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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents of business growth expectations and subsequent accumulated sales revenues and employment costs. Hypotheses are derived guided by the theory of planned behaviour.

The authors followed a sample of 207 incorporated businesses started in May/June 2002 over a ten-year period. The hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regression analysis.

The results suggest that the entrepreneurs’ need for social cohesion, subjective norm with regard to business growth and perceived self-efficacy with regard to opportunity recognition are positively and significantly associated with business growth expectations. These expectations, reported at the time of business registration, accurately predict subsequent short-term as well as long-term accumulated sales revenues and labour costs, but this is not the case for entrepreneurs with novel business ideas.

Since entrepreneurs’ attitude, subjective norm and self-efficacy are possible to change, the findings should interest policy makers and educators. Measures aimed at enhancing the antecedents of entrepreneurs’ growth expectations should be considered. The findings that growth expectations have a long-lasting effect on sales and employment stress the importance of entrepreneurs’ subjective expectations for outcomes in new businesses.

There is a lack of studies using a longitudinal design when investigating the link between initial business growth expectations and subsequent firm outcomes. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature in this regard by using high-quality secondary data to examine firm achievements.

While the growth of emerging technologies like Blockchain has created significant market opportunities and economic incentives for firms, it is valuable for both researchers and practitioners to understand their creation mechanisms. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

Based on the knowledge search perspective, this study examines the impact of search boundary on innovation novelty and quality. Additionally, innovation targets, namely R&D innovation and application innovation, are proposed as the moderator of the knowledge search effect. Using a combination of machine learning algorithms such as natural language processing and classification models, the authors propose new methods to measure the identified concepts.

The empirical results of 3,614 Blockchain patents indicate that search boundary enhances both innovation novelty and innovation quality. For R&D innovation, the positive impact of search boundary on innovation quality is enhanced, whereas for application innovation, the positive effect of search boundary on innovation novelty is improved.

This study mainly contributes to the growing literature on emerging technologies by describing their creation mechanisms. Specifically, the exploration of R&D and application taxonomy enriches researchers' understanding of knowledge search in the context of Blockchain invention.

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 paper is to consider whether or not the introduction of inflation targeting (IT) impacts on the mean-reversion properties of inflation and output growth.

Focusing on eight Asian countries of which four are inflation-targeters, the authors employ a two-state Markov-switching model which characterizes the behavior of inflation and output growth as regime-dependent based on periods of stationarity or non-stationarity.

In contrast to a literature that offers mixed findings, the authors find the presence of stationary inflation and output growth in one regime for all IT countries, except for South Korea which is characterized by stationary output growth in both regimes. In the cases of South Korea and Thailand, IT reduces the probability of inflation remaining in a non-stationary regime. IT increases the probability of South Korea remaining in a regime of low persistence output growth. While IT is important in understanding behavior, so are other considerations such as exchange rate volatility, as well as the Asian and global financial crises.

In contrast to other unit root tests of inflation and output growth, a novelty of the approach is that the authors obtain new insights in terms of two concepts of stationarity that allow for inflation and output growth to switch between stationary and non-stationary regimes (partial stationarity), or between stationary regimes of differing degrees of persistence (varied stationarity).

The paper explores the composition of employment in new innovative firms. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the mixture of job positions at the firm level measured by employees’ occupational position, their qualification and specialisation, as well as their origin. As there is little known about the structure and quality of employment in new firms, insights are helpful for policymakers who are engaged in regional development and job creation.

The database used for analysis comes from an interdisciplinary study on human-related success factors of business start-ups in the German state of Thuringia. Data were collected by means of 399 face-to-face interviews with the sole founder or the leading entrepreneur of a start-up firm. The findings are based on a multivariate data analysis using regression models.

The results indicate that temporary employment is more likely inherent in fast growing firms. Academic spin-offs prefer to hire people with a university education and scientific background. Furthermore, it is found that manufacturing firms have a relatively higher demand for staff with a professional education as well as a technical background. However, there is no support for the thesis that innovative firms contribute to combating structural unemployment at least in the short run.

Results are limited to a particular geographical region. Researchers are strongly encouraged to conduct further research on the topic.

The paper includes implications for policymakers in the field of unemployment reduction and employment creation.

The paper explores the link between innovation and the quality of employment in new business ventures. This approach is in contrast to the bulk of other studies dealing with new employment generation in terms of numbers.

This paper reviews one of the crucial issues in the recent growth literature concerning the hypothesis of cross country convergence of levels and growth rates of income per capita implied by the neo‐classical growth model, both in the Solow‐Swan and Rampsey‐Cass‐Koopmans versions. The alternative endogenous growth models, consistent with permanent income inequality, are considered. Convergence to a common income level versus divergence is discussed from a theoretical point of view. Then, empirical tests of the convergence property are presented. What emerges is that Barro type regressions and their findings about “conditional” convergence are questionable and cannot be used to give a definitive response on this issue.

