Search results

Numerous policy announcements and articles have been produced over the past 20 years calling for higher education institutions to give greater focus to social, cultural, economic and environmental sustainability in their curriculum, research, engagement activities and operations. However, there has been much less attention given to establishing how to ensure these desired developments are successfully initiated, implemented and sustained. It is to these key areas of effective change management, leadership, support and governance for embedding sustainability into the core activities of higher education institutions through transformation that this special issue of Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) gives focus. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper brings together a consolidated analysis of the existing empirical literature on effective change management and leadership in higher education transformation with particular focus on the results of a recent international empirical study of 188 experienced leaders of sustainability in universities in Australia, the UK, the European Mainland, North America and South Africa.

The paper brings together the case for action in the sector, identifies an integrating framework for addressing sustainable development in the university curriculum, research, engagement activities and operations consistently, comprehensively through a whole institutional approach and identifies the key challenges and lessons on effective change management and leadership for sustainability transformation initiatives in universities and colleges.

Higher education institutions often give more attention to discussing what should change in their provision than to ensuring that desired transformations are actually put into practice effectively, sustainably and with positive impact. This paper and the articles which follow seek to address this gap.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between knowledge-economy and economic growth in 16 Asia-Pacific (AP) countries during the period 2011–2018. The study also aims to investigate a diversity of knowledge-economy pillars, including tertiary education, domestic innovation, foreign innovation, economic incentives and institutional regime and information and communications technologies (ICTs) and their relation to economic growth.

The study applies a comparative empirical analysis using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), one-step difference generalised methods of moments (GMM) and bias-corrected least-squares dummy variables (LSDVc) estimators to test this relationship.

Pooled OLS estimators deemed suboptimal to the panel data under study, while GMM results reveal a significant relationship between tertiary education, domestic and foreign innovation, government expenditure and investments with economic growth. Of these results, domestic innovation, investments and government consumption are positively correlated with economic growth, whereas tertiary education and foreign innovation show a negative relation. Meanwhile, institutions and ICT have insignificant relationships with economic growth. LSDVc results coincide with GMM results with respect to tertiary education, whereas institutions is the only additional significant and negatively correlated variable with economic growth.

The main limitation of this research lies in the unavailability of proxy data for knowledge economy pillars in monetary terms, and hence, the paper relies on indices.

The novelty of the study lies in its aim to investigate economic growth in the AP region that is enhanced by domestic innovation, foreign innovation or both – an area which is empirically understudied in the knowledge-economy context. Further, the paper’s novelty lies in its application of a comparative empirical analysis between the most popular dynamic panel estimators – dynamic GMM and bias-corrected LSDVc for AP countries.

Western business-to-business firms are under increasing competition from firms in emerging nations. As examples, Mindray in medical devices, LiuGong in earth moving equipment, Tata motors in Buses and Suzlon in Wind turbines are emerging as strong competitors in their industries. Yet despite increased competition from emerging nation firms, insufficient research has examined the growth of these firms, specifically in the areas of technology and innovation development processes. The purpose of this study is to examine how emerging nation business-to-business firms that have global ambitions achieve technology competence.

The authors examined several case studies on emerging market business-to-business firms that have moved to global markets and highlight the following five: LiuGong China (excavating products), Mindray China (medical equipment), Suzlon Energy India (wind generators), Tata Motors Buses India and BYD Auto China (batteries to electric cars). The firms are in business-to-business markets, except for BYD China that emerged as a business-to-business battery supplier but is currently in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets.

The authors find that firms in emerging markets that have global ambitions follow different approaches to innovation development processes from conventional theories and assumptions held by scholars and practitioners in Western developed countries. Our cases suggest that firms follow the proposed progression: domestic markets – internally developed technology; domestic markets –acquired technology; and finally to, global markets – acquired technology.

The authors contribute to research in three areas. First, they suggest that the innovation development process for emerging market firms is different from the Western world. Second, they provide a framework of innovation development process that can be tested in multiple environments. Third, this study suggests a deeper examination of the longitudinal development of business-to-business firms, an area that has received less attention.

The authors suggest that firms need to better track their competition from emerging nations because emerging nation firms can quickly acquire technology to become strong competitors.

Extant research has not examined these issues.