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1 – 10 of over 3000Despite the importance of foreign market entry mode (FMEM) decisions for the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is insufficient understanding…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the importance of foreign market entry mode (FMEM) decisions for the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is insufficient understanding of the knowledge types and sources necessary for such decisions. This study addresses this issue by investigating the knowledge configurations that underpin FMEM initial choices and subsequent changes in SMEs.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adopted an interpretive approach and analysed empirical data from 37 in-depth interviews with decision-makers in internationalised SMEs from the United Kingdom.
Findings
The findings reveal that different knowledge configurations drive FMEM decisions in SMEs. Based on the analysis conducted for this study, initial FMEM choices draw on prior experiential knowledge combined with knowledge from desk research and knowledge acquired from peers, competitors and international partners. However, unlike many previous contributions, this research shows that foreign market experiential knowledge does not influence mode changes. Within-mode changes rely mainly on mode-specific knowledge and on knowledge about exploiting the benefits of the internet and digital platform ecosystems. Conversely, between-mode changes draw on diverse knowledge that is frequently created in interaction with international stakeholders or acquired externally.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the SME internationalisation literature by highlighting the knowledge configurations that inform not only initial choices but also between- and within-mode changes. Moreover, it reveals the importance of distinct types of digital technology-based knowledge for facilitating mode changes. It also adds to the knowledge-based perspective by underscoring that dynamic and heterogenous knowledge configurations, often created in interaction with international stakeholders, promote firm internationalisation.
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Sachin Kumar Raut, Ilan Alon, Sudhir Rana and Sakshi Kathuria
This study aims to examine the relationship between knowledge management and career development in an era characterized by high levels of youth unemployment and a demand for…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the relationship between knowledge management and career development in an era characterized by high levels of youth unemployment and a demand for specialized skills. Despite the increasing transition to a knowledge-based economy, there is a significant gap between young people’s skills and career readiness, necessitating an in-depth analysis of the role of knowledge management at the individual, organizational and national levels.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a qualitative study using the theory-context-characteristics-methodology approach based on a systematic literature review. The authors created an ecological framework for reflecting on knowledge management and career development, arguing for a multidisciplinary approach that invites collaboration across sectors to generate innovative and reliable solutions.
Findings
This study presents a comprehensive review of the existing literature and trends, noting the need for more focus on the interplay between knowledge management and career development. It emphasizes the need for businesses to promote the acquisition, storage, diffusion and application of knowledge and its circulation and exchange to create international business human capital.
Practical implications
The findings may help multinational corporations develop managerial training programs and recruitment strategies, given the demand for advanced knowledge-based skills in the modern workspace. The study also discusses the influences of education, experience and job skills on business managers’ performance, guiding the future recruitment of talents.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review is among the first to assess the triadic relationship between knowledge management, career development and the global unemployment crisis. The proposed multidisciplinary approach seeks to break down existing silos, thus fostering a more comprehensive understanding of how to address these ongoing global concerns.
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Fredrick Muyia Nafukho and Walid El Mansour
The purpose of this paper was to determine the factors that enable entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and the significant role of education and training in enhancing…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper was to determine the factors that enable entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and the significant role of education and training in enhancing opportunity recognition.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper follows a systematic literature review method to answer the research questions. A systematic literature review allows us to determine the work carried out to date, how it was done, assess literature and report all relevant research. The authors have used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-Analysis procedure.
Findings
The findings of this study showed that prior knowledge, social networks, external environment, entrepreneurial alertness, creativity, self-efficacy and entrepreneurial passion are the main factors that play a role in the opportunity recognition process. The authors were also able to establish the importance of education and training in enhancing opportunity recognition. Experiential learning is at the forefront of education methods used to improve prior knowledge and experience that directly impact the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities.
Practical implications
The paper provides human resource development practitioners and entrepreneurship educators with factors that determine entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. It pinpoints the factors that can be exploited in enhancing employees and novice entrepreneurs’ ability to recognize viable entrepreneurial opportunities.
Originality/value
Opportunity recognition is recognized as the first step in the entrepreneurship process. Therefore, it is crucial for entrepreneurs to have the ability to recognize opportunities that are viable. Understanding the factors that contribute to a successful opportunity recognition is important. In addition, the role of education and training in opportunity recognition and enhancing entrepreneurial opportunity recognition cannot be overlooked.