The study explores techno-work engagement, which is a positive and fulfilling state of well-being with respect to the use of digital technology at work. It provides insight into the circumstances in which the educational use of ICT enhances work well-being.

A total of 60 Finns from the education sector wrote descriptions of situations in which they experienced techno-work engagement related to the use of educational technology. The responses were analysed qualitatively.

Participants experienced techno-work engagement not only when educational technology facilitated work, enabled progress and produced novelty value but also when working in collaboration and in a positive climate.

This first qualitative study of techno-work engagement deepens the understanding of positive well-being experiences associated with the use of educational technology. It also provides suggestions for leading technology-related work well-being in educational sector.

This research paper aims to explore Airbnb’s online experience initiative, which has sparked a new wave of virtual tourism to improvise a large assortment of experiential activities through cyberspace. It works to answer questions pertinent to the type of virtual experiences tourists seek and how these experiences could fulfill tourist needs, thereby rendering favorable socio-mental outcomes through experiences encountered.

Drawing on travel experience and transformative tourism theoretical tenets, this qualitative inquiry used data collected from social media posts from virtual tourists.

Results reveal four major themes of online experiences – hedonism, attention restoration, social relatedness and self-exaltation – that encompass 12 experiential categories. They further underscore four types of transformative mechanisms pinpointing hedonic well-being, environmental-mastery well-being, social well-being and eudaimonic well-being.

Research findings demonstrate how Airbnb exercised marketing agility during severe environmental plight; while expediting strategic initiatives that offer tourists and residents alike a means to reengage in leisure and travel activities at home. They also salvage the peer-to-peer community by turning accommodation hosts into online experience ambassadors.

The contribution of this inquiry lies in assessing virtual experiences and reconnecting how different cyber experiences can meet an array of tourist needs. This study further highlights the transformative virtual experience paradigm to lay the necessary theoretical foundation for future research on virtual transformative tourism. This research goes beyond the common understanding of transformative tourism that relies merely on corporeal encounters. From a practical point of view, this study brings light to a novel concept – sharing experience economy – that incorporates the nuances between sharing economy and experience economy.

This paper investigates the relationship between human capital, economic freedom, governance performance, and economic growth and whether institutional factors such as governance performance and economic freedom mediate the association between human capital and economic growth.

In this study, the authors apply the panel data regression method to verify five hypotheses and check the robustness of the empirical findings from four aspects (chow test, panel unit root test, granger test and generalized method of moments) based on the data covering China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa from 2000 to 2018.

After multiple tests with mixed methods, the empirical results show that the relationship between human capital and economic growth is not linear but inverted U-shaped. Furthermore, human capital has a positive effect on economic growth only in a certain period of time, and governance performance positively moderates the effect of human capital on economic growth in BRICS.

First, the impact of human capital on economic growth is not linear but an inverted U-shaped and governance performance moderates the effect of human capital on economic growth in BRICS. The study and research model enhances the authors’ insights on the advantage and challenges of human capital in the future. Second, the proposed multi-methods in the study accurately forecast economic growth which partially solves endogenous problems because of reverse causality.

The purpose of this study is to assess the nexus between the vast dimensions of financial inclusion and economic development of the emerging Indian economy.

In this study, vector auto-regression (VAR) models and Granger causality test were followed to test the main research question in Indian context. The data were collected on various dimensions of financial inclusion and economic development for the period 2004-2013.

Empirical results and discussion suggest that there is a positive association between economic growth and various dimensions of financial inclusion, specifically banking penetration, availability of banking services and usage of banking services in terms of deposits. Granger causality analysis reveals a bi-directional causality between geographic outreach and economic development and a unidirectional causality between the number of deposits/loan accounts and gross domestic product. The results obtained favor social banking experiments in India with a deepening of banking institutions.

This study is limited to the banking institutions and specifically to the emerging and developing economies.

This study analyzes the quantitative value of social banking experiments and governments’ efforts to enhance financial inclusion in terms of economic growth.

Financial inclusion plays a key role in developing a strong and an efficient financial infrastructure, which facilitates the growth of an economy. The findings of the study reveal that there is a strong association between banking penetration and growth. The discussion leads in the favor of deepening of the banking institutions, and therefore, policymakers can look forward to these findings to maintain a sustainable-inclusive-developed economic system in an emerging economy like India.

This study is original in nature and includes recent evidence and efforts to promote financial inclusion in the Indian economy. The findings of this study will be of value to banks and policymakers.