Search results

To date, sustainability in technology firms has focused on improving outputs while maintaining the same inputs. The purpose of this paper is to propose a six‐stage model for enhancing inputs as well as outputs, named sustainable human capital. The paper extends traditional views of individuals as human capital, measured as formal education and direct experience to incorporate more holistic and humanistic views of informal education and indirectly related experience. This allows technology firms, whose lifeblood is innovation, to increase employee satisfaction and performance, quality and quantity of technology firm innovation, and societal well‐being in the form of sustainable products and services.

This paper extends concepts in innovation management to build a holistic model of employees as sustainable human capital. By bridging theory and practice, this paper provides a framework for knowledge‐building partnerships and, thus, relational wealth, or the value created by and for a firm through its internal relations among and with employees.

A model of sustainable human capital starts with pre‐hiring processes (raw materials), on‐boarding (design stage), training and development (production stage), developing external partnerships and integrating individual employees with the ecosystem (distribution stage), building internal relationships through mentoring (use and maintenance stage), and employee's exit through succession planning (recovery stage).

Technology managers have been utilizing a lifecycle approach for product innovation, yet have de‐coupled the product from the people, the fundamental source of innovation. Thus, re‐incorporating the human aspect to the lifecycle approach offers practices for holistic engagement of employees in innovation. Just as management literature pushed economists to shift their views of employees from homogeneous units of human capital to heterogeneous individuals, sustainability literature must evolve in its approach to start thinking of employees as discrete individuals with differentiated skills that change over time.

Geographical location has been of noted importance for technology entrepreneurship, i.e. technology clusters. While social resources have been investigated as strategic in management literature, media reputation appears to be an overlooked reason why technological entrepreneurship has been less prevalent in some geographical locations, despite there being fertile economic parameters. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Utilizing methodology developed by Rindova et al. to explore how media (local and foreign) describes technological entrepreneurship (local and foreign), the paper compares Boston, MA and Kolkata, India in terms of positive or negative valenced recognition and explores their relation to technology entrepreneurship location.

Geographical media reputation is contextualized and does not transfer readily. Unlike the absolute positives of economic reasoning, positive media reputation in the local context does not scale globally. Also, negative reputation is very hard to overturn at the global level. Social resources often have their own social dynamics that are localized in culture and environment.

This paper is an exploratory, illustrative analysis of the relation between geographical reputation at local and global levels and the location choice of technology entrepreneurship. Other factors do exist that the paper does not examine specifically but tries to match through sample selection, realizing no two geographical locations can ever be exact matches and in this case are rough equivalents.

Geographical location imputes social resources – namely media reputation – that can affect the location choice of technology entrepreneurship beyond economic considerations.