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This paper aims to explain the unwillingness to exchange export knowledge by members of exporters’ networks and provides potential solutions to this problem.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explain the unwillingness to exchange export knowledge by members of exporters’ networks and provides potential solutions to this problem.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses data from a survey of 301 members of a French exporter’s network to test a set of hypotheses with partial least squares structural equation modeling.
Findings
Network participants’ export experience and age have a negative influence on their willingness to exchange knowledge. However, positive attitudes toward the network (perception of network quality, commitment) can mitigate those negative links.
Practical implications
Network members’ unwillingness to exchange knowledge represents a major challenge that threatens the existence of knowledge networks. The findings suggest solutions to this issue for network managers.
Originality/value
This study views knowledge exchange in a network as a risky behavior. It explains why members do not participate in networks. The model shows how contrary forces work and interact to deter or foster knowledge exchange.
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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of rapid internationalization by emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) on their innovation performance. It also…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of rapid internationalization by emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) on their innovation performance. It also seeks to identify any potential moderating factors that could influence this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
By analyzing data from listed Chinese MNEs from 2012 to 2022, this study applies a negative binomial regression model to test the research hypotheses.
Findings
This study uncovers an inverted U-shaped relationship between the internationalization speed of EMNEs and their innovation performance. It also suggests that strong absorptive, learning and managerial capacities could play positive moderating roles in the effect of internationalization speed on EMNEs’ innovation performance.
Originality/value
This study highlights rapid global expansion, promoting new knowledge acquisition for EMNEs. However, due to time-compression dilemmas with limited EMNE firm-specific advantages, overly accelerated internationalization hinders learning effectiveness. Additionally, this study reveals the critical importance of three firm-specific capacities in EMNEs – absorptive, learning and managerial capacities – in efficiently assimilating newly acquired knowledge from foreign markets and enhancing their innovation performance through rapid internationalization.
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Alexandre Borba Salvador, Mariana Bassi-Suter and Nicola Forsdike
This study aims to understand how marketing faculty become reference-educators of business executives by exploring the factors that contribute to their teaching performance.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand how marketing faculty become reference-educators of business executives by exploring the factors that contribute to their teaching performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Exploratory qualitative research, using in-depth interviews in which the object of the study was the marketing educator, based on three Brazilian business schools.
Findings
The teaching performance depends on the teaching practice, which is influenced by technical knowledge, pedagogical factors and personal features. The development of a practitioner-educator is a complex process that arises from both formal and informal learning.
Research limitations/implications
Deepens the understanding of marketing educators’ individual factors, proposing a model to expand the knowledge of the factors shaping a reference-educator.
Practical implications
Raises awareness among managers of Higher Education institutions of the relevance of the development of its educators considering not only pedagogical skills but also marketing and social skills.
Social implications
Improvements in education generate a positive contribution to society. Better marketing educators may result in better professionals, which could, ultimately, generate more benefits both for corporations and for society.
Originality/value
Existing literature has neglected the understanding of how marketing educators’ individual factors may impact on good teaching to create a well-rounded practitioner-educator. This study seeks to address that gap by exploring how marketing faculty, especially practitioners of marketing, become reference-educators, that is, educators identified as exemplars of good practice by their students and peers.
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Significant funding has been made available in the UK for social, behavioural and design research that aims to improve health and wellbeing for older adults. The growing…
Abstract
Purpose
Significant funding has been made available in the UK for social, behavioural and design research that aims to improve health and wellbeing for older adults. The growing importance and use of participatory and co-creative approaches in this field not only reflects a general turn in social research but also seeks to redress power imbalances between researchers and researched. This paper aims to use Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” as a lens to describe the author’s experience with one such project, and highlight the cautions and considerations that must be made when navigating, handling and amalgamating “other people’s knowledge”.
Design/methodology/approach
Personal and theoretical reflection. Primary data for this paper consists of first-hand insider observations on how different forms of knowledge were treated in an interdisciplinary, intersectoral participatory research context.
Findings
Some participatory studies are hampered by insufficient consideration for a range of ways of thinking, including between researchers and participants, younger and older adults, different academic disciplines or academia and industry. This can harm project integrity and outcomes, potentially eroding trust in academic research.
Originality/value
By reflecting on a recent participatory study in healthy ageing, this paper outlines a theoretical basis to increase the benefits of working with different stakeholders across health and care, design, business and academia. It concludes by suggesting ways that researchers might address epistemic injustice, and so recognise and properly value the range of knowledge types encountered in participatory research.
