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Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors have attracted great attention worldwide for a variety of applications in measuring physical, chemical and biological parameters. However, stability has been one of the key issues which have limited their effective commercial applications. To fully understand this challenge of operation stability, this paper aims to systematically review mechanisms, stability issues and future challenges of SAW sensors for various applications.

This review paper starts with different types of SAWs, advantages and disadvantages of different types of SAW sensors and then the stability issues of SAW sensors. Subsequently, recent efforts made by researchers for improving working stability of SAW sensors are reviewed. Finally, it discusses the existing challenges and future prospects of SAW sensors in the rapidly growing Internet of Things-enabled application market.

A large number of scientific articles related to SAW technologies were found, and a number of opportunities for future researchers were identified. Over the past 20 years, SAW-related research has gained a growing interest of researchers. SAW sensors have attracted more and more researchers worldwide over the years, but the research topics of SAW sensor stability only own an extremely poor percentage in the total researc topics of SAWs or SAW sensors.

Although SAW sensors have been attracting researchers worldwide for decades, researchers mainly focused on the new materials and design strategies for SAW sensors to achieve good sensitivity and selectivity, and little work can be found on the stability issues of SAW sensors, which are so important for SAW sensor industries and one of the key factors to be mature products. Therefore, this paper systematically reviewed the SAW sensors from their fundamental mechanisms to stability issues and indicated their future challenges for various applications.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) own and control technological resources and capabilities that make them critical actors in accelerating the transition toward net zero. Even beyond the energy sector, stakeholders are putting increasing pressure on MNEs to reduce the carbon intensity of their operations, that is, to improve their carbon performance. While there is unambiguous evidence that national climate policy is a critical catalyst for long-term carbon performance improvements, there is limited research on how MNEs’ carbon strategies react to climate policies. This chapter reviews the concepts, drivers, and strategies connected to carbon performance in the broader sustainability and management literature to clarify potential complementarities to international business (IB). The authors then highlight how MNEs will face increasing institutional complexity along two dimensions: (1) the structural diversity of institutional environments and (2) institutional dynamism, primarily reflected by public policy. The proposed conceptual framework maps these two dimensions to national and subnational levels, and the authors present two data sources that allow the quantitative analysis of country differences in the diversity and dynamism of national climate policy. The authors conclude that there are ample opportunities for IB researchers to explore MNEs’ strategic reactions to climate policy and to inform policymakers about the consequences of national climate policy in the global economy.

Firms are driven to ride on the digital wave in today’s open innovation ecosystem. This study aims to explore the effect of digital transformation (DT) on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms’ innovation ambidexterity, namely, radical versus incremental innovation, respectively. Meanwhile, the authors evaluated the moderating role of the complexity of R&D collaboration portfolio (i.e. organizational diversity and geographic diversity) in the above relationships.

Using a panel data set of 171 Chinese listed firms in the information and communications technology services industry from 2010 to 2018, the proposed hypotheses were empirically attested.

It is found that DT has a positive relationship with radical innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship with incremental innovation. In terms of the R&D collaboration portfolio, organizational diversity positively moderates the relationships between DT and innovation ambidexterity, respectively. The geographic diversity weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of DT on incremental innovation; however, its moderating role in the link between DT and radical innovation is not empirically verified.

Extant scholars mainly addressed the interplay between KIBS firms and their manufacturing clients, while this study reveals the different consequences of DT on KIBS firms’ innovation ambidexterity to highlight the role of KIBS firms is an independent and essential innovator in a knowledge-driven economy. Notably, the findings contribute to knowledge management (KM) and R&D literature by confirming the diversity of the R&D collaboration portfolio is a critical KM strategy for KIBS firms to develop and promote external knowledge resources.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between corporate sustainable development goals (SDGs) disclosure and analyst forecast quality.

The study focuses on a sample of 95 Italian-listed companies preparing the mandatory non-financial declaration (NFD) according to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards over a five-year period (2017–2021), corresponding to an unbalanced sample of 438 observations. Analyst forecast quality was proxied by earnings forecast accuracy (FA) and earnings forecast dispersion (FD), built on data retrieved from the Refinitiv database. A manual content analysis was performed on NFDs to derive an SDG disclosure score (SDGD) for each sampled company.

