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This study aims to investigate the effect of the virtual spokesperson type on the consumers' preference for new products. To meet the consumer needs of Generation Z, virtual spokespeople have become new assistants in brand marketing. However, how virtual spokespersons drive consumer preference for new products is minimally understood.

This research conducts three experiments to investigate the influence of virtual spokesperson type on consumers' preference for new products.

The research shows that, for radically new products, competent virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of self-efficacy and thus consumers' preference; for incrementally new products, warm virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of social connection and thus consumers' willingness to buy.

This study broadens research on brand spokespersons and virtual spokespersons. This research also enriches and expands research on the consideration of new product types in brand spokespersons.

Green hospitality studies have not adequately focused on the diffusion of eco-innovative hotels amongst visitors. This study aims to fill this gap by identifying green hotel attributes that influence visitors’ adoption of eco-friendly hotel and their intentions to partake in green initiatives.

The paper uses a mixed-method approach to explore the drivers of customers’ green hotel adoption and consumption. In the qualitative phase, data were collected via 20 open-ended interviews and analyzed to derive a measurement scale. The scale was then tested through a survey comprising 500 respondents using structural equation modelling.

The study results elucidate how guests’ visit intentions and green consumption behavior is built through their perception of newness and uniqueness of eco-innovative attributes. Findings shed light on how green hotel’s sustainable communication and corporate social responsibility outreach efforts positively influence guest visit intentions.

Study results reveal perceived eco-innovativeness as an important antecedent of visit intentions. Based on guest’s preferences, green hotels striving to increase its visitors’ base could begin by expanding their eco-innovative attributes.

Contrasting previous studies that have exclusively used the theory of planned behavior constructs, this study argues that diffusion of innovation constructs also offer valuable insights into guests’ visit intentions. While existing studies have covered limited number of eco-innovative attributes, this study adds to the literature by presenting a comprehensive set of attributes including trustworthiness of communication and observability of its social impacts.

This paper examines rent determinants and their relationship with commercial office property rents.

The method adopted in this study differs from that of previous studies on this topic. Firstly, based on the survey of the viewpoints of experts, Relative Importance Index (RII) analysis was used to identify rent determinants and to rank and ensure their relevance and validity in the Sri Lankan context. Secondly, sampling of data related to 115 office properties collected from property tenants and landlords located within the central built-up area of Colombo City was conducted using a multi-methods approach to carry out an objective hedonic analysis of office rents.

This research utilizes RII and hedonic models to provide insights into determinants and relationships. Both analyses confirm that the three top drivers of commercial office rent are distance from the major town center, availability of parking space and the condition of the property. In addition to these three factors, hedonic models reveal that the age of the property and the availability of a conference hall also play a relevant role in explaining office rents. Given the disparities in the findings of the two methods, further examination was able to confirm that factors such as distance from the major town center, parking availability, age of the property, presence of a conference hall, building condition, floor size, business type and type of building are likely to influence commercial office rent. These findings reflect elements such as the quality, newness and better facilities of different office properties.

This systematic study and analysis of office rent for the guidance of real estate investors can support sound investment decisions, potentially leading to more financially sound property development, reduced public debt levels and improved public-private financing. Further, the research findings offer valuable insights to real estate investors, developers and planners regarding location decisions for office development quality enhancements in future office developments.

This research provides fresh insights into the local scale office market, an area where limited evidence currently exists. Further, the methodology adopted provides evidence that hedonic analysis, supported by a multi-method approach, can mitigate the subjective judgments made by professionals.

Based on the density dependence theory, this paper attempts to explore how two types of interdependence among firms located in the same national high-tech zones (NHTZs) – mutualism and competition – affect entrepreneurship in the NHTZs. The authors suggest that increasing firm density can help enhance legitimacy and form mutual networks. However, as the competition becomes fierce, the above positive relationship will weaken when the firm density exceeds a certain level. In addition, the authors are interested in whether the age of NHTZs would affect their sensitivity to legitimacy and competition and whether firm density affects entrepreneurship.

This article formulates two hypotheses from the theoretical deduction. The hypotheses are examined using the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with a unique, unbalanced panel dataset of Chinese NHTZs spanning from 2014 to 2021. Considering potential endogeneity risk among the variables, the authors attempt to lag variables and ultimately find the results are still robust.

Drawing upon the density dependence theory, the empirical results show firm density is conducive to promoting entrepreneurship, while the positive relationship between community density and NHTZs' entrepreneurship gradually weakens as the firm density surpasses a certain level. The dynamics between mutualism and competition have different impacts on NHTZs' entrepreneurship. In addition, the results demonstrate that the linkage between firm interdependence and entrepreneurship is stronger for younger NHTZs. Firm density has an impact on entrepreneurship through legitimacy and excessive competition effects.