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Alan Labas and Jerry Courvisanos
This study aims to develop an original conceptual framework to guide research into knowledge transmission between professional external knowledge providers and their business…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to develop an original conceptual framework to guide research into knowledge transmission between professional external knowledge providers and their business clientele. As such, the framework aims to bridge a gap between theory and practice by explicating the processes which affect knowledge transmission and the conversion of knowledge for business application (i.e. knowledge transference).
Design/methodology/approach
Key concepts from disciplines of knowledge management, information management, communications, services marketing and business advice are reviewed and integrated into the development of this framework. Underpinned by a critical realist philosophical lens, it provides a robust research guide for examining business advisor knowledge actions in a changing open environment.
Findings
This study identifies that the process of knowledge transmission from a source external to a business is more complex than internal knowledge sharing. It addresses this complexity through a knowledge transmission framework, in a research design that is applicable to any methodological paradigm. Real-world application is identified in its applicability for evaluating mechanisms to facilitate knowledge transmission practices of external advisors to small business in regionally isolated communities.
Research limitations/implications
The critical realist research methodology allows for causality in knowledge transmission to emerge; however, no assertion is made that the conceptual framework developed needs any particular philosophical paradigm for its application. Instead, what is asserted is that the research framework developed in this paper is specifically suited to the characteristics of external knowledge providers, their tacit knowledge and the businesses they service.
Originality/value
This study reconceptualises various theoretical perspectives and develops a sequential process for addressing a research lacuna by specifically examining the processes (or connections) between external business advisor’s knowledge and their advisory actions. With these processes clearly established, the role of external knowledge providers, as knowledge transmitters, deepens the understanding of knowledge transference that up until now has focused typically on internal organisation aspects.
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Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, Munish Thakur and Payal Kumar
The 170-year-old Master in Business Administration (MBA) program is becoming obsolete and inefficient to address today's real-world problems, and is facing mounting criticism from…
Abstract
Executive Summary
The 170-year-old Master in Business Administration (MBA) program is becoming obsolete and inefficient to address today's real-world problems, and is facing mounting criticism from business scholars, management deans, and academic scholars alike. Reviewing major criticisms, this chapter suggests a new design for the MBA program that will not only address the criticisms but also accept a paradigm shift that will spearhead it in coming decades. The redesigned MBA “structure” proposes a four-semester full-time program, during which each semester delves into deeper marketplace problems of increasing complexity (i.e., from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems) and deals with these problems with new levels of critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning processes tempered by corresponding entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and values. The “content” of the redesigned program is anchored around five major themes of business learning: namely, intrinsic motivation management, creativity and innovation management, productivity management, revenue management, and eco-sustainability management, each geared to generate professional entrepreneurial knowledge, and skills and values urgently needed today. Numerous beneficial features of this newly redesigned integrated business management program (MBA) are also discussed.
Maria Da Graça Benedito Jonas, Luis Artur, Siri Ellen Hallstrøm Eriksen and Synne Movik
Disaster management practices depend on societies' knowledge. As climate change rapidly reshapes knowledge, questions arise about how knowledge for disaster management is produced…
Abstract
Purpose
Disaster management practices depend on societies' knowledge. As climate change rapidly reshapes knowledge, questions arise about how knowledge for disaster management is produced and (re)shaped in modern world and how effective it is to withstand the ever-growing frequency and magnitude of disasters. This paper discusses the dynamics of knowledge creation and its use for disaster management in Chokwe district, southern Mozambique.
Design/methodology/approach
The study reviews historical archives to identify how disaster management knowledge has changed from pre-colonization to the present.
Findings
Before colonization, local knowledge associated with traditions of asking gods and ancestors for rain and blessings in life prevailed. With colonization, around the 1500s, Portuguese rulers attempted to eliminate these local practices through an inflow of European settlers who disseminated scientific knowledge, built dams and irrigation schemes, which changed the region’s knowledge base and regimes of flooding and drought. After independence in 1975, the new government nationalized all the private property, expelled the settlers and imposed a socialist order. All knowledge on disaster management was dictated by the new government; those against this new order were sent to re-education centers implanted nationwide. Centralization of knowledge and power was, therefore, implanted. Socialism collapsed by the 1990s, and over time, there has been an amalgam of different knowledge bases and attempts to recognize local disaster management practices.
Originality/value
The Chokwe case shows that knowledge for disaster management evolves with local socioeconomic, political and environmental changes.
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