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Innovative initiatives focusing on social and environmental impact often need help to secure traditional financial resources for their launch. Equity crowdfunding platforms (ECF) provide a potential funding source for these initiatives, particularly for technological inventors. This research paper aims to theorize how ECF campaigns attract investors to invest in technological initiatives with social and environmental value proposition impacts.

Using an inductive qualitative approach, the authors have gained insights, from 35 sustainable technological projects sponsored by a Chilean equity-crowdfunding platform, regarding the business model's transformation to achieve sustainable social and environmental impacts.

Findings show that disruptive technologies and sustainable aims are pivotal factors in successfully attracting investors to support sustainable technological initiatives through ECF platforms or campaigns. These factors led investors to actively engage with these projects and contribute to the value-creation process by transforming business models with social and environmental impacts and utilizing sustainable technology to enhance efficiency and optimize available resources.

Due to the nature of this research, researchers must test the proposed conceptual framework using longitudinal quantitative data from multiple ECF platforms, technological solutions and investors worldwide in future research to enhance the comprehension of this phenomenon.

The findings highlight the significant contribution of ECF platforms and technological portfolios toward creating sustainable impacts. It is a good signal for investors interested in investing in technological initiatives and addressing social and environmental challenges.

The contribution of disruptive technological projects from ECF platforms and ECF investors to tackle social and environmental challenges.

This research theorizes how ECF platforms tackle social challenges by encouraging investors to invest and participate with entrepreneurs in the co-creation process of sustainable technological solutions.

In today’s business world, adopting social commerce for day-to-day operations has increasingly become an important phenomenon. Several factors have been identified by previous researchers regarding the adoption of social commerce, but academic research is scarce on the relationship between the factors influencing social commerce adoption and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the post-COVID-19 situation. This study aims to identify the impact of technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors on the adoption of social commerce by SMEs in Sri Lanka.

A quantitative study utilised the deductive approach and collected data through a field survey by distributing a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to conveniently selected respondents from Sri Lankan SMEs. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used for the analysis of 384 responses.

The results revealed that technological factors [technology availability (TA) and cost-effectiveness (CE)], environmental factors [bandwagon effect (BE)] and entrepreneurial factors [attitude (AT), innovativeness (IN) and IT knowledge (IK)] have a significant impact on the social commerce adoption of SMEs in Sri Lanka. This study, as the first of its type, offers insightful information on the influence of variables on the adoption of social commerce after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar to any research, this study also has inherent limitations. Due to time and financial restrictions, the study’s convenience sampling method was adopted. The study’s possible limitation is its narrow focus, which could mean that it only examines a select few social media (SM) networks. The study’s conclusions might be less generalised since it focused on the western province of Sri Lanka. Future studies should take a cross-cultural strategy to explore the influence of social commerce adoption to improve the generalisability of research findings.

This study provides an in-depth assessment of critical factors, facilitating policymakers, owners, leaders and managers (decision-makers) to gain insight into the real influencing factors on social commerce adoption and the significance of SM. The study helps them comprehend how outstanding governance and knowledge of influencing factors can boost SME success in various ways. For example, research reveals that various factors have a major influence on social commerce adoption.

There has been limited research conducted on social commerce adoption after the COVID-19 pandemic period; thus, this study looked at the variables influencing it amongst SMEs in a South Asian developing country like Sri Lanka after the pandemic lasted for two years. By placing a strong emphasis on the role of entrepreneurial characteristics and the available technology within one single framework in the context of SMEs and their involvement with social commerce adoption, this study contributes to the past literature by emphasising the role of several significant factors in SMEs' adoption of social commerce. Whilst previous studies looked at multiple factors influencing the adoption of social commerce globally, this study focussed on how these factors have a significant impact on SMEs in Sri Lanka.

This study developed a multi-perspective framework combining technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors influencing SMEs to adopt social commerce. The study provides a contribution to the literature on social commerce adoption from the perspective of SMEs in a developing country like Sri Lanka after COVID-19. Exclusively, it examines the impact of entrepreneur-related factors on social commerce adoption.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of technological diversification (TD) on enterprise innovation performance, meanwhile focusing on the moderating effects of various organizational slack (i.e. absorbed and unabsorbed slack) and ownership types (i.e. state-owned or privately-owned) in the context of Chinese listed firms.