This study provides empirical evidence suggesting that voluntary SDG disclosure matters to the capital market in that it helps enhance the information environment of companies, evidenced by improved analyst forecast quality. In particular, this study highlighted that SDG disclosure positively influences analyst FA while negatively affecting analyst FD.

This study focuses on the Italian context, which has idiosyncratic characteristics regarding the structure of the financial market, the composition of corporate ownership and experience in non-financial reporting practices.

This study indicates to corporate managers that following GRI standards may represent the right way to better integrate SDG disclosure in corporate non-financial reports and increase the relevance of such information for investors and other capital market participants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that empirically examines the association between SDG disclosure and analyst forecast quality.

The principal objective of this current research is to explore and test an underlying mechanism to solve the inconsistent relationship between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employee creativity. This study also tests the moderating role of absorptive capacity in fully understanding the relationship between two constructs.

A time-lagged survey was utilized to collect data from 317 employees working at information technology (IT) organizations in Vietnam. This research conducted a hierarchical regression analysis to examine the hypotheses.

This research found that employees’ operational skills fully mediated the link between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employees’ creative performance. Moreover, absorptive capacity positively moderated the relationship between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employees’ operational skills as well as the relationship between employees’ operational skills and employee creativity.

This research is one of the first papers to discuss the mediating role of employees’ operational skills in associating supervisors’ developmental feedback with employee creativity in response to the calls of previous studies. To fully comprehend the indirect impact of supervisors' developmental feedback on workers' creative performance, this research also examines the moderating influence of absorptive capacity at the individual level.

This paper analyses how firm births and deaths are influenced by previous firm births and deaths in related and unrelated sectors. Competition and multiplier effects are used as the theoretical lens for this analysis.

This paper uses 2008–2016 Irish business demography data pertaining to 568 NACE 4-digit sectors within 20 NACE 1-digit industries across 34 Irish county and sub-county regions within 8 NUTS3 regions. A three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation is used to analyse the impact of past firm deaths (births) on future firm births (deaths). The effect of relatedness on firm interrelationships is explicitly modelled and captured.

Findings indicate that the multiplier effect operates mostly through related sectors, while the competition effect operates mostly through unrelated sectors.

This paper's findings show that firm interrelationships are significantly influenced by the degree of relatedness between firms. The raw data used to calculate firm birth and death rates in this analysis are count data. Each new firm is measured the same as another regardless of differing features like size. Some research has shown that smaller firms have a greater propensity to create entrepreneurs (Parker, 2009). Thus, it is possible that the death of differently sized firms may contribute differently to multiplier effects where births induce further births. Future research could seek to examine this.

These findings have implications for policy initiatives concerned with increasing entrepreneurship. Some express concerns that public investment into entrepreneurship can lead to “crowding out” effects (Cumming and Johan, 2019), meaning that public investment into entrepreneurship could displace or reduce private investment into entrepreneurship (Audretsch and Fiedler, 2023; Zikou et al., 2017). This study’s findings indicate that using public investment to increase firm births could increase future firm births in related and unrelated sectors. However, more negative “crowding out” effects may also occur in unrelated sectors, meaning that public investment which stimulates firm births in a certain sector could induce firm deaths and crowd out entrepreneurship in unrelated sectors.

This paper is the first in the literature to explicitly account for the role of relatedness in firm interrelationships.

Drawing on the challenge–hindrance stressor framework and the “too-much-of-a-good-thing” principle, this study examined the curvilinear effects of two emic social challenge stressors (guanxi beliefs and participative decision-making (PDM)) and the moderating effect of an etic social hindrance stressor (perceived organizational politics) on Hong Kong and United States nurses’ job satisfaction.

A quantitative survey method was implemented, with the data provided by 355 Hong Kong nurses and 116 United States nurses. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the degree of measurement equivalence across Hong Kong and US nurses. The proposed model and the research questions were tested using nonlinear structural equation modeling analyses.