On the one hand, the research period of this paper is 2014–2021, as the China Torch Statistical Yearbook only started to publish operating revenues in 2014, so the data period of this paper is relatively short. More research can be done in the future when more data is disclosed. On the other hand, the qualitative analysis cannot be conducted because of the limited data and materials. In future research, the qualitative analysis of entrepreneurial activities in NHTZs, such as questionnaires or case studies, needs to be supplemented, which will be an interesting direction.

Most existing research has not distinguished the differences between NHTZs (Wang et al., 2019), especially the differences in legitimacy and access to resources caused by the age of NHTZs. This article considers the heterogeneity between NHTZs, which helps to provide theoretical and practical evidence for a transition economy like China to make trade-off decisions on balancing absorbing new entrants with promoting the efficient allocation of resources based on the density and age of NHTZs.

Drawing upon density dependency theory, this paper enriches the literature on agglomeration and entrepreneurship with a new perspective and extends the study to NHTZs.

First, this paper provides new evidence on how agglomeration affects entrepreneurship from an ecological perspective with the help of mutualism and competition interdependence. Most studies have explored the role of agglomeration in entrepreneurship, focussing on social networks, knowledge spillovers or resource endowments (Acs et al., 2013; Capozza et al., 2018; Yu, 2020). Drawing upon density dependency theory, this paper enriches the literature on agglomeration and entrepreneurship with a new perspective and extends the study to NHTZs. Second, the emphasis of science parks has been primarily on qualitative or case studies (Salvador et al., 2013; Guo and Verdini, 2015; Xie et al., 2018). We have diversified the quantitative research between agglomeration and entrepreneurship by using panel data from Chinese NHTZs from 2014 to 2021. Third, most existing research has not distinguished the differences between NHTZs (Wang et al., 2019), especially the differences in legitimacy and access to resources caused by the age of NHTZs. This article considers the heterogeneity between NHTZs, which helps to provide theoretical and practical evidence for a transition economy like China to make trade-off decisions on balancing absorbing new entrants with promoting the efficient allocation of resources based on the density and age of NHTZs. Finally, this paper meticulously investigates the profound influence and underlying mechanisms of firm density within NHTZs on entrepreneurship. It discerns two distinct mechanisms at play: the legitimacy effect and the impact of excessive competition resulting from firm density. This comprehensive analysis significantly contributes to our comprehension of the intricate interplay between firm density and entrepreneurship, shedding light on the dynamics of competition and mutual benefits.

Entrepreneurial ventures aspiring to disrupt existing market incumbents often use business-model innovation to increase the attractiveness of their offerings. A value proposition is the central element of a business model, and is critical for this purpose. However, how entrepreneurial ventures modify their value propositions to increase the attractiveness of their comparatively inferior offerings is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the value proposition innovation (VPI) of aspiring disruptors.

The authors used a flexible pattern matching approach to ground the inductive findings in extant theory. The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with managers from startups in the global electric vehicle industry.

The authors developed a framework, showing two factors, determinants and tactics, that play a key role in VPI connected by a continuous feedback loop. Directed by the determinants of cognitive antecedents, development drivers and realization capabilities, aspiring disruptors determine the scope, focus and priorities of various configuration and support tactics to enable and secure the success of their value proposition.

The authors contribute to theory by showing how cognitive antecedents, development drivers and capabilities determine VPI tactics to disrupt existing market incumbents, furthering the understanding of configuration tactics. The results have important implications for disruptive innovation theory, and entrepreneurship research and practice, as they offer an explanatory framework to analyze strategies of aspiring disruptors who increase the attractiveness of sustainable technologies, thereby accelerating their diffusion.

This study investigates the extent to which a firm’s centrality and autonomy in its supply network are associated with the intensity and complexity of its competitive actions.

Utilizing social network analysis and dynamic panel data models, this study analyzes a comprehensive panel dataset with 10,802 firm-year observations across various industries between 2011 and 2018 to test the hypotheses.

Our findings show that a firm’s level of centrality in its supply network has an inverted U-shaped relationship with both competitive intensity and competitive complexity. In addition, the turning points of these two inverted U-shaped relationships differ in that firms with a lower level of centrality tend to compete aggressively by launching more actions within fewer categories, while firms with a higher level of centrality tend to compete aggressively by launching fewer actions that cover a larger range of categories. Finally, we find that a firm’s structural autonomy has a positive relationship with competitive complexity.

