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The purpose of this paper, based on first-hand data from 255 chairmen of planting cooperatives in Sichuan province, is threefold: to understand their social network heterogeneity; to understand the significance for members of marketing innovation in farmers' cooperatives and to understand the effects of chairmen's social network heterogeneity on cooperative marketing innovation.

The research employs an empirical survey of the chairmen of planting cooperatives in rural Sichuan province. The researchers use the ordinary least squares method to conduct regression on the data and the generalized linear model to process the data and avoid errors in the model setting. In the study, the following two hypotheses are examined: (1) The heterogeneity of chairmen's social networks has positive effects on cooperative marketing innovation; (2) The effects of heterogeneous external and internal social networks on cooperative marketing innovation are different.

The results show that both external and internal social network heterogeneity has positive effects on cooperative marketing innovation, and the effects of internal heterogeneity are greater than that of external heterogeneity.

This paper contributes to improving the income of farmers, the innovation of farmers' cooperatives and the development of agriculture in China. It provides a new way of managing and serving members to enable the long-term sustainable development of farmers' cooperatives.

Synthesizing from the institutional theory and social network theory, this study investigates factors influencing green innovation performance in new ventures.

The findings show that the dimensions of internal social network; heterogeneous network and tie strength have significant positive effects on proactive environmental strategy based on a sample of 300 new ventures in China.

The results further support the mediating role of proactive environmental strategy on internal organizational networks and green innovation performance of new ventures. The study further investigated the moderating role of the regulatory quality as a dimension of institutional environment in China. The results show that the regulatory quality positively moderates the relationship between proactive environmental strategy and green innovation performance. Policy and managerial implications are further discussed.

Over the past 20 years, green innovation has increasingly attracted the attention of policymakers and scholars. However, most studies have focused on mature ventures, and little attention has been given to how newly established ventures attain green innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present a topology-based tissue scaffold design methodology to accurately represent the heterogeneous internal architecture of tissues/organs.

An image analysis technique is used that digitizes the topology information contained in medical images of tissues/organs. A weighted topology reconstruction algorithm is implemented to represent the heterogeneity with parametric functions. The parametric functions are then used to map the spatial material distribution following voxelization. The generated chronological information yields hierarchical tool-path points which are directly transferred to the three-dimensional (3D) bio-printer through a proposed generic platform called Application Program Interface (API). This seamless data corridor between design (virtual) and fabrication (physical) ensures the manufacturability of personalized heterogeneous porous scaffold structure without any CAD/STL file.

The proposed methodology is implemented to verify the effectiveness of the approach and the designed example structures are bio-fabricated with a deposition-based bio-additive manufacturing system. The designed and fabricated heterogeneous structures are evaluated which shows conforming porosity distribution compared to uniform method.

In bio-fabrication process, the generated bio-models with boundary representation (B-rep) or surface tessellation (mesh) do not capture the internal architectural information. This paper provides a design methodology for scaffold structure mimicking the native tissue/organ architecture and direct fabricating the structure without reconstructing the CAD model. Therefore, designing and direct bio-printing the heterogeneous topology of tissue scaffolds from medical images minimize the disparity between the internal architecture of target tissue and its scaffold.

There has been an increasing trend toward the creation of senior management teams (SMTs) which are characterized by a high degree of functional heterogeneity. Although such teams may create better linkages to information, along with the benefits of functional heterogeneity comes the potential for conflicts that stem from the value differences among subcultures in an organization. These conflicts can adversely affect performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how school leaders’ activities mediate the relationship of SMT functional heterogeneity to SMT effectiveness (in-role performance and innovation).

Data, which were obtained through a survey, was collected from a sample of 92 schools in Israel. Data were collected from two sources (principals and SMT members) to minimize problems associated with same source and common method bias. Data were aggregated at the team level of analysis.

The results of structural equation model indicated that principal’s internal activities enhanced SMT in-role performance whereas principals’ external activities enhanced SMT innovation. The results also showed that principal’s internal activities are full mediators of the relationship between functional heterogeneity and SMT in-role performance.

This study has implications for policies involving the design and implementation of leadership tools to effectively manage SMTs. The results of this study can help principals to establish priorities and allocate their time and resources more effectively, both inward and outward the SMT boundary so as to assist functionally heterogeneous SMTs translating the benefits of functional heterogeneity into significant achievements.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how business uncertainty affects the implementation of supply chain integration (SCI). More importantly, this research divides business uncertainty into four dimensions and SCI into three dimensions to examine the role of each dimension. In addition, it investigates the moderating effects of manufacturing approaches, such as push and pull, in the relationship between SCI and performance.

Through a structured survey, this study collected 259 responses from supply executives, and supply and purchasing managers of US manufacturing firms. The empirical data analysis was done by using the partial least squares technique.

The results empirically support the findings that business uncertainty positively affects implementation of SCI. Among the four dimensions of business uncertainty, dynamism and hostility significantly affect implementation of internal integration, integration with suppliers, and integration with customers. In addition, manufacturing approaches, such as push and pull, have a moderating effect on the relationship between SCI and performance.

This study collected survey responses from a manufacturing firm in the supply chain to assist managers to find a solution while dealing with business uncertainty through the implementation of SCI. It also emphasizes manufacturing approaches, such as push and pull, in implementing SCI to improve performance. Thus, supply and purchasing managers should consider the business uncertainty that they are dealing with while developing their supply chain strategy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide meaningful insights on the effects of SCI toward dealing with business uncertainty. More importantly, by dividing the dimensions of business uncertainty and SCI, this study presents empirical evidence of the significant role of supply chain practices in uncertain business conditions. In addition, this study addresses the gap in extant literature and shows that managers need to consider their manufacturing approach in SCI to improve business performance.

