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Technology acquisition is a common phenomenon of acquiring external knowledge, but we have a limited understanding of conditions in which the acquirer integrates the target or not. On one hand, the acquirer may have a policy to integrate the target to benefit from its prior knowledge. On the other hand, the target may face challenges in continuing its knowledge creation and the acquirer may want to provide it autonomy to not disrupt it. This paper aims to identify conditions in which targets tend to be less integrated after acquisitions, allowing them to maintain more autonomy and contribute more to knowledge creation.

We test our arguments in the empirical setting of the global biopharmaceutical industry using a difference-in-difference approach on a longitudinal dataset of matched patents. We examine self-cites received by patents belonging to acquirers and the targets before and after the acquisitions.

We find that, on average, the targets’ prior patents do not receive more self-cites after the acquisition. We conclude that this is because their R&D activities are disrupted, suggesting a higher level of post-acquisition integration. However, more nuanced findings reveal that it may not be the case all the time. When the target has more research experience, is international or is specialized in complementary technologies, prior patents of targets continue to receive more self-cites after the acquisition. It indicates that the targets in such conditions continue knowledge creation, suggesting a lower level of post-acquisition integration.

Our findings contribute to post-acquisition integration research. While post-acquisition integration downside is common, we present conditions in which such a downside may be less likely. We highlight that the context of an acquisition may be an important determinant of the extent of integration of the target. Moreover, we supplement the integration research (cultural, structural and human resource and leadership perspectives of integration) by adding a knowledge-based perspective to it. Such dynamics have important implications for acquirers and targets in deriving value from the acquisition.

Intangible capital (IC) is an important factor for economic growth and firm performance. The role IC has played has become even more crucial in recent decades, possibly influencing debt capacity and default risk assessment. This paper studies how entrepreneurial and employee-based IC affects financial leverage.

Employer–employee unbalanced panel data provided by Statistics Finland that refer to Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are used. Intangibles are measured with an expenditure-based method. Employee-based IC and entrepreneurial knowledge are used to explain debt financing in SMEs.

The findings imply that IC-intensive firms have less debt capacity due to weak pledgeability and asymmetric information between borrower and lender. Entrepreneurs with managerial or financial knowledge increase the firm's debt capacity compared to other entrepreneurs, especially in knowledge-intensive services (KIS). One explanation is that the entrepreneurs are more competent in negotiating with lenders as the entrepreneurs possess better financial skills. Entrepreneurs with technical knowledge decrease the firm's debt capacity in all industries.

While some earlier research focused on the IC–financial leverage relationship, hardly any study has looked at entrepreneurial IC. This paper provides new insights by including entrepreneurial IC alongside employee-based IC.

Many observers believe that industry experience of entrepreneurs drives successful new entrepreneurial firms. However, whenever it comes to disruptive digital ventures such as Financial Technologies (Fintechs), the picture may be different due to the cross-industry nature of digital firms. The purpose of this study is to disentangle the impacts of finance, banking and information technology (IT) experiences of founders on performance of European Fintechs around venture capital (VC) investment.

Based on a data set of 105 Fintechs from European countries, including UK, which are involved in 201 VC rounds between 2006 and 2019, the authors adopt a Bayesian quantile approach to link founders’ experience with two performance measures that identify market success (return on sales) and investment outcome (return on equity).

The findings indicate that finance and IT-specific experiences seem to matter more often than banking experience and that the extent of their impact depends on level and metric of performance. More specifically, Fintechs in Europe and UK are more able to achieve market success with both finance and IT experiences of their founders, but that does not necessarily transform into higher returns for investors.

This study provides new evidence that not all aspects of industry experience matter for digital ventures, as they must fit to a certain firm, cycle and industry. For Fintech, as the name says, finance and IT experiences matter.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether the nature of innovation is accumulative or radical and to what extent past year accumulation of technology stock can predict future innovation. More importantly, the authors are concerned with whether a change of policy regime or a variance in the quality of technology will moderate the nature of innovation.

The authors examined a dataset of 3.6 million Chinese patents during 1985–2015 and constructed more than 5 million citation pairs across 8 sections and 128 classes to track knowledge spillover across technology fields. The authors used this citation dataset to calculate the technology innovation network. The authors constructed a measure of upstream invention, interacting the pre-existing technology innovation network with historical patent growth in each technology field, and estimated measure's impact on future innovation since 2005. The authors also constructed three sets of metrics – technology dependence, centrality and scientific value – to identify innovation quality and a policy dummy to consider the impact of policy on innovation.