This study formulates five hypotheses based on organization and agency theories. Our empirical analysis employs a fixed-effect regression estimator with a unique panel dataset of Chinese-listed manufacturing firms and 13,566 firm-year observations over 9 years from 2012 to 2020.

Our findings show that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between TD and innovation performance, varying with different types of organizational slack and ownership. In state-owned enterprises (SOEs), unabsorbed slack negatively moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship; however, in privately-owned enterprises (POEs), this relationship is positively moderated. Although absorbed slack has negative moderating effects in both SOEs and POEs, its impact is only significant for POEs.

Our results imply that organizational slack has a contrasting impact on the relationship between TD and innovation performance when the type of ownership varies. Therefore, the managers that intend to achieve optimal innovation performance through TD should understand how organizational slack can be leveraged.

This study contributes to the existing literature by applying the relationship between TD and innovative performance to the transition economy, as well as examining the double-edged sword impact of state ownership on firm innovation performance.

This study aims to examine the complex effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on China’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) from 2005 to 2020. It also explores the role of absorptive capacity as a moderating factor during this period.

Employing provincial panel data from China, this research measures agricultural TFP using the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA)-Malmquist method. The impact of FDI on agricultural productivity is further analyzed using a nondynamic panel threshold model.

The results highlight technological progress as the main driver of agricultural TFP growth in China. Agricultural FDI (AFDI) seems to impede TFP development, whereas nonagricultural FDI (NAFDI) shows a distinct positive spillover effect. The study reveals a threshold in absorptive capacity that affects both the direct and spillover impacts of FDI. Provinces with higher absorptive capacity are less negatively impacted by AFDI and more likely to benefit from FDI spillovers (FDISs).

This study provides new insights into the intricate relationship between FDI, absorptive capacity and agricultural productivity. It underscores the importance of optimizing technological progress and research and development (R&D) to enhance agricultural productivity in China.

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.

A new round of technological revolution is impacting various aspects of society. However, the importance of technology adoption in fostering firm innovation is underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether robot adoption affects technological innovation and how human capital plays a role in this relationship in the era of circular economy.

Based on the robot adoption data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and panel data of China's listed manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2020, this study uses regression models to test the impact of industrial robots on firm innovation and the mediating role of human capital.

The results demonstrate that the adoption of industrial robots can significantly promote high-quality innovation. Specifically, a one-unit increase in the number of robots per 100 employees is associated with a 13.52% increase in the number of invention patent applications in the following year. The mechanism tests show that industrial robots drive firm innovation by accumulating more highly educated workers and allocating more workers to R&D jobs. The findings are more significant for firms in industries with low market concentration, in labor-intensive industries and in regions with a shortage of high-end talent.

Due to data limitations, the sample of this study is limited to listed manufacturing firms, so the impact of industrial robots on promoting innovation may be underestimated. In addition, this study cannot observe the dynamic process of human capital management by firms after adopting robots.

The Chinese government should continue to promote the intelligent upgrading of the manufacturing industry and facilitate the promotion of robots in innovation. This implication can also be applied to developing countries that hope to learn from China's experience. In addition, this study emphasizes the role of human capital in the innovation-promoting process of robots. This highlights the importance of firms to strengthen employee education and training.

The adoption of industrial robots has profoundly influenced the production and lifestyle of human society. This study finds that the adoption of robots contributes to firm innovation, which helps people gain a deeper understanding of the positive impacts brought about by industrial intelligence.

By exploring the impact of industrial robots on firm innovation, this study offers crucial evidence at the firm level to comprehend the economic implications of robot adoption based on circular economy and human perspectives. Moreover, this study reveals that human capital is an important factor in how industrial robots affect firm innovation, providing an important complement to previous studies.

Recent technological turbulence stemming from Industry 4.0 provides managerial opportunities and challenges simultaneously. In this context, the purpose of this study is to explore the role of technological opportunism on innovativeness and discover the impact of innovativeness on new products performance in international markets.

To empirically test the hypotheses, the authors have collected survey data from 237 Korean exporting firms and applied structural equation modeling.