From the perspective of top management heterogeneity, this paper aims to study the impact of the psychological traits of executive pay bandwagon on earnings management in the listed companies of China.

This paper applies the ratio of executive pay to the median pay level of executives in firms of similar size and industry, namely, the comparing coefficient, as an alternative variable of executive pay bandwagon, and earnings management as the behavior choice of executive pay bandwagon, to examine whether executives in the listed companies of China have comparing mentality, and whether the result is influenced by executive heterogeneity by using the multiple linear regression models.

The lower the executives’ compensation is than the median pay level of executives in firms of similar size and industry, the stronger the incentive the executives have to compare with others whose pay is higher, increasing the extent of earnings management in the future, and executives tend to use real activities manipulation rather than accrual-based earnings management to increase their performance-based compensation. As pay bandwagon is a kind of executives’ individual psychological reaction, in a large extent, its behavioral performance is likely to be affected by executive heterogeneity. Specifically, when the proportion of male executives, young executives or low educated executives is relatively high, or executives are located in remote cities, there will breed more earnings management behaviors induced by pay bandwagon. Further study shows that pay bandwagon is positively correlated with rigging compensation based on real earnings management and pay bandwagon also has significantly negative effects on the firms’ future value creation.

Pay bandwagon is an important inducement of executives’ earnings management, with implication that for executives with different characteristics, one should pay attention to the subjective psychological perception and expectation of their pay in the future studies related to executives’ compensation incentives.

This study introduces the research within sociology, psychology and experimental economics, and considers the executives’ subjective perception of their pay, to explore the internal mechanism that executives affect firm performance via a specific earnings management method and to implement self-interested behavior due to pay bandwagon. And this is the first study to select several typical executive individual characteristics to investigate the influence of executive heterogeneity on pay bandwagon and its economic consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the Boardroom heterogeneity affects IPO underpricing for entrepreneurial firms, where Boardroom heterogeneity was classified in terms of functional background, educational background, age and length of tenure.

A national research design was conducted using data collected from 355 firms listed on China’s Growth Enterprise Market from its start in 2009 to 2012.

The author found that IPO underpricing has a significant negative correlation with functional heterogeneity, a positive correlation with educational heterogeneity, a significant negative correlation with age heterogeneity, but it does not show significant correlation with heterogeneity in tenure. Board heterogeneity affects IPO underpricing of entrepreneurial firms partially, which means functional, educational and age heterogeneity conveys signals to potential investors regarding a firm’s quality.

More entrepreneurial firms in more years for data and long-term performance research design in future research would be required for further understanding of the relationships among the variables in this study.

This paper suggests that IPO firms may make use of such an influencing mechanism to determine the issue price or to control the IPO underpricing by showing the Boardroom heterogeneity.

This paper revealed the influence of the characteristics of board members of such firms on IPO underpricing, which is rare in recent studies comparing to the study for the top management team; also this study provides empirical support for such effect.

This research focuses on the relationship between Top Management Team heterogeneity (TMT) and University Spin-Offs (USOs) economic performance according to a micro-foundational perspective. The purpose consists in exploring whether a high academic representation in TMTs may improve USOs’ performance and how their competencies and backgrounds affect USOs’ economic success.

The authors employed data from the Italian platform Netval to identify the entire population of USOs in southern Italy. They selected both pure and hybrid spin-offs that had at least one academic member on the TMT. Applying these conditions to our sample selection, the authors came to a population of 136 firms. They applied a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

Our main findings reveal that the USOs’ economic performance improves with more academicians in the TMT and even in the same scientific field. Our data also shows that CEO duality has a negative impact on economic performance.

This work takes for the first time a micro-foundational perspective to analyze individual-level factors that affect USOs’ performance. The authors tried to bridge a research gap in the USO literature, shedding light on the relationship between TMT composition and new venture performance, considering some significant interactions between team members. Our expected findings also contribute to the general literature on entrepreneurial teams in new ventures and suggest a means to reconcile some inconsistent literature results on TMT heterogeneity and USO performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the difference between formal and real school autonomy in the Italian educational system. The Italian case is characterised by low levels of school autonomy. It is interesting to consider whether heterogeneity of patterns is possible in this context. A description of this heterogeneity is provided through archetypes.

The methodology is a qualitative survey conducted among school principals. A non‐standardised questionnaire was completed by 35 principals. The collected data were examined in accordance with the framework dimensions (different features of school autonomy) and three archetypes were identified.

The three archetypes of schools identified are: first, entrepreneurial (the strategies followed and the tools used are broader than those that the law prescribes); second, chaotic (different actors express their opinions but, ultimately, there is no shared decision at the school level); and third, bureaucratic (the school's principal thinks that nothing can be done without legal prescription).

Through a new case (the Italian educational system), this paper contributes to the stream of literature on the disconnect between formal and real school autonomy. This paper can help policy makers to improve understanding of the characteristics and internal heterogeneity of the educational system.

Attempts to explain the sources of the basic assumption of the socio‐economic approach to management (SEAM): the existence of hidden costs and performance. These are due to the heterogeneity of situations and to the presence of multiple contradictions in these situations. Aims to show how SEAM can help to both spot these two dimensions and to shed light on the operational difficulties for managers to cope with them.