Innovation growth is built upon past year accumulation and technology spillover. Innovation grows faster for technologies that are more central and grows more slowly for more valuable technologies. A pro-innovation and pro-intellectual property right (IPR) policy plays a positive and significant role in driving technical progress. The authors also found that for technologies that have faster access to new information or larger power to control knowledge flow, the upstream and downstream innovation linkage is stronger. However, this linkage is weaker for technologies that are more novel or general. On most occasions, the nature of innovation was less responsive to policy shock.

This paper contributes to the debate on the nature of innovation by determining whether upstream innovation has strong predictive power on future innovation. The authors develop the assumption used in the technology spillover literature by considering a time-variant, directional and asymmetric matrix to model technology diffusion. For the first time, the authors answer how the nature of innovation will vary depending on the technology network configurations and policy environment. In addition to contributing to the academic debate, the authors' study has important implications for economic growth and industrial or innovation management policies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative picture of the state of the art of the literature on digitalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as an enabler for their internationalisation process and as a comprehensive view of the specific domains impacted by digital technologies as well as their repercussions on the international outreach.

A systematic review which leverages a descriptive analysis of extant literature and an axial coding technique has been conducted to shed light on the current knowledge and to identify primary research areas and future research lines.

The research indicates that digitalisation impacts the internationalisation of SMEs in three specific domains: (1) internationalisation through the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) technologies and e-commerce platforms; (2) international expansion through the digitalisation of value chain activities and (3) international outreach through knowledge acquisition on digital platforms.

The value of this study is threefold. First, the authors attempt to systematically review the literature on SMEs digitalisation and internationalisation and provide a holistic perspective on the intertwining of these two research streams. Second, the authors propose a novel conceptualisation on the dimensions of SMEs digitalisation as enablers to internationalisation. Third, the authors put forward promising future lines of research.

1. Digitalisation represents a pivotal strategy that allows companies to build new strategic capabilities and is a propeller for SMEs internationalisation.

2. Through e-commerce, SMEs could compete at the same level of multinational companies but enduring lower costs of expansion.

3. Digital platforms allow SMEs to enhance the learning processes about international markets through an immediate access to relevant information.

4. Digital entrepreneurship has enabled SMEs to develop new configurations of value chain activities, evolving their business model or reaching new markets.

5. SMEs are changing the “business as usual” paradigm offering digital tools to build modular architectures that are scalable and agile in their evolution ability.

Digitalisation represents a pivotal strategy that allows companies to build new strategic capabilities and is a propeller for SMEs internationalisation.

Through e-commerce, SMEs could compete at the same level of multinational companies but enduring lower costs of expansion.

Digital platforms allow SMEs to enhance the learning processes about international markets through an immediate access to relevant information.

Digital entrepreneurship has enabled SMEs to develop new configurations of value chain activities, evolving their business model or reaching new markets.

SMEs are changing the “business as usual” paradigm offering digital tools to build modular architectures that are scalable and agile in their evolution ability.

This research aims to provide a new perspective on the evolving linkages between LAs and FSAs in the context of the technology-based manufacturing industry. Firm-level competitive strengths in an international context build upon the combination of (largely) exogenous location advantages (LAs) and endogenous firm-specific advantages (FSAs). The authors focus especially on the decay of LAs over time, which has been observed in many highly developed countries during the past decades. The authors show how the strengthening of FSAs can substitute for decaying LAs, thereby safeguarding against the demise of entire industrial regions.

The authors examine the technology-based manufacturing industry in Belgium, building upon an analysis of survey responses by 66 firms including a subgroup of 26 multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries. The professional association representing this industry in Belgium (Agoria) viewed the firms included in the survey as representative for Belgian technology-based manufacturing in terms of the LAs they presently build upon (or location disadvantages they face) and the internal strengths they command relative to (foreign) rivals. The investigation uncovered the decay of critical LAs in Belgium and in parallel, the rise of ‘compensating’ FSAs of Belgian operations relative to foreign firms, including, especially, MNE sister subsidiaries in other countries. The authors also conducted 23 in-depth interviews with senior level managers (CEOs and senior vice presidents) of technology-based firms, including 10 subsidiaries of foreign-owned MNEs, which validated our analysis of the interplay between LAs and FSAs.

The findings reveal that since inception, Belgian manufacturing operations experienced an overall decay in their critical LAs by 23% on average. Despite this, several Belgian subsidiaries of foreign MNEs consider themselves as commanding a resource-base superior to that of the next-best-in-class subsidiaries. Furthermore, when assessing the dynamic interplay between LAs and FSAs, there is some evidence that the decay of LAs fueled the quest for – and firm-level journey toward – stronger FSAs.

