challenges and identifies next research steps in developing defensible regional targets for applied sustainability efforts.

The practical implications of this research include the following: substantive changes to methodologies for rating sustainability leadership and performance, a framework that incentivizes institutions to frame sustainability efforts in terms of collaborative or collective impact, a framework within which institutions can meaningfully prioritize efforts, and a potential shift toward regional impact metrics rather than those focused solely on campus-based or generalized targets.

The authors believe this to be the first effort to analyze North American higher education sustainability performance using regional frameworks.

This study aims to examine the management of food supply chains in complex and volatile business environments, where the sustainability requirements of customers and legislation are increasing. This challenging situation gives rise to the question as to how a logistics company can achieve and sustain competitive advantage through environmentally-oriented sustainability.

This empirical study gathers insights on emerging practices in European food service supply chains from two parallel Delphi surveys conducted with 145 industry experts from 27 countries. The long-term industry expectations of a leading provider in food service logistics are compared with an industry-wide external panel. The questions were designed to understand how managers perceive the emerging domain of sustainability in supply chains.

Environmentally oriented sustainability will remain a key driver of success in the field. However, after applying the dominant logic concept for analyzing results, it becomes apparent that managers have to continuously challenge internal existing expectations to translate an emerging domain into strategy. We show how the senior management team under investigation was challenged in its dominant logic and how it tried to overcome this situation during strategy development.

The study shows how managers perceive and cope with the emerging domain of environmentally oriented sustainability, how they translate it into strategy, and utilize resources for creating customer value. The research supports managers in adapting to new competitive environments. Furthermore, the study contributes by visualizing the dominant logic of a firm and the approach of top management for adjustment.

This paper measures German customers' label-depending preference and willingness to pay for organic and local food.

The sample covers 325 survey respondents from 12 out of the 16 German federal states. Data was collected through convenience sampling in December 2019. A choice-based conjoint analysis was operated.

Customers value local food from their federal state most, thereby accepting a price premium of no less than 200%. The label moderates the influence of organic production conditions on price acceptance significantly.

Based on self-reported data from a convenience sample, the demographic distribution of the sample differs from that of the German population. Moreover, the willingness to pay was found to be product-specific, limiting general applicability.

Marketers should focus on local and local organic food in the assortment. Marketing strategies should include information campaigns. Producers may sell their products regionally or cooperate with local retailers. Introducing a separate official “local organic” label is suggested.

The study provides detailed evidence on the preference of German costumers and suggests a significantly higher willingness to pay for organic and local food than previous literatures.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on tracing GHG emissions across the supply chain industries associated with the US residential, commercial and industrial building stock and provides optimized GHG reduction policy plans for sustainable development.

A two-step hierarchical approach is developed. First, Economic Input-Output-based Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) is utilized to quantify the GHG emissions associated with the US residential, commercial and industrial building stock. Second, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) based optimization framework is developed to identify the optimal GHG emissions’ reduction (percent) for each industry across the supply chain network of the US economy.

The results indicated that “ready-mix concrete manufacturing”, “electric power generation, transmission and distribution” and “lighting fixture manufacturing” sectors were found to be the main culprits in the GHG emissions’ stock. Additionally, the majorly responsible industries in the supply chains of each building construction categories were also highlighted as the hot-spots in the supply chains with respect to the GHG emission reduction (percent) requirements.

The decision making in terms of construction-related expenses and energy use options have considerable impacts across the supply chains. Therefore, regulations and actions should be re-organized around the systematic understanding considering the principles of “circular economy” within the context of sustainable development.

Although the literature is abundant with works that address quantifying environmental impacts of building structures, environmental life cycle impact-based optimization methods are scarce. This paper successfully fills this gap by integrating EIO-LCA and MILP frameworks to identify the most pollutant industries in the supply chains of building structures.

Over the last decade, multiple initiatives have been undertaken to learn how to capture the carbon footprint of a supply chain at a product level. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the process of standardization to secure consistency of product carbon footprinting (PCF) and to outline how the current developments in PCF support the need for a standardized method to measure and report environmental performance in supply chains.

This paper is based on a literature review and a review of international standards for PCF which brings knowledge of PCF to the existing literature of green supply chain management.

The multiple initiatives for standardization each improve the understanding of standardized methods of conducting PCF. At the same time, however, important differences exist between the standards in terms of the modelling framework to be used when conducting a PCF, and a paradox exists concerning methods for securing future standardization of PCF.

Standards for evaluating emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in supply chains are evaluated without consideration of other environmental impacts. In addition, the research only compares international standards, thereby excluding national initiatives.

Standardization efforts can be expected to shape the future practice of measuring emission of GHGs in companies and supply chains which provides a framework for reducing impacts.

Papers that outline the standardization process for PCF have been examined, but this paper adds value by categorizing the field, outlining the latest standards, and by being the first paper to compare standards for PCF on selected criteria and identify gaps.