The results show that while guanxi beliefs only showed an inverted U-shaped relation on Hong Kong nurses’ job satisfaction, PDM had an inverted U-shaped relation with both Hong Kong and United States nurses’ job satisfaction. The authors also found that Hong Kong nurses experienced the highest job satisfaction when their guanxi beliefs and perceived organization politics were both high.

The results add to the comprehension of the nuances of the often-held assumption of linearity in organizational sciences and support the speculation of social stressors-outcomes linkages.

Managers need to recognize that while the nurturing and development of effective relationships with employees via social interaction are important, managers also need to be aware that too much guanxi and PDM may lead employees to feel overwhelmed with expectations of reciprocity and reconciliation to such an extent that they suffer adverse outcomes and become dissatisfied with their jobs.

First, the authors found that influences of guanxi beliefs and PDM are not purely linear and that previous research may have neglected the curvilinear nature of their influences on job satisfaction. Second, the authors echo researchers’ call to consider an organization’s political context to fully understand employees’ attitudes and reactions toward social interactions at work. Third, the authors examine boundary conditions of curvilinear relationships to understand the delicate dynamics.

This paper undertakes a structured literature review to analyse the literature on performance management and measurement (PMM) in universities over the last four decades. Over that time, PMM has emerged as an influential force in universities that impacts their operations and redefines their identity.

A structured literature review approach was used to analyse a sample of articles on PMM research from a broad range of disciplines over four decades. This was undertaken to understand the impacts of PMM practices on universities, highlight changes over time and point to avenues for future research.

The analysis highlights the fact that research on PMM in universities has grown significantly over the 40 years studied. We provide an overview of published articles over four decades regarding content, themes, theories, methods and impacts. We provide an empirical basis for discussing past, present and future university PMM research. The future research avenues offer multiple provocations for scholars and policymakers, for instance, PMM implementation strategies and relationships with various government programs and external evaluation and the role of different actors, particularly academics, in shaping PMM systems.

Unlike a traditional literature review, the structured literature review method can develop insights into how the field has changed over time and highlight possible future research. The sample for this literature review differs from previous reviews in covering a broad range of disciplines, including accounting.

This study aims to investigate the impact of stakeholders’ nonfinancial resources (NFRs) on companies’ profitability, filling a significant gap in the literature regarding the role of NFRs in value creation.

Data from 76 organizations from 2017 to 2019 were collected and analyzed. Four primary NFRs and their key value drivers were identified, representing core elements that support different dimensions of a company’s performance. Statistical tests examined the relationship between stakeholders’ NFRs and financial performance measures.

When analyzed collectively and individually, the results reveal a significant positive influence of stakeholders’ NFRs on a firm’s profitability. Higher importance assigned to NFRs correlates with a higher return on sales.

This study contributes to the literature by empirically bridging the gap between stakeholder theory and the resource-based view, addressing the intersection of these perspectives. It also provides novel insights into how stakeholders’ NFRs impact profitability, offering valuable implications for research and managerial practice. It suggests that managers should integrate nonfinancial measures of NFRs within their performance measurement system to manage better and sustain companies’ value-creation process.

The literature mainly concentrates on the relationships between externally oriented digital transformation (ExtDT), big data analytics capability (BDAC) and business model innovation (BMI) from an intra-organizational perspective. However, it is acknowledged that the external environment shapes the firm's strategy and affects innovation outcomes. Embracing an external environment perspective, the authors aim to fill this gap. The authors develop and test a moderated mediation model linking ExtDT to BMI. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities view, the authors' model posits that the effect of ExtDT on BMI is mediated by BDAC, while environmental hostility (EH) moderates these relationships.

The authors adopt a quantitative approach based on bootstrapped partial least square-path modeling (PLS-PM) to analyze a sample of 200 Italian data-driven SMEs.

The results highlight that ExtDT and BDAC positively affect BMI. The findings also indicate that ExtDT is an antecedent of BMI that is less disruptive than BDAC. The authors also obtain that ExtDT solely does not lead to BDAC. Interestingly, the effect of BDAC on BMI increases when EH moderates the relationship.

Analyzing the relationships between ExtDT, BDAC and BMI from an external environment perspective is an underexplored area of research. The authors contribute to this topic by evaluating how EH interacts with ExtDT and BDAC toward BMI.