Search results

Exposure to a public health threat of significant proportions made current models inadequate to explain the failure phenomenon in small businesses. Hence, the need to reimagine the phenomenon. Borrowing from the principles of biology, this study extended theoretical and empirical perspectives on the failure phenomenon by unpacking its constituent elements and the measurement metrics using the regeneration lens.

Based on a cohort tracked over time, the study estimated the survival probabilities of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) with and without regeneration using the Kaplan–Meier method. The study investigated the factors that predict enterprise regenerative capacity using the multivariate Cox proportional hazard ratios.

Rates of interruption in business activity, by month, ranged between 0% and 18% during the follow-up period. True mortality rates hovered between 0% and 4% over the same period. Over three in five SMEs that experienced interruption in business activity without ceasing operations regenerated at some point in time during the follow-up period. The survival probabilities beyond the follow-up period were 0.85 and 0.44 with and without regeneration effects, respectively. Fresh capital injection (+), the introduction of new/improved processes or products/services (+), perceived business outlook (+) and the presence of debt (−) influenced the capacity to regenerate.

The cohort was followed for only six months. There is a need to continue interrogating the failure phenomenon in other contexts over longer periods using the regeneration lens. Bringing on board academia, financial institutions and other SME-related ecosystem players will be strategic.

The approach provides a more nuanced understanding of the life and well-being of enterprises under conditions of disruption. Improving the precision and validity of failure-related statistics enhances their utility in policy and remediation-related discussions.

The results did not show significant differences in SME mortality rates between male and female-owned enterprises. The results provide further evidence that the failure phenomenon is ungendered. As such, financial institutions and the SME ecosystem at large must eliminate perceptual gender biases in the financing and other support to SMEs.

The study used the principles of biology to reimagine the failure phenomenon in small businesses. The approach breathes life into entrepreneurship research and policy.

This paper aims to explore how the owners of less competitive micro-firms (MFs) perceive the “crisis–innovation–change management” triangle. It examines whether their understanding of these overarching entrepreneurship theory principles is inadequate compared to the relevant scientific literature.

This qualitative analysis follows principles based on the inductive method and grounded theory, thickly describing the results from research conducted in a sample of 38 tertiary-sector MFs in the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace region – one of the least developed and competitive areas across Europe. It triangulates the data with 11 respective small firms.

MF owners perceive the crisis as an ostensibly exogenous phenomenon, innovation as something quasi-unattainable – although vaguely significant – and change management as a relatively unknown process. This understanding lies somewhat distant from the extant literature that examines the structural nature of crises, the innovational power to exit profound restructurings and the rebalancing requisite for building new overall organizational methods to survive this internal–external transformation. In essence, the triangle crisis–innovation–change management is a blind spot for the examined MF owners as they ignore its significance as an adaptation mechanism – contrary to several direct competitors.

Based on the reluctance of these individuals to cultivate their systematic business knowledge, it seems unrealistic that they would seek to pay the necessary high price for business consulting in the future. An ideal solution would be to build public entrepreneurship clinics to provide these less dynamic and adaptable organizations with free preliminary or in-depth counseling. The Institute of Local Development-Innovation could aim to provide free consulting services to reinforce organizational physiology by coordinating different socioeconomic actors.

To the best of our knowledge, this empirical research is one of the first to test the comprehension of weaker MFs – less competitive and developed in organizational terms – to the triangle crisis–innovation–change management.

The case was developed from secondary sources and interviews with a security analyst. The secondary sources include company annual reports, news reports, analyst reports, industry reports, company websites, stock exchange websites and databases such as Bloomberg and CMIE Prowess.

Increasing competition in product and capital markets has put tremendous pressure on managers to become more cost competitive. To address their firms' uncompetitive cost structures, managers may have to consider dramatic restructuring of their businesses. During 2014–2017, Tata Steel Ltd (TSL) UK considered a series of divestitures and a merger plan to nurse the company back to health. The case considers the economics of the restructuring plan. The case is designed to help students analyze a corporate downsizing program undertaken by a large Indian company in the UK and to highlight the dynamic role of the CFO and governance issues in family firms. It introduces students to issues surrounding a typical restructuring and provides students a platform to practice the estimation of value creation in a restructuring exercise. While some cases on corporate restructuring in the context of developed economies are available, there are very few cases written in an emerging market context. This case bridges that gap. TSL presents a unique opportunity to study corporate restructuring necessitated by a failed cross-border acquisition. It illustrates the potential for value loss in large, cross-border acquisitions. It shows how managerial hubris can prompt family firm owners to overbid in acquisitions and create legacy hot spots. In addition, the case can be used to discuss the causes of governance failures such as weak institutional monitoring and poor legal enforcement in emerging markets that could potentially harm minority shareholders.

The case was developed from secondary sources and interviews with a security analyst. The secondary sources include company annual reports, news reports, analyst reports, industry reports, company websites, stock exchange websites and databases such as Bloomberg and CMIE Prowess.

This study investigates CSR reporting’s role in debt access and cost of debt with the moderating role of external assurance and GRI adoption in emerging markets. Such an investigation will help facilitate external fund flow to firms in better terms.

We collected data from 16 emerging markets between 2008 and 2019 from the Thomson Reuters Eikon and ran fixed effects regression analysis and robustness tests by addressing endogeneity concerns, adopting alternative sample and integrating additional control variables.

The results show that CSR reporting has a positive association with access to debt and a negative association with the cost of debt. Furthermore, both external assurance and GRI adoption do not significantly moderate between CSR reporting and access to debt and cost of debt. Hence, creditors in emerging markets are not interested in CSR report assurance and GRI framework adoption and do not integrate them into their lending decisions.

Emerging markets are unique settings characterized by high growth rates, limited capital availability, high debt costs and weak institutional environments. Thus, reaching debt with convenient conditions is critical for emerging market firms to finance their growth. Hence, our study will help emerging market firms reach external funding more easily and in better terms via CSR transparency. Besides, our investigation is based on a broad sample of emerging markets, and hence updates prior emerging market studies conducted in single-country settings. Lastly, we test the complementarity of third-party assurance and GRI adoption to CSR reporting in loan contracting.