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This study analyzes emerging market (EM) firms’ entrepreneurial transformation process at both the cognitive and behavioral levels to facilitate successful international venturing. Specifically, the relationships among entrepreneurial orientation (EO), strategic renewal, and international venturing, the mediating role of strategic renewal, and the contingent roles of technological dynamism and competitiveness are examined. Cross-sectional survey data collected from 137 paired EM firms in China confirm our hypotheses. Results show that strategic renewal positively mediates the link from EO in the form of proactiveness, risk-taking, and innovativeness, to international venturing. Moreover, technological dynamism elevates the mediation effect of strategic renewal, whereas technological competitiveness diminishes the facilitating role of strategic renewal.

Until recently, general economic theory has hardly paid any attention to the production factor “nature”. Human economy has been characterised as a closed system, in which all kinds of products are produced through the input of the production factors “labour” and “capital” and then consumed. This appears to be no longer valid. Human economy interferes with the environment and is therefore an open system. Nowadays the consequences of this are thoroughly investigated in environmental economics, a borderland between economics on the one hand and ecology on the other. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this line of thought. The production factor “nature” can be seen as a stock of capital, one part of which consists of non‐renewable resources and the other of renewable resources. This latter has a limited renewal capacity. Both kinds of resources are exhaustible. Human production reduces total stock, so that the change in it is the result of depletion of nature by production and of natural renewal. If natural renewal equals human expenditure of nature, one can speak of a steady state. In the next section, a brief discussion of an efficiency rule for the use of exhaustible resources is followed by an examination of renewable resources. As opposed to non‐renewable resources, ecological aspects play a major part in the optimum management of this kind of resource. The concept of the “optimum steady state” is developed to show the ecological constraints of human production insofar as it is based on the stock of renewable resources. Finally, there is a discussion on two types of nature‐conserving technological change, which could widen the ecological borders.

This study aims to analyse the complementary role of structural and relational capital (as the outcomes of codification and personalisation knowledge management strategies) in renewal capital and innovation in high- and low-tech companies.

The primary data, which were collected through a structured questionnaire from 180 Spanish companies, are analysed using structural equation modelling based on partial least squares.

Overall, the study offers three fundamental findings. First, it demonstrates the outstanding role of renewal capital as an intellectual capital (IC) component; second, it provides a conceptual analysis of the connection between knowledge management strategies and IC; and third, it highlights the necessity of considering the technological level of the firm as a contingency variable affecting the IC–innovation relationship.

The study has three apparent limitations: The sample of firms is restricted to Spanish companies, data concerning the main study variables were collected from only one person at each firm, and not all of the possible components of IC were included in the research model.

Business practitioners can find useful guidelines for making efficient use of knowledge resources when boosting innovation performance, depending on the technological level of their firms.

Although many studies have tried to disentangle the IC–innovation connection, this study is unique, as it considers knowledge management strategies, a novel combination of IC components and the level of technological sophistication in the same analysis.

The purpose of this paper is twofold, first, to shed light on the different patterns in which international marketing and purchasing (IMP) and national innovation system (NIS) were embedded into the Swedish policy context, where the first approach must be regarded as a relative failure and the second a success, second, to compare their analytical lenses and policy implications through the study of a number of seminal texts of the two approaches.

First, a Swedish case is selected since it provides an example of a policy context where both approaches have been considered and used as sources of inspiration for the design of policy measures. Second, the authors study a selection of the seminal texts of the two approaches in order to identify their basic theoretical assumptions. The emphasis here lies on how the schools view the importance of relations between companies, how they perceive the innovation process, their attitude towards the neoclassical market model and the explicit and implicit implications of their theoretical assumptions for policy.

IMP and its notion of the heterogeneity of resources can provide a much more context grounded analysis than is possible within the NIS/Lundvall framework. However, it requires deep contextual knowledge of individual companies, industries and national and international settings to understand the value of these resources. IMP is “tied to the ground” and radically critical of the atomistic abstractions characterising the neoclassical market view. NIS, on the other hand, requires contextual knowledge on a more superficial level and can co-exist with neoclassical economics.

While the authors mainly focus on IMP and NIS, which date back to the 1980s, a later wave of concepts from the 1990s and onwards involve clusters (Porter, 1990), and triple helix (Etzkowitz and Leidesdorff, 1998). However, these latecomers share with NIS the ability to co-exist with neoclassical economics.

IMP requires high demands on any policy maker that would adopt it, in terms of acquiring deep contextual knowledge and giving up established views on how the economy works

The paper reveal that while both IMP and NIS like to present themselves as rebels radically departing from neoclassical economics and the linear model, NIS can still co-exist with neoclassical economics. Furthermore, IMP places high demands on any policy maker that would adopt it, in terms of acquiring deep contextual knowledge and giving up established views on how the economy works. NIS, on the other hand, requires contextual knowledge on a more superficial level.

To present the challenge of sustainable development, the way in which technology can address that challenge and the task of engineering education to train engineers for it.

The paper describes briefly the history of the environmental and sustainability discourse in The Netherlands, as a densely populated country. It argues that technology should play a major role in SD, but that technological innovation is not enough. Technological systems renewal is a transdisciplinary activity involving relevant stakeholders and disciplines. “Needs” is the basic starting‐point to innovate new systems of provision. The paper reviews relevant literature regarding future orientation of technology development. Based on it, goals for training of engineers are developed.