The originality of this study is the alternative perspective to the conventionally assumed “positive-positive” relationship between LAs and FSAs. Prior management research has not examined the impact of decaying LAs on new FSA-creation in the realm of technology-based manufacturing.

Sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem research is an emerging trend within the entrepreneurship domain. Drawing from resource dependency theory, this study examines the interdependent nature of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem factors and the mediating role of local culture as it relates to entrepreneurial action. The authors collected data from 12 entrepreneurial ecosystems in Australia and developed a model of the interdependencies of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem factors.

The data were collected through an e-survey of Small and Medium Entreprise (SME) owners in New South Wales, Australia. The authors applied partial least squares structural equation methodology to assess the structural models, validate the outer models and examine the inner model.

The findings reinforce empirical support for sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems. The environment where sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems are evolved influences their functionality. Further, entrepreneurial culture mediates the relationship with other ecosystem factors. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study focuses on understanding the interdependent nature of sustainable ecosystem factors. The authors identified entrepreneurial culture as a mediator to business support services, educational institutional support and financial capital availability with business and social networks.

This paper aims to examine how collaborative supplier development (SD) activities, supplier capabilities and buyer–supplier relationship interrelate in technology-based, luxury product business contexts characterized by small volumes, difficult targets and resource constraints relative to those targets.

Using inductive case research method, the authors investigate multiple embedded cases involving six dyadic buyer–supplier relationships of two luxury product manufacturers in the motorcycle and automotive industries. Each dyad represents an important sub-system for which the buying firm committed significant SD efforts to help the supplier successfully achieve difficult targets.

The analysis reveals how paradoxical tensions might emerge as the firms engage in successful SD activities, which could lead to decreasing relationship commitment ultimately resulting in the termination of the relationship. The authors utilize the “value co-creation and value capture” paradox framework to understand the SD and relationship dynamic and characterize it as developing-leveraging paradox to explain its dualities, i.e. commitment-based SD efforts (increasing value co-creation), and unilateral leveraging of the newly acquired capabilities (increasing value capture) by both the buyer and the supplier. Overemphasis on value capture by one of the exchange partners spurs a detrimental vicious cycle leading to the decline of the relationship.

The study explains the paradoxical dynamics that may emerge in SD activities of innovative, technologically complex, luxury product firms. The findings contribute to the SD literature by highlighting how learnings from SD activities could contribute to the dark sides of buyer–supplier relationship. The technologically complex, luxury product contextual characteristics of the study may limit the generalizability of the study findings.

The study provides novel insights into the emergence and management of paradoxes in buyer–supplier relationships, in terms of virtuous and vicious dynamics of developing-leveraging.

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.

The Scottish economy was experiencing steady growth prior the hit of the COVID-19, with the pandemic causing the government to announce extreme lockdown measures with unprecedented impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Whilst some of the industry sectors in Scotland took a lighter hit, a large part of the organizations had to either adapt or completely disrupt their business. An essential aspect of their survival, risk management (RM) was among the areas requiring the most significant acceleration. This study compared the RM practices implemented by Scottish SMEs prior and after the outbreak as well as examined the attitudes of key decision-makers in the SMEs in relation to risk, including their perceived readiness for another crisis of similar significance.

An online survey based on ISO 31000 RM guidelines was distributed to 232 Scottish SMEs. Based on the official government reports and existing knowledge on how SMEs around the world have handled crisis events within the past 20 years, the authors developed the hypothesis that crisis events significantly accelerate SMEs' RM implementation. Around 13 items were tested in relation to the hypothesis and responses were tested via two-tailed T-test to establish significant statistical difference.

The research provides insight into the current state of risk management practices implemented by Scottish SMEs. As expected, SMEs showed significant difference in their RM implementation prior and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Whilst this has been viewed as a positive, motivations, priorities and approaches in managing risk demonstrated by the SMEs is questionable with views to their sustainable long-term recovery. The study highlights the lack of confidence instilled within the SMEs that they can handle another crisis of similar significance and provides directions for further investigation and improvements with the aim of helping the SMEs prepare better to mitigate the consequences of future crisis events.

In academic sense, the study offers a tested universal framework and a detailed questionnaire for assessment of RM strategy, applicable to organisations of various type, size and geography. Several implications with regards to managerial practices have been highlighted, including the neglect of the SMEs’ own internal environments and its significance in their risk strategies, the predominantly reactive approach to RM displayed by most Scottish SMEs as well as the neglect of compliance risk leading to potential quality and customer satisfaction issues preventing SMEs from full post-crisis recovery.