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The purpose of this study is to evaluate Department of Defense (DoD)-backed innovation programs as a means of enhancing the adoption of new technology throughout the armed forces.

The distribution of 1.29 million defense contract awards over seven years was analyzed across a data set of more than 8,000 DoD-backed innovation program award recipients. Surveys and interviews of key stakeholder groups were conducted to contextualize the quantitative results and garner additional insights.

Nearly half of DoD innovation program participants achieve no meaningful growth in direct defense business after program completion, and most small, innovative companies that win follow-on defense contracts solely support their initial sponsor branch. Causes for these program failures include the fact that programs do not market participants’ capabilities to the defense community and do not track participant companies after program completion.

Because the DoD does not market the capabilities of its innovation program participants internally, prospective DoD customers conduct redundant market research or fail to modernize. Program participants become increasingly unwilling to invest in the DoD market long term after the programs fail to deliver their expected benefits.

Limited scholarship evaluates the efficacy of DoD-backed innovation programs as a means of enhancing force readiness. This research not only uses a vast data set to demonstrate the failures of these programs but also presents concrete recommendations for improving them – including establishing an “Innovators Database” to track program participants and an incentive to encourage contracting entities and contractors to engage with them.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight on high-interest areas of research in defense-related logistics and supply chain management and opportunities for advancing theory and practice in this domain.

A panel of experts provided their insight to several questions oriented toward examining research opportunities and gaps in defense logistics research at the 2018 Academic Research Symposium of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals annual conference on September 30, 2018.

Three overarching themes emerged from the panel discussion for advancing theory and practice in defense logistics and supply chain management, which are developing a central repository, creating publication opportunities and integrating research practice and knowledge with the greater academic community.

Logistics and supply chain research is critical for advancing knowledge and practice in the military, as well as industrial settings. The intention in this manuscript is to provide scholars and practitioners in both settings greater awareness and potential avenues for developing synergies and processes for advancing logistics and supply chain research.

Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms (KIE) strongly rely on scientific and strategic research and development (R&D) capabilities to achieve higher performance levels. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to disentangle the effects of scientific capabilities and strategic R&D on KIE performance; and how the constituent elements of these dimensions can be configured to generate conditions for high performance.

The authors’ empirical setting involves companies that submitted projects to the Innovative Research in Small Businesses (PIPE) program in Brazil. The authors then run partial least square structural equation modeling to verify how scientific and strategic R&D capabilities influence the performance construct. Second, the authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify configurations that are equifinal in terms of generating superior performance.

Findings indicate a strong association between scientific capabilities and KIE performance. The configurational approach outlines the existence of multiple paths to success, but human capital stands as a core condition throughout estimations.

The authors’ assessment has implications for how KIE firms are managed according to their organizational profiles and trajectories. Also, it advances the authors’ comprehension on how entrepreneurship policies can better target these distinct profiles.

The authors’ analysis provides new evidence on the inherent complexity behind the generation of high performance in KIE when addressing their portfolios of knowledge-related capabilities. More than that, the authors were able to identify the existence of heterogeneous profiles that can equally lead to higher levels of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implication of Japanese government venture capital (VC) policies for future research and to provide basis for policymakers and practitioners.

This is an academic literature review of available peer-reviewed publications on government VC policies. This paper discusses and analyses the current state and issues of the Japanese government VC policies regarding three research questions: What do Japanese government VCs do? Do they contribute to their portfolios? and Do they contribute to the development of VC market?

There are mainly two findings in this paper: It is effective to establish a complementary relationship with private VCs for Japanese government VCs to contribute to their portfolios; Japanese government should simultaneously continue to make and review policies for the VC market, the stock market, the entrepreneur sector and the environment surrounding them by its strategic long-term commitment to contribute to the development of VC market and new technology-based firms in Japan.

As there are only a few studies on recently strengthened Japanese government VC policies, this paper provides an in-depth discussion on these Japanese VC policies, which can be used for future research and as a valuable resource for policymakers and practitioners.