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This study empirically examines the relationship between institutional ownership and innovation activity in the unique setting of the clinical trials for US biopharmaceutical companies. We used multiple statistical techniques in the period from 1990 through 2006 for firms in the biopharmaceutical industry to examine this relationship. Contrary to the widely believed relationship discussed in the literature, our findings suggest that institutional investors vary in their reactions to innovative progress. Specifically, we find that institutional investors with a long-term investment horizon (i.e., dedicated owners) increase their holdings of a firm’s equity as the number of the firm’s products increases in phases I and II of FDA clinical trials. These findings are robust for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation as well as for different operationalizations of the change of institutional ownership.

One of the lessons learned from the recent financial-sector crisis is that institutions may sometimes sow the seeds of their own destruction. We offer a two-tiered analysis of how the diffusion of innovative practices – in this case, issuing and securitizing subprime mortgages – can lead to an unanticipated breakdown of established institutions. At the institutional level, we demonstrate that the lack of effective external regulatory presence, the emergence of new norms through the introduction of a new institutional logic, and intense mimetic and competitive pressures may lead organizational actors to exploit a suboptimal innovation. At the organizational level, we argue that over-embeddedness of central actors within relatively closed networks and superstitious learning processes can exacerbate the biases to which decision makers are susceptible, leading to the institutionalization of a suboptimal organizational practice. These two parallel sets of processes led to severe consequences at the institutional level, which we label “terminal isomorphism.” We end by discussing consequences for institutional theory, future research directions, and recommendations for policy makers.

This chapter explores the role of colleges and universities supporting regional and national economic development with emphasis on leveraging innovation and entrepreneurship. Key focuses for economic development support from higher education include human resources development, technical assistance, capacity building, economic research and analysis, research, technology transfer, and new business development.

The current research investigates the regional differences in benefiting from innovation toward growth ambitions in a sample of female entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Nordic region. A sample of 4,048 early-stage female entrepreneurs from these two regions who were participated in annual surveys of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor was selected for further analysis. The results of data analysis using hierarchical linear modeling (mixed models) revealed that innovation benefits growth ambitions of early-stage female entrepreneurs. Further, the regional differences affect the benefit of innovation in shaping growth ambitions, so that, in Nordic region, the early-stage female entrepreneurs expect more growth out of their innovation as compared with their counterparts in MENA region. These results have been discussed regarding to existing literature, and future research directions have been suggested based on the results.

This paper focuses on the strategic role of elites in managing institutional and organizational change within English public services, framed by the wider ideological and political context of neo-liberalism and its pervasive impact on the social and economic order over recent decades. It also highlights the unintended consequences of this elite-driven programme of institutional reform as realized in the emergence of hybridized regimes of ‘polyarchic governance’ and the innovative discursive and organizational technologies on which they depend. Within the latter, ‘leaderism’ is identified as a hegemonic ‘discursive imaginary’ that has the potential to connect selected marketization and market control elements of new public management (NPM), network governance, and visionary and shared leadership practices that ‘make the hybrid happen’ in public services reform.

Accounting for quality and improved organizational performance has recently received attention in management control research. However, the extent to which process innovation changes have been integrated into management control research is limited. This paper contributes to that integration by drawing from institutional adaptive theory of organizational change and process innovation strategies. The paper utilizes a 2 by 2 contingency table that uses two factors: environmental conditions and organizational change/learning strategies, to build a process innovation framework. A combination of these two factors yields four process innovation strategies: mechanistic, organic, organizational development (OD) and organizational transformation (OT).

The four process innovation typologies are applied to characterize innovations in accounting such as activity based costing (ABC). ABC has been discussed as a multi-phased innovation process that provides an environment where both the initiation and the implementation of accounting change can occur. Technical innovation can be successfully initiated as organic innovation that unfolds in a decentralized organization and requires radical change and double loop learning. Implementation occurs best as a mechanistic innovation in a hierarchical organization and involving incremental change and single loop learning. The paper concludes that if ABC is integrated into an OD or OT intervention strategy, the technical and administrative innovation aspects of ABC can be utilized to manage the organization’s operating activities.

This study explores how organizations deal with divergent institutional logics when designing new products. Specifically, we investigate how organizations approach and embody institutional complexity in their product design. Through a multimodal study of serious games, we identify two design strategies, the proximity and the amplification strategies, which organizations employ to balance multiple institutional logics and design novel products that meet competing institutional expectations. Our study makes an important theoretical contribution by showing how institutional complexity can be a source of innovation. We also make a methodological contribution by developing a new, multimodal research design that allows for the in-depth study of organizational artifacts. Altogether, we complement our understanding of how institutional complexity is substantiated in organizational artifacts and highlight the role that multimodality plays in analyzing such situations.

Fighting the drought. Based on this idea, for almost two centuries now the Brazilian State has elaborated policies and programmes intended to stimulate rural development in the semiarid region of the country. It is this idea which has nourished the illusion that immense infrastructures need to be built to capture, store and transport large volumes of water in order to supply production activities in the region. Associated with this proposal is the attempt to reproduce the same pattern of development adopted in other Brazilian biomes, the main characteristic of which is the use of monoculture practices on large properties managed according to entrepreneurial modes of production. However the rich social experience promoted by rural worker organizations in the region has challenged this model by proposing living with the semiarid (Convivência com o Semiárido) as the guiding principle for alternative trajectories of development. Inspired by the experience of territorial development under way in the Agreste da Borborema region of Paraíba state, the chapter shows that the evolution of these new paths of development depends on revitalizing and mobilizing locally available resources, such as ecological potentials, social mechanisms for organizing labour and for producing and sharing knowledge, local forms of connecting food production to consumption and so on. The text concludes by emphasizing the need to design and implant institutional frameworks that enable a more balanced distribution of power between the State and civil society organizations, thereby allowing the latter to assume a more substantial role in identifying and managing endogenous resources that underpin self-centred development strategies.

In this chapter, the authors study how external knowledge contributes to the innovation results of firms in transition economies. Specifically, the authors distinguish between product and process innovations and identify the geographical origin of external knowledge – from the home country or from abroad. Theoretically, the authors discuss the innovation systems of transition economies and the effects of foreign and national external knowledge on product and process innovations in these under-researched contexts. Using a sample of firms from 19 countries from wave V of the Business Environment and Enterprise Surveys, the authors find that foreign and national external knowledge both contribute to the achievement of product and process innovations. However, the two types of external knowledge exert different effects depending on the innovation outcome analyzed. Firms in transition countries that incorporate foreign external knowledge are more likely to achieve product innovations than those that acquire national external knowledge. In contrast, both types of knowledge are equally useful for achieving process innovations.