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The purpose of this paper is to explore strategy-specific competencies with regard to intangibles and provides empirical evidence of intangible-based strategy groups for Russian companies. Additionally, the study examines the link between intangible-based strategy and company performance.

The paper uses strategic group theory and the resource-based view framework to identify similar strategic behaviour of companies by employment of intangibles. In line with the intellectual capital concept, the study provides a cluster analysis that considers four types of intangibles: human, relational, innovation and process capital. These are measured through publicly available data using principal component analysis. The empirical part of the study uses a database of 1,096 Russian public companies, which covers the period 2004–2014.

As a result, the study reveals three profiles of strategic behaviour with regard to intangibles. The majority of Russian public companies (63.5 per cent) are Generics and pursue a non-intensive intangible strategy. Only 13.3 per cent of companies constitute the intangible-intensive profile by having endowment of all intellectual resources higher than the sample average. The remaining companies (23.2 per cent) also pursue an intangible-intensive strategy with a focus on innovation capital. Intangible-intensive strategic groups outperform Generics.

The study proposes a novel intangible-based strategy continuum, which straddles two polar strategies: generic and smart. The study introduces insights to better understand the differences in performance across intangible-intensive strategies and presents a new empirical inquiry into strategic behaviour with regard to intangibles in Russia.

This paper aims to examine how a company can build and develop its relational capital in a digital environment. It searches for proxy-indicators for digital relational capital and explores their impact on company performance.

The paper is designed to sit in the cross-section of two concepts – Big Data and Intellectual Capital. We analyze eight metrics of digital relational capital (SEMrush rank, Trust flow, Domain authority, MozRank, Number of pages indexed in Yandex and Google, Thematic Citation Index by Yandex, Alexa Rank) and examine their impact on company performance by conducting a two-stage fixed-effect regression. The empirical part of the paper is based on a database of more than 1,000 Russian public companies from 2010-2016.

The study justifies eight Big Data-based metrics that enable the estimation of the digital relational capital of a company. Empirical evidence of a significant impact on corporate performance is provided. Moreover, a U-shaped configuration of obtained relationships allows for a better understanding of the phenomenon of digital relational capital and has managerial implications.

Companies can indirectly influence the proposed metrics. The study gives specific recommendations regarding these metrics to allow companies to optimize their performance. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical research on relational capital through Big Data in Russia.

Video games are considered as a leisure activity that makes being unemployed more attractive than before. In this study, the authors use eSports prizes as a proxy for the popularity of video games to analyze its influence on total and youth unemployment.

The authors develop a theoretical model and empirically test it using the total prize money won by representatives of a country in a given season in eSports tournaments, via a panel regression model with the country-year as a unit of observation. The data set includes information about 191 countries between 2000 and 2015.

The authors’ results of regression analysis show a positive influence of the popularity of video games on the unemployment rate. In addition, the authors analyze this effect for countries with different levels of income and labor productivity. The authors found a significant inverse relationship between income level and the effect of the popularity of video games on total and youth unemployment.

While previous studies rely mostly on self-reported data, the authors suggest a new approach to measure video game popularity. This paper contributes to existing knowledge with empirical evidence on how leisure activities affect unemployment at the country level.