This study bridges the gap between the supply chain management literature and strategic management literature and investigates how supply networks shape competitive aggressiveness. In particular, this research investigates how a firm’s structural position in its supply network affects its competitive actions, an important intermediate mechanism for competitive advantage that has been overlooked in the supply chain management literature.

This paper aims to examine the factors associated with a household business entrepreneur’s decisions to formalise the firm at a multidimensions level.

The data set is a panel of 2,336 SMEs and household businesses from Vietnamese SME surveys during the 2005–2015 period.

This study elucidates how firm-level resources, entrepreneur characteristics and costs of doing business influence an entrepreneur’s decision to enter, the speed and the degree of formality.

This study provides insight into the origins of an entrepreneur’s decisions to the multidimensions of business formality through the lenses of the resource-based view, entrepreneurship and institution theories.

By examining the impact of product innovation on abnormal financial returns following the launch of new products, this study aims to test the explanatory power of a new compound measure of product innovativeness (Ganbaatar and Douglas, 2019).

It is a longitudinal study in which the authors used the compound product innovativeness score (CPIS) for the first time to measure product innovativeness. The abnormal financial returns are estimated through the event study design, where four different models are used. Artificial neural network analysis is done to determine the impact of the CPIS on abnormal returns by utilising a hexic polynomial regression model.

The authors find effect sizes that substantially exceed practically significant levels and that the CPIS explain 65% of the variance in the firm’s abnormal returns in market valuation. Moreover, new-to-the-market novelty predicts 83% of the variation, while new-to-the-firm (catch-up) innovation insignificantly impacts firm value.

This paper demonstrates how the CPIS, an objective and direct measure of product innovativeness, can be used to gain more insight into the innovation effect.

Implications for the business practice of this study include the necessity of relentless innovation by firms in contested differentiated markets, particularly where technological advance is ongoing. Larger and mature firms must practice corporate entrepreneurship to renew their products on a continuous basis to avoid slipping backwards in their markets. Innovation leadership, rather than following the leader, is also important to increase competitive advantage, given the result that innovation followship does not produce abnormal financial returns.

In this study, the authors focused on the effect of product innovativeness on firm performance. While the literature affirms a positive relationship between innovation and firm performance, the effect size of this relationship varies, due largely to the authors contend to simplistic measures of innovativeness. In this study, the authors adopt the relatively novel “compound” measure of product innovativeness (Ganbaatar and Douglas, 2019) to better encapsulate the nuances of both technical novelty and market novelty. This measure of product innovativeness is applicable to firms of all sizes but is more easily applied to entrepreneurial new ventures and SMEs, and it avoids the shortcomings of prior firm-level and subjective measures of innovativeness for both smaller and larger firms. Using a more effective analytical method (Artificial Neural Network), the authors investigated whether there is a “practically” significant effect size due to product innovation, which could be valuable for entrepreneurs in practice. The authors show that the CPIS measure can very effectively explain abnormalities in the stock market, exhibiting a moderate effect size and explaining 65% of the variation in abnormal returns.

The purpose of this study is to, first, analyze the past years of research on international branding and, second, building on an early literature review, to analyze patterns in the field and suggest future research.

The analyzed papers were compiled using the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The author searched papers published between 2007 and 2023 that used terms related to international branding in their title, abstract and keywords.

This paper structures and identifies key institutions, papers, regions and authors in the field. It provides an overview of the past years of research in the area. The study identifies important gaps in the literature and suggests further research dealing with, for example, the B2B sector and emerging markets.

Despite the increase in international branding studies, few literature reviews have been published since 2007. This review fills this research gap. It identifies future research areas dealing with branding in the B2B sector, branding in emerging markets, branding process and implementation studies using longitudinal methods and more practical research.

This study aims to examine how the knowledge breadth and depth of a patent affect its likelihood of being pledged. It also seeks to explore whether these relationships change diversely in different technological environments.

A complementary log-log model with random effects was conducted to test the hypotheses using a unique data set consisting of 348,927 invention patents granted by the China National Intellectual Property Administration from 1985 to 2015 belonging to 74,996 firms.

The findings reveal that both knowledge breadth and depth of a patent positively affect its likelihood of being pledged. Furthermore, the knowledge breadth and depth entail different degrees of superiority in different technological environments.

This study focuses on the effect of an individual patent’s knowledge base on its likelihood of being selected as collateral. It does not consider the influence of the overall knowledge characteristics of the selected patent portfolio.

Managers need to pay attention to patents’ knowledge characteristics and the changes in technological environments to select the most suitable patents as collateral and thus improve the success rate of pledge financing.

This study explores the impact of multidimensional characteristics of knowledge base on patent pledge financing within a systematic theoretical framework and incorporates technological environments into this framework.