Empirical results indicate that technological opportunism, which represents technology sensing and responding capability, has a positive and significant influence on both exploratory and exploitative innovativeness. Also, explorative and exploitative innovativeness have positive and significant effects on new product performance in international markets.

This study highlighted the importance of technology sensing and responding capabilities to capture emerging opportunities, which may arise from Industry 4.0 technologies. In addition, sensing and responding capabilities will help a firm create a culture that values innovative proclivity, and in turn, will lead to superior new product performance in international markets.

Despite extensive scholarly interest in Industry 4.0, previous studies have neglected to address the potential impact of Industry 4.0 within the domain of new product development and its performance. Also, there have been several calls from the literature to address the managerial and strategic issues surrounding the Industry 4.0 phenomenon. In this study, the authors attempted to fill the research gaps in Industry 4.0 research studies through empirical examination.

This study aims to assess whether technological incentives inspire communities in the process of digital inclusion. The factors analyzed by the authors assess five dimensions: technology incentives, technology utilization, searching skills, social integration, and capabilities.

Data were collected from 329 respondents in 14 public libraries and analyzed using structural equation modeling to validate the proposed research model and its relationships with the factors the authors analyzed.

The results showed that technological incentives significantly impact on technology utilization, searching skills, social integration, and capabilities to support community digital inclusion in Pakistan.

Technological incentives to the community will lead to the improvement of network technology for things like online taxation, banking transactions, social integration, participation in government, and modern health and education benefits. In addition, technological incentives will also enhance information literacy and digital access, helping people improve cognitive skills and critical thinking and also helping to develop skills.

This research is based on raw data first collected from various people with different opinions from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa public libraries. This study was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the overall situation related to the use of technology in Pakistan and the complications involved.

The study sheds light on the internal enabling factors towards emerging market (EM) small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) preparedness for Industry 4.0 (I4.0) using three dimensions: managerial, operational and technological readiness.

The study uses convenience sampling, having online and paper-based surveys and collecting 110 responses from manufacturing Malaysian SMEs. This sample allowed assessing the relationships of the hypothesized variables through the structural model of data analysis.

This study’s findings demonstrate that financial capability and perceived benefits enhance Malaysian SMEs' managerial, operational and technological readiness.

Using Malaysia's case, this paper extends the discussion of the key drivers that underline the decision of EM firms to adopt I4.0.

This study’s results provide valuable insights for policymakers to improve the digital ecosystem. Also, understanding critical drivers for I4.0 readiness would encourage SMEs in Malaysia to embrace new digital technologies.

Although digital transformation towards I4.0 for manufacturing SMEs would be decisive, little is known about how ready these Malaysian firms are to adopt it or the driving factors that motivate them. Meanwhile, inadequate readiness causes a high failure rate in implementing new technology, processes or organizational changes.

The world is increasingly threatened by climate change. As the dimensions of this danger grow, it becomes essential to develop the most effective policies to mitigate its impacts and adapt to these new conditions. Technology is one of the most crucial components of this process, and this study focuses on examining climate change adaptation technologies. The aim of the study is to investigate the entire spectrum of technology actors and to concentrate on the technology citation network established from the past to the present, aiming to identify the core actors within this structure and provide a more comprehensive outlook.

The study explores patent citation relationships using social network analysis. It utilizes patent data published between 2000 and 2023 and registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Study findings reveal that technologies related to greenhouse technologies in agriculture, technologies for combatting vector-borne diseases in the health sector, rainwater harvesting technologies for water management, and urban green infrastructure technologies for infrastructure systems emerge as the most suitable technologies for adaptation. For instance, greenhouse technologies hold significant potential for sustainable agricultural production and coping with the adverse effects of climate change. Additionally, ICTs establish intensive connections with nearly all other technologies, thus supporting our efforts in climate change adaptation. These technologies facilitate data collection, analysis, and management, contributing to a better understanding of the impacts of climate change.

Existing patent analysis methods often fall short in detailing the unique contributions of each technology within a technological network. This study addresses this deficiency by comprehensively examining and evaluating each technology within the network, thereby enabling us to better understand how these technologies interact with each other and contribute to the overall technological landscape.