The engineer has to meet a threefold challenge: providing new creative approaches on the one hand, and setting up and executing R&D programs that produce results, on the other; cooperating with other disciplines and lay stakeholders, on the one hand, and guarding disciplinary quality, on the other; bridging moralism and strategic pragmatism.

The paper is an introduction, i.e. it sketches the issues without dealing with them in detail.

The paper draws in broad lines a road‐map for the future of engineering education and sustainable development. The paper is a useful source for those engineering institutions that are formulating a strategy to introduce sustainable development.

The paper goes beyond environmental engineering, not by just adding social and economic issues, but by developing an integrated framework for academic training of engineers.

One of the most familiar nostrums of the public management reform literature is that public managers must be risk takers (e.g. Gore, 1993). As is so often the case with prescriptions for public management reform, there is much more advice about risk-taking, its merits and demerits, than there is research on its the incidence, causes and effects of public management risk-taking. Only a handful of studies have actually provided systematic evidence about public agencies’ risk-taking (e.g. Bellante & Link, 1981; Berman & West, 1998; Bozeman & Kingsley, 1998) and some of these studies point to the complexities of conceptualizing and measuring public management risk.

Dynamic capabilities (DCs) upgrade operational capabilities. However, DC dimensions of sensing, seizing and reconfiguring may combine in different configurations that result in alternative outcomes, depending on the firm's lifecycle stage. The purpose of this research is to explore configurations of DC dimensions during different stages of firms' lifecycles that result in operational marketing and technological capabilities.

Given the limited understanding of how DC dimensions and operational capabilities interact across a firm's lifecycle, the authors employed a multi-method approach to understand whether different configurations of DC dimensions may lead to operational marketing and technological capabilities and how the firm's lifecycle may condition these configurations. The authors first apply PLS path modelling to assess the validity and reliability of the measures. Then, the authors use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyse micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in different growth stages operating in the creative industry within highly competitive and fast-changing environments.

Results show that several configurations of DC dimensions and competitive intensity influence marketing and technological capabilities. Although several configurations include sensing, seizing and reconfiguring, the findings also point to configurations where not all DC dimensions are present.

Improving operational capabilities does not necessarily imply a simultaneous presence of all three DC dimensions. Especially in the growth stage, managers that face resources shortage may only focus on sensing and seizing dimensions when developing marketing capabilities.

This research focuses on configurations of DC dimensions (instead of configurations of different types of DCs) that generate diverse marketing and technological capabilities development paths. The authors provide several equifinal configurations of DC dimensions that lead to operational marketing and technological capabilities. This study contributes to disentangling DCs and their dimensions across different lifecycle stages.

This paper aims to explore the use of backcasting approach in dealing with the indeterminate future performance of the emerging renewable energy sector, based on the case of China. Through backcasting analysis of the emerging sector under uncertainties and concerns of the stakeholders, it acknowledges a range of hurdles ingrained in the current energy system and issues related to technology management within the Chinese context.

This is a conceptual paper with integration of relevant contemporary knowledge.

This study points out the challenges in plausible developments for the renewable energy sector harnessing such approach. Particularly, the pursuit of end‐points under a multitude of optima can be associated with goal‐seeking embedded in backcasting for sustainable developments, whereas economic and technological constraints inherent to the processes of technological innovation in the cultural environment are recognized. Formulating an integrative framework, this study suggests the relevance of the approach of backcasting to augment dynamic policy analysis and planning for plausible developments in time, and to consequently optimize resource allocation in the renewal of necessary technological infrastructure.

This paper structurally reveals critical issues in the development of an emerging technology sector of growing importance and the pertinent implications to policy making in China for sustainable development given the underlying quantitative and qualitative constraints.

The article provides a conceptual replication and enrichment of the status quo bias theory in the specific context of understanding IT department user resistance and user adoption. The findings can assist technology renewals and associated change management professionals to assess and plan the adoption and active usage of human resource systems.

The authors used survey method to gather data. All items were based on prior literature. They administrated the survey to employees of GOODTECH (name changed), information systems (IS) department members, situated in France. They obtained 103 valid responses along with usage data from the system to run their path model, in order to validate the proposed research model.

The study offers an enriched user resistance model (URM) to understand why IT-savvy employees would resist or adopt new human resource tools. Apart from providing partial validity to status quo bias theory in the French context, the enriched model uses behavioral intention to use as an intermediate variable to explain the influence of two key constructs of the original theory: switching cost and switching benefits. This research provides a better explanatory power to understand the cause of user resistance and new IT use.

The sample size used in the study can be considered as a limitation, although power analysis reveals that the results are significant and valid. The context of the study is also limited to one country and to a specific type of IS implementation scenario. Since the purpose of the paper was to offer contextual theory enhancement, the findings are valid for this purpose.

Digital project managers are offered a framework to increase technology adoption of new human resource tools and evaluate how to reduce user resistance at times of technology renewals. Self-efficacy for change and colleagues’ opinion can indirectly impact behavioral intention to use via switching cost and switching benefit perceptions and thus reducing resistance perceptions as well as increasing adoption of new IT tools in post-implementation phases.

The paper enriches the well-established user resistance theory in IS domain in a context of human resource post-implementation phase by studying IT-savvy end user's perceptions. The paper demonstrates the need to integrate user adoption and user resistance variables in one parsimonious framework and extends support to emerging research on dual